Abstract
The Urban Racial State by Noel Cazenave is a well-written and well-argued examination of the urban landscape of the 1960s and 1970s: an analysis in many ways long overdue. It chronicles the rise and fall of community action programs in New Haven, Connecticut and Syracuse, New York using concepts of the racialized state, managers of state apparatuses, and systemic racism to hone his analysis. Cazenave exposes the exploitation of the urban black population not only on Congress Avenue in New Haven and the mean streets of Syracuse’s Fifteenth Ward but in the halls of Congress in Washington, DC. In particular, he shows how the community action program, viewed by some as a radical attempt to undermine accepted social reform, was little more than an attempt through traditional social services to bring minor reforms to populations desperate for more meaningful change.
But Cazenave’s goal is not merely to depict a history of neglect but to argue that the “chief function of the urban racial state is the maintenance of the racial status quo.” It is, he claims, the big picture of racial oppression not the neutral, colorblind political structure that has characterized much of the urban research since the Civil Rights movement. Political leaders, as important members of the state apparatus, have the specific task of managing competing racial demands. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was white progressive mayors who supported in the main sentiments of the power elites and other segments of the white population, and addressed only in special circumstances the contested racial demands of the African Americans. Police suppression was always in the background for battles unresolved by other means. Indeed, Cazenave argued that it was the nimbleness of the urban racial state in making small, easily manageable adjustments that generally forestalled the need for far-reaching changes.
Focusing on programs to prevent juvenile delinquency and wars on the poor was precisely intended to highlight the cultural deficiency and bad behavior of the ghetto residents and to keep the spotlight off the systemic racism that invaded every state institution within city limits. It also bypassed the social dislocations of urban renewal policies and practices that had destroyed African American neighborhoods on much of the east coast. In Syracuse, it was only after CORE protests in 1963 that the mayor agreed to concessions of “enforcement of housing codes, establishment of a human rights commission, and a promise that families of color would not have to move into a block already more than one-third people of color.” These were the victories.
But the greatest strength of this work, a systematic exposure of the urban crisis in black and white in the 1960s and 1970s, by definition ignores the more complex oppression of what came next. Cazenave is aware of this short coming as he invites scholars “to fix what is broken and expand upon what remains to be fleshed out.” But his theory balanced between local white racial resentment, white elites, and African American protest fades in a present with urban populations victimized by a de-industrialization that closed urban factories in record numbers, an informal economy that used crack cocaine as currency and jailed as many young black males as could be found. It also undermined much of the assumed power and privilege of the white working class, many now jobless or forced to the inner-ring suburbs and their mushrooming low-skilled employment. All were left with a downward mobility that made class trump race in ways that it had not in the past.
For those who fled the “darkening” cities, their movement to the suburbs would be at great expense and at a sacrifice of stable urban neighborhoods that had been their home for generations. Middle-class whites also lost their stronghold on state employment as urban problems necessitated skills like navigation of new welfare and immigration policies and bilingualism, absent in their prior employment. They were also threatened by the growing presence of black mayors who, while not championing the demands of black constituents any more than their white predecessors had, did reduce white access to the coveted machine employment of the past.
New legal immigration from the Caribbean, Latin American, and Asian countries, further segmented the racial portrait of America with black and white conflicts morphing into conflicts with the inconclusively white, brown, yellow, and black populations who in turn competed for housing, employment, and neighborhood supremacy. Concentrated poverty areas filled with a so-called underclass of many nationalities, living in the shadow of both successful and unsuccessful urban ethnic enclaves, and gentrified districts of upwardly mobile professionals who had renovated the homes formerly rented and sometimes owned by the once prevalent black and white working class. Answering questions like “how to define who is there” and “what are they doing,” the starting point for Cazenave in the 1960s research, suddenly was a lot more complicated in the present. The urban racial state became the urban racial, ethnic, class and gendered state, constantly changing, with racism its most ubiquitous characteristic.