Race and ethnicity I: Property,race,and the carceral state

I Introduction

On 28 August 1967, the Milwaukee NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Color People) Youth Council, together with Father James Groppi, commenced the first of a series of historic marches demanding the passage of an open housing ordinance. ¹ The march followed unrest just one month earlier when demonstrations about housing discrimination and police brutality were violently suppressed by local authorities. ² This uprising – dubbed the Milwaukee Riot – took place as fires from the Detroit rebellion were still smoldering. Mayor Henry Maier, a vocal opponent of open housing, responded with the full power of the repressive state, calling in the National Guard to strengthen the already heavy police presence and imposing strict curfews that halted movement throughout the city. A month later, the first open housing march crossed the 16th Street viaduct, known as Milwaukee’s ‘Mason-Dixon Line’, connecting the Black north side to the white, working-class south side. The small group encountered 5000 white counter-protesters who threw bottles and rocks, burned effigies, and shouted racial epithets. The next day, the group of about 200 – marching in defiance of the mayor’s prohibition on protest – was met by an even larger white mob, with numbers swelling to over 13,000. Following the second march, the NAACP Youth Council’s headquarters, known as The Freedom House, was destroyed by a fire. ³ The fair housing marches lasted for 200 consecutive days, even as civic leaders and white power groups alike rallied against open housing.

Fifty years later, Milwaukee remains starkly segregated by race and class and is gripped in a housing crisis defined by foreclosure, property abandonment, and eviction (Desmond, 2016). In August 2016, the police murder of a young Black man set off a new uprising and Milwaukee’s segregated landscape was again a key part of the protest. Poor communities of color who have endured the violence of racist urban policy, deindustrialization, and the predations of real estate continue to agitate for neighborhood investment as the City channels increased funding into policing (Loyd and Bonds, 2017) and high-end development projects designed to attract the young, white, and wealthy back to the city (Hashimoto, 2017).

What can we learn about the current racial conjuncture – one marked by the sharpening of racial inequality and segregation and crises in the legitimation of policing (Gilmore and Gilmore, 2016) – by focusing on struggles over housing and residential property? How do the politics of property help us to understand more about geographies of race and the expansion of the carceral state? ⁴ In this report, I take up these questions to theorize property as an essential component of carceral urbanism and the making of race. Exploring a range of issues related to the racial capitalist state and the governance of property (Singh, 2014), I argue, reveals how carceral regimes and social welfare policies have been enmeshed within the discursive and material production of race. I draw examples from Milwaukee because it is illustrative both of the specificity of racial formations and urban politics in contouring local outcomes and is embedded within a larger set of historical patterns and their unfolding that is essential in understanding modern carceral configurations. I will show that property is a growing area of focus with critical scholarship on race in geography, while also arguing that residential housing dynamics have been a critical intervening factor in shaping crime policy.

This report focuses on scholars engaging themes of property to theorize and unsettle race rather than delineating the philosophical origins of property doctrine and its geographic manifestations, which have been well documented elsewhere (see Blomely, 2001, 2003, 2004). As I trace below, this work situates property as fundamentally relational, considering enactments of property not simply as happening to one racial group through the efforts of another, but instead as co-constitutive processes whereby the loss or acquisition of property produces a set of racialized relationships and conditions. Centering property as a race-making institution allows us to consider the persistence of property in defining and remaking categories and carceral space – instead of perpetuating the epistemic violences of property by reproducing narratives of genocide, dispossession, and loss (McKittrick, 2011; Woods, 2002). This review situates property as connected to race, drawing upon the growing body of literature in geography taking up the ‘urban land question’ (Roy, 2017). I then situate property within theories of racial capitalism and critical carceral studies. Next, I consider property as it relates to policing and the carceral state.

II Why property?

Recently, Blomely noted that ‘it would be a mistake to overlook property’ (2016: 594). He makes this claim while highlighting the centrality of property, in its multiple meanings, in organizing social and political life. The concept of property refers both to something owned or possessed as well as to ownership, or the right to possess. Property includes material, tangible objects, but also an array of immaterial goods (e.g. trademarks and patents.) As Correia argues, property is both ‘an object and a relation’ (2013: 7), something that can be possessed as well as a set of conditions defining the terms of that possession. It is therefore both material and figurative, simultaneously a means to accumulate wealth and a site of belonging and identity (Harris, 1993; Blomely, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2016). For these reasons, property is understood not as a fixed entity, or ‘thing’, but instead as a set of relations that are discursively and materially constituted through everyday power relations.

Why focus on property to understand race and why now, given the long interest of geographers in the politics of property (e.g. Blomely, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2016; Smith, 2008; Harvey, 2003; Mitchell, 1997; Newman and Wyly, 2006; Wyly et al., 2012)? First, examining the (re)production of race through property is a useful way to theorize this historical juncture of racial capitalism, characterized by ongoing settler colonial displacement, urban fiscal crisis and infrastructural decline, gentrification, eviction, and speculative planning and development, and the proliferation of mechanisms to securitize urban space. Capitalism holds that property is central to the generation of wealth and the allocation of resources within markets. It is, of course, a lack of property that came to define a class of workers as distinct from capitalists who controlled the means of production. The role of enclosure and the privatization of common lands in the creation of wealth for a few and the impoverishment of many is well documented (e.g. Harvey, 2003; Federici, 2004; Roberts, 2017). Property instantiates specifically racialized regimes of accumulation and property entitlement within the long history of racial capitalism and colonization (Harris, 1993; Singh, 2014). Examining the material and discursive production of property within a racialized context of differential rights and entitlement is revealing both of the co-constitution of capitalism and race and of the historically contingent nature of racial notions of difference (Wyly et al., 2012). Moreover, within modern liberal states, access to property contains the promises of autonomy and full citizenship (Roy, 2003; Ranganathan, 2016). Even as property rights remain intertwined with white supremacy (Harris, 1993; Inwood and Bonds, 2017), property ownership has also symbolized a form of racial justice, empowerment, and protection from the state (Connolly, 2014). For these reasons, as Blomely (2001) and Roy (2017) have argued, property contains alternative possibilities.

Second, within geography, there is increasing attention to property regimes as they relate to the racialization of space (Ranganathan, 2016; Roy, 2017; Safransky, 2014, 2017; Inwood and Bonds, 2017; Correia, 2013; Darden and Thomas, 2013; Derickson, 2016; Wyly et al., 2012). While long a focus of research in the Global South, growing interest in ‘the urban land question’ (Roy, 2017) is reinvigorating debates about land struggles, property making, and race, particularly in postindustrial cities in North America (see Ranganathan, 2016; Safransky, 2014, 2017). Though the political economy of land use has been a central frame within urban geography literature in the Global North for decades, this scholarship, has dedicated less attention to ‘property as a social institution’ (Safransky, 2017: 1085). Notable exceptions include Nicholas Blomley’s work on the geographies of property – foundational in defining property as social and political, in both its constitution and its outcomes (e.g. 2001, 2003, 2004, 2016), and Anaya Roy’s (e.g. 2003, 2017) research on urban informality, which has long challenged North/South bifurcations.

Third, property inhabits a central role in contemporary social movements, on both the right and the left, and these struggles reveal the consequences and contradictions of racial capitalism and of the ongoing racial differentiation of societies. Given the centrality of property relations within systems of racial and class domination (Singh, 2014; Harris, 1993; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Ranganathan, 2016; Inwood and Bonds, 2017; Blomely, 2003), its significance in both movements for justice – from indigenous struggles for self-determination and Black liberation movements – and in mobilizations to defend white propertied power is hardly surprising. Across US cities and beyond, demands for redistribution and collective resistance to structures of white possession have been at the core of radical movements. In the next section, I turn my attention to property as it relates to racial capitalism and the securitization of urban environments.

III Property, racial capitalism, and the carceral state

Examining property within racial capitalism requires an understanding of race as a constitutive element of capitalism (Robinson, 1983; Pulido, 2016; Melamed, 2015; Woods, 2017 [2002]). Jodi Melamed explains that ‘[c]apital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups’ (2015: 77). ‘Racism’, she contends, ‘enshrines the inequality that capitalism requires…displacing the uneven life chances that are inescapably part of capitalist social relations onto fictions of differing human capacities, historically race’ (p. 77). Thus, within racial capitalism, race is understood not as an outcome of unequal capitalist processes, nor as an intersecting dynamic, but instead as essential to the workings of capitalism and its reproduction over time. As such, all capitalism is racial capitalism, and ‘[t]he uneven capitalist development of places is simultaneously a racialized process of (de)valorization and (dis)accumulation that relies upon legal and extra-legal racialized violence’ (Loyd and Bonds, 2017: 2; Gilmore, 2007; Melamed, 2011, 2015).

Property is reproduced through racialized and gendered social relations, enshrined in capitalist markets, protected by the law, and vigorously defended by the state. The legal history of property ownership in the United States is underpinned by the expropriation of indigenous territories, the enslavement of humans legally classified as property, and the exploitation of devalued labor (Harris, 1993; Singh, 2014; Bonds and Inwood, 2017). It is impossible to understand the racial economies of property without attention to gender and sexuality and the ways in which women’s bodies and socially reproductive labor were (and are) essential to property making, even as their bodies continue to be understood as property to be regulated by the state (Roberts, 2017; Federici, 2004). Within capitalism, property is violence (Correia, 2013), buttressing racialized and gendered class rule, colonial dispossession, and the power of the state, even as these processes are sanitized, routinized, and formulated as procedural (Blomely, 2003).

Linking processes of racialization with property, Singh (2014) identifies whiteness, defined as ‘a status conferring distinct – yet conjoined – social, political, and economic freedoms across a vertiginously unequal property order’, as emerging ‘from the government of property and its interests in the relationship to those who have no property and thus no calculable interests and who are therefore imagined to harbor a potentially criminal disregard for propertied order’ (2014: 1091). This understanding makes clear the centrality of property relations to material and discursive ordering of people and places. It also emphasizes the role of the state in regulating and protecting property regimes. For Singh, policing as an institution is fundamentally linked to ensuring property relations. Robert’s (2017) feminist historical materialist examination of primitive accumulation and the law traces how coercive state power underpins gendered and racist capitalist imperatives. Together with other scholars in critical carceral studies (e.g. Gilmore, 2007; Rodríguez, 2008; Camp, 2016; Camp and Heatherton, 2016; Loyd et al., 2012; Loyd and Bonds, 2017; Story, 2016), Singh and Roberts challenge us to make sense of the role of state violence in creating the conditions necessary for capitalist production.

The field of critical carceral studies examines the scale and impact of the immense US carceral apparatus, ⁵ documenting the policies and practices underpinning the state’s capacity to police and incarcerate. Geographers concerned with carcerality have done much to theorize how incarceration and policing shape contemporary geographies. This research examines how movement both underpins and is constrained by imprisonment (Turner, 2013; Moran et al., 2012), the embodied experience of incarceration and carceral space (Shabazz, 2015; Moran, 2013), and the race and class dynamics of rural prison sitings (Gilmore, 2007; Bonds, 2009). Importantly, critical carceral studies challenges common sense understandings of the carceral state, outlining its roots back to the early republic (Muhammad, 2010; Singh, 2014; Davis 2003; Rodríguez, 2008; Simon, 2007) and locating its systems of social control, surveillance, and confinement far beyond the criminal legal system (Gilmore, 2007; Story, 2016; Shabazz, 2015; Moran et al., 2013; Turner, 2013; Bonds, 2009; Martin and Mitchelson, 2009; Loyd et al., 2012; Jefferson, 2017). Practices of carcerality are dispersed across and embedded within a range of institutions, liberal social agendas, and ‘softer’ systems and community-based programs classified as ‘not punishment’ (Beckett and Murakawa, 2012: 221; Hinton, 2016; Brown, 2014; Schept, 2015).

Geographers have paid less attention to the connections between carcerality and residential property, though important analysis reveals how carceral conditions permeate low-income public housing and housing estates (see Shabazz, 2015; Jordan, 2017; Villanueva, 2017). Emphasizing different linkages, Bonds (2013) documents how discourses about housing shortages associated with a prison siting generated support for upscale development at the expense of much needed low-income housing in rural Oregon. Jordan’s (2017) examination of urban ecology’s influence on theories of crime in planning illustrates how scholarship linking crime and housing markets has the tendency to situate crime as emanating from neighborhood conditions and ‘social breakdown’ in ways that uncritically map crime onto low-income communities of color. These understandings have bolstered popular approaches to informal surveillance and crime prevention (e.g. Jacobs, 1961) and theories like ‘defensible spaces’ (Newman, 1972) and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED), which focus on the built environment, architecture, and design as a means to reduce crime. Indeed, the increasingly dominant model of broken windows policing is premised on identifying signs of ‘disordered’ property (e.g. broken windows) or people as a means to contain crime and its spread (Camp and Heatherton, 2016; Herbert and Brown, 2006; Loyd and Bonds, 2017). Such approaches pathologize the poor, obscure connections between other places and the structural conditions underpinning unequal housing markets, and fail to engage with research documenting the social, political, and economic construction of crime and criminality (e.g. Muhammad, 2010). Moreover, they rest on strategies of deconcentrating the poor through mechanisms like housing vouchers (e.g. Desmond, 2016) without addressing structural racism and the racialization of crime and poverty (Loyd and Bonds, 2017).

Like Simon (2010), I argue that the housing dynamics of the second half of the 20th century are deeply connected to the expansion of law and order politics in the US (see also Garland, 2001; Davis, 1990). Simon centers his analysis on white suburbia, fear of crime, and the rise of consumer markets tied to real estate consumption and the material value of homes. He argues that the valorization of homeownership during the 1960s and its association with all manner of public virtue and citizenship more explicitly tied white homeownership and concern about maintaining property values to a risk mentality and public fears about crime. Emphasizing ‘the real estate value of whiteness’, reinforced by federal and local policies and lending practices that devalued racial integration, Simon (2010) argues that white homeowners had ‘a capital stake in the increasing whiteness of their neighborhoods’. His analysis adds to examinations documenting the clear racial components of suburbanization (Jackson, 1985; Freund, 2007) by connecting the rise of middle-class home ownership specifically to public concern about crime and the securitization of urban public space. For example, in Milwaukee, at the same time that white suburban homeownership was increasing, affordable housing options for low-income people of color were significantly and consciously constrained through processes like zoning and urban renewal (Smith, 2003; Gurda, 2006) and the salience of urban crime as a subject of fear was expanding. In fact, although Milwaukee had one of the lowest crime rates for a city of its size, white fears about Black criminality led to intensified policing in the city’s inner core throughout the 1960s, with then-police chief Harold Breier stoking racist anxieties by falsely attributing 80 percent of the city’s crime to Black neighborhoods (Gurda, 2006). Breier presided over a racially segregated police force and was adamantly opposed to school integration, claiming that this would be tantamount to ‘busing crime all over the city’ (Taylor, 2016).

A focus on residential property and carcerality is further informed by scholarship detailing the interconnected histories of urban crisis and racialized conceptualizations of ‘crime’, ‘poverty’, and ‘disorder’ (Muhammad, 2010; Camp, 2016; Hinton, 2016). For example, Muhammad (2010) documents how discourses of Black pathology and crime provided absolution for mob violence and lynching, legitimated discriminatory public policy, and the segregation of northern US cities. Hinton’s (2016) examination of reforms associated with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs reveals how liberal framings of race, crime, and poverty emphasized crime management as the solution to urban inequality. Similarly, Camp (2016) traces how federal and local responses to urban uprisings of the 1960s created the foundations for the neoliberal carceral state. As in other cities, Milwaukee’s Black residents experienced systemic discrimination and spatial isolation, confined to highly segregated neighborhoods made so through conscious design. Efforts to contain Black populations were underlain by pervasive discourses about Black criminality circulating locally in the context of expanding Black settlement as well as within federal anticrime efforts designed to suppress urban insurrections (Hinton, 2016; Camp, 2016), including protest in Milwaukee in 1967. The criminalization of Blackness reinforced Milwaukee’s segregation and legitimated the lack of material investment in Black communities. Taken together, these dynamics curtailed Black mobility and supported expansive techniques of state surveillance in Milwaukee’s low-income neighborhoods of color. It is from these racial geographies that we can make sense of contemporary patterns of segregation and ongoing crises of policing in Milwaukee (Loyd and Bonds, 2017).

