wacquant, urban outcasts (2008)

ghetto, banlieu, favela, etc. (1-12)

(1-2): key point--"urban marginality is not everywhere woven of the same cloth, and, all things considered, there is nothing suprising in that. the generic mechanisms that produce it, like the specific forms it assumes, become fully intelligible once one takes caution to embed them in the historical matrix of class, state, and space..."

(3): important--from the communal ghetto ("a compact and shaprly circumscribed sociospatial formation to which blacks of all classes were consigned and bound together by a broad complement of instituions specific to the group and its reserrved space"), to the fin-de-siecle hyperghetto ("novel, decentralized, territorial and organizational configuration characterized by conjugated segregation on the basis of race and class in the context of the double retrenchment of the labour market and the welfare state from the urban core, necessitating and eliciting the corresponding deployment of an intrusive and omnipresent police and penal apparatus.")

(3-4): important claim--"in the final analysis, however, it is the collapse of public institutions, resulting from state policies of urban abandonment and leading to the punitive containment of the black (sub-)proletariat, that emerges as the most potent and most distinctive cause of entrenched marginality in the American metropolis... the implosion of America's dark ghetto... [is] economically underdetermined and politically overdetermined: properly diagnosed, hyperghettoization is primarily a chapter in political sociology."

(5): Black Belt ("spatial relegation... operate[s] on the basis of race first and foremost, modulated by class position after the break of the 1960s, and both are anchored and aggravated by public policies of urban triage and neglect)" vs. Red Belt ("it is just about the reverse... where marginalization is primarily the product of a class logic, in part redoubled by ethnonational origin and in part attenuated by state action") [i forsee two questions here, already: (1) what does it mean for race and class to be distinct logics? can race stand on its own, outside of class?; (2) how can we speak of the state at once effecting this, and also autonomous from it?]

(5): working-class banlieues in France heterogenous; in US, stark monotony to the ghetto.

(5): important claim--"specifically racial dimension of urban marginality in the American metropolis." and it is this specifically racial character in America, he is stressing, that tells us that state structures and policies play a decisive role in "the differential stitching together of inequalities."

(7): and further key claim, re: periodization--thesis of the emergence of a new regime of urban poverty... "post-fordist poverty... is fueled by the growing instability and heterogeneity of the wage-labour relation in the context of rising inequality; increasingly disconnected from the short-term cyclical fluctuations of the national economy and accentuated by the recoiling of the social welfare state; and tends to concentrate in defamed and desolate districts where the erosion of a sense of 'place'... and the absence of a collective idiom of claims-making exacerbate the experience and effects of deproletarianization and destitution."

(7): neoliberalism as a challenge to the possibility of citzenship (can we indict capitalism? because it doesn't seem like we're rehabilitating the fordist moment, either?) not promising that the positive project is van parijs and the 'basic income.' total cop-out.

(8-12): five recommendations

1. and foremost--clearer separation between "folk concepts" used by decision makers and residents and the "analytical concepts" that social scientists must construct.
2. situate it in time--"in the diachronic sequence of historical transformations... [not] to forget that urban space is a historical and political construction in the strong sense of the term..."
3. ethnographic observation as an indispensable tool (a surreptitious swipe at the others in the field, too)
   
4. distinguish between social condition, position in hierarchy of places, and function for broader metropolitan system
5. the degree and form of state penetration

(12): police fetishism--criminalization of a social problem

(12): hint at state responsibility for the fact of urban outcasts (this is important--again, because it raises the question of how the state can be both implicated in, and attenuating, the same process)

chapter one, the return of the repressed (15-39)

(15-16): the ideology of the fordist years (w. w. rostow and daniel bell)--'democratic' in tocqueville's sense; the meritocracy; poverty as the residue of past inequities. welfare state in europe, free-market with targeted assistance in the US.

(17): lyndon johnson promising an end to poverty by 1976

(17-18): very unkind, here, to Marxism, arguing that it couldn't make sense of the continued salience of race. but whatever.

(20): est. damage following rodney king riots--one billion dollars!

(20): question--can we say anything about this periodization? that all of a sudden fordist society woke to the shocks of the riots of the last two decades of the 20th century? does this not elide the upheavals of the 60s (civil rights movement, most notably)?

(22): 1980s and 1990s riots driven by two logics, to varying degrees depending on country: (1) a logic of protest against ethnoracial injustics; (2) a class logic pushing the impoverished working class to rise up against economic deprivation.

(24): violence is typically viewed as violence from below (the product of the pathologies of the underclass)--"yet, far from being irrational expressions of impenitent incivility..., the public disorders caused by dispossessed youthsin the cities... over these past dozen years constitue a (socio)logical response to the massive structural violence unleashed upon them by a set of mutually reinