Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity. Gaye Theresa Johnson
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citizenship, and infrapolitical struggles have created the conditions for future successes in organized collective movements.2 Spatial entitlements created new articulations, new sensibilities, and new visions about the place of Black, Brown, and working-class people on the local and national landscape. They were also “diagnostic” of authority: following Lila Abu-Lughod and Robin D.G. Kelley, I suggest that spatial entitlement illuminated the “complex interworkings of historically changing structures of power.”3 Understanding it in this way renders everyday acts of resistance and survival demonstrative of more than just the courage of freedom seekers.
The variety of strategies enacted by working-class youth to imagine and articulate new modes of social citizenship have been underestimated as a site and mode of scholarly inquiry. In the face of persistent repression, particularly in the meaningful spaces of interracial congregation, these actions can be studied as a barometer of the power relationships between oppressed and oppressors. Taken together, they constitute a philosophy of action that allowed the futures of Black and Brown people to be considered using the same lens of possibility. Spatial entitlement provides a means for understanding how working-class communities and individuals secure or create social membership, even when the neighborhoods and meaningful spaces of congregation around them are destroyed.
Spatial entitlement requires an alternative understanding and construction of the meaning of citizenship. Traditionally, citizenship is defined in terms of social membership in a particular society or national identity. In this regard, Rogers Smith has argued that “citizenship laws literally constitute—they create with legal words—a collective civic identity. They proclaim the existence of a political ‘people’ and designate who those persons are as a people, in ways that often become integral to individuals’ senses of personal identity as well.”4 Excluded from these collective identities, aggrieved people have fashioned alternative expressions of collectivity and belonging.
The United States’ use of citizenship as a qualifying category of national belonging reveals an unsavory legal history. Time and again, rather than endowing citizenship with affirmative characteristics of national membership, the United States has historically defined its citizens not as much by who they are, but rather by who they are not: at both federal and local levels, a desire by whites to sustain racial and class privilege has been the driving force behind legislation authored to exclude people based on race, gender, origin, and legal status. When these exclusions constitute the conditions for citizenship, the “civic myths” that inevitably arise as nations define why persons form a people can become what Smith argues are “noble lies . . . [that] cloak the exploitation of citizens by their leaders [and] demonize innocent outsiders.” And “they may also be “ugly, ignoble lies. And they are often likely to be so. . . .”5 These lies have been the basis for the exclusion of generations of racial outsiders.
The 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford case demonstrates that such ignoble lies require extraordinary measures of maintenance and justification. In Scott, Chief Justice Taney was forced to execute several legal contortions in order to distinguish the difference between the denial of rights (particularly the franchise) to free Blacks and the denial of rights to white women and minors. In order to preserve the myth of racial inferiority, Taney declared that unlike Blacks, women and minors were U.S. citizens as well as state citizens, entitled to privileges and immunities clause protection. Such women and children were, Taney said, “part of the political family” of those “who form the sovereignty.” Blacks were outside the “family.”6
In the past three years, the United States has passed a series of anti-immigration laws that function to discriminate and exclude with increasing sophistication and malice. Laws such as Arizona’s HB 1070,7 Georgia’s HB 87,8 Alabama’s HB 569 hijack the language of civil rights to exclude racialized subjects from national membership by proclaiming them a threat to the civil liberties of white citizens. Even when these laws have been overturned or modified at the federal level, which is increasingly rare, the de facto consequence remains, evidenced by anti-immigrant racism: populations perceived to be expendable or unwanted can be excluded not just from citizenship rights but human rights as well.
Legal scholar Patricia J. Williams has argued that since citizenship rights have been a crucial terrain of struggle against the totalizing domination of racialized capital, we cannot abandon them as a category of analysis. Williams insists that for Black Americans and others, the discourse of rights embedded in citizenship can still be deployed against the social system that they are supposed to uphold.10 Spatial entitlement recognizes that for Black and Brown communities in LA, expressions of collective entitlement to national membership have been an important site of resistance over time. The history of this resistance contains significant lessons for understanding not just how these claims are made, but why, as a cumulative political practice, they form a counternarrative to privileged constructions of public life.11
My discussion of spatial entitlement values the ways in which freedom seekers have attempted to claim human and social rights and recognizes the philosophies of freedom and equality that connect local articulations to international movements. Within this framework, the struggle for social membership and human rights by and among local populations becomes something larger, more just, and more complex than a conventional discussion about citizenship. The spatial articulations these struggles enact become a multireferential practice that holds that imagination and freedom struggles at the center of some of its strongest foundational elements.
Struggles for social justice in Los Angeles involved changing the meaning of existing spaces and creating new ones. African Americans and Mexican Americans in Los Angeles recognized that ghetto and barrio segregation could also produce unique and creative forms of congregation.12 The city streets that served as commercial conduits could also become sites for festive celebration and display. Dance halls, night clubs, and youth centers could be transformed into laboratories for the creation of new identities and identifications. Moreover, spatial entitlement was not confined to physical spaces. When housing segregation, police containment, and transit racism made it difficult to move across urban spaces, young Black and Brown people used the discursive spaces of popular music to create shared soundscapes. They did not have to be in each other’s physical presence to enjoy the same music at the same time as it was broadcast to them on radios in living rooms, bedrooms, neighborhood hangouts, and automobiles. These strategies and affinities speak to the power of popular music and of popular culture to envision and create new political possibilities.
Studying the ways that entitlements of space and social membership were enacted through popular culture reveals the history and the promise of shared cultural politics among Black and Brown communities. Spatial entitlement has enormous implications for the study of Black and Brown working-class opposition, because it redresses inattention to the profound role that space plays in everyday life, as well as the cumulative role that everyday life plays in the development of mass movements. Kelley’s analysis of Black working-class resistance on public transportation is instructive here. Segregated public spaces in mid-twentieth-century Birmingham were “daily visual and aural reminders of the semicolonial status Black people occupied in the Jim Crow South.” As such, they constituted important sites of contestation and struggle, and such struggles “offer some of the richest insights into how race, gender, class, space, time and collective memory shape both domination and resistance.” Furthermore, these struggles remind us that Birmingham whites encountered public space as “a kind of ‘democratic space’ where people of different class backgrounds shared city theaters, public conveyances, streets, and parks.” But for Black people in the same era, “white-dominated public space was vigilantly undemocratic and potentially dangerous.”13 Black working-class opposition on Birmingham’s streetcars and buses during WWII, as well as many of the spatial entitlements examined in this book, can help us to understand how marginalized historical actors have worked under injurious conditions to produce, elaborate upon, and defend emancipatory identities.
There is an old saying, popular among Black church congregations, that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth has even put on its shoes. Contemporary conservative news sources have been a relentless source of characterizations that depict the relationship between Black