IV Conclusion

In this progress report, I have emphasized struggles over housing to highlight linkages between property, race, and the carceral state. I refer to Milwaukee to illuminate how local politics and specificities of race have informed housing dynamics. However, this example is embedded within broader historical patterns unfolding across the US. As in other cities, racism, a growing economy, and the federal subsidization of suburban homeownership drew whites into Milwaukee’s suburbs while those very housing policies and urban renewal programs further concentrated Black populations in the city’s inner core. Federal policies coalesced with local racial dynamics and modes of governing property to harden racial and class segregation and these divisions were extensively policed. Mobilizations challenging racism, abandonment, and police violence were depicted as violent and criminal, which reinforced a turn to law and order as the answer to the city’s racialized housing crisis. Local level discourses about housing and crime iterated themes at the national scale as the federal government grappled with the suppression of urban insurrections across the country (Camp, 2016).

My broader argument is that we must theorize the politics of residential property – including the protection of white propertied interests and resistance to such formations – as fundamentally connected to practices of policing and the carceral management of urban space. That urban and suburban whites routinely mobilized to exclude people of color from residential property markets is well documented. So, too, is the role that law and order policing and white vigilantism has played in protecting private property and in maintaining racialized urban boundaries. Yet I argue that the role of racist housing policy and cultures of property remain critically important for understanding articulations of race in an era of colorblind racism. If conjunctural analysis entails the examination of the social, political, and economic forces giving rise to a particular historical moment – or ‘historiciz[ing] the present’ (Grayson and Little, 2017: 62) – unraveling how and why racialized crime management became a political priority alongside urban crisis and changing residential property regimes is essential for theorizing contemporary crises in policing.

Today, property rights and access to housing are framed in terms of the deracialized terms of the market. Access to healthy neighborhoods, thriving employment sectors, and other such structures of opportunity is understood according to common-sense ideas of personal responsibility. The accumulated advantages associated with white propertied power are invisibilized, subsumed within larger discourses about urban crime, pathology, and cultures of poverty that blame those excluded from such prospects for their own failings. The refusal to acknowledge the role that historical and contemporary forms of racism play in everyday structures of society is buttressed by liberal, colorblind discourses championing a commitment to the equality of opportunity (Melamed, 2011). Securing property and housing markets requires massive intervention and investment and law and order politics work to keep the system afloat. Furthermore, demands for structural intervention or redistribution must be countervailed by attending discourses that rationalize unequal patterns of exclusion. Low-income neighborhoods of color, like those in Milwaukee – produced through federal policy, systemic racial exclusion, and ongoing efforts to shield suburban municipal resources from urban jurisdictions – are subject to ongoing surveillance and routine police contact in the name of public safety and neighborhood improvement.

As geographers increasingly theorize property and the making of race, I call for renewed attention to housing as a means to theorize the enduring power of the racialized threat of crime within a system of racial capitalism. That carcerality and property are closely connected is perhaps obvious given the central role of the criminal legal system, historically and in the present, in maintaining the conditions necessary for capitalism. However, as the field of critical carceral studies so presciently demonstrates, we must also pay close attention to the ways in which liberal reforms and ostensibly more humanistic forms of punishment further entrench and extend the long reach of the carceral state into the everyday lives of the racialized poor. Given the centrality of mass criminalization, white propertied power, and challenges to the legitimation of policing in this political moment, there is a pressing need for expanded geographic scholarship connecting legal and extra-legal violence to the workings of racial capitalism. In developing such critiques, however, it is essential that geographers center the knowledges of Black, indigenous, feminist, queer, and anti-colonial scholarship in their analyses. This requires more than recognition but instead deep engagement with abolitionist, antiracist, feminist, anticapitalist, and decolonial critiques (e.g. Gilmore, 2007; Davis, 2003; Brown and Schept, 2017; Loyd, 2014; Loyd et al., 2012; Camp and Heatherton, 2016; McKittrick, 2011) that simultaneously challenge the imperatives of the racial capitalist state while viewing carceral spaces as sites of resistance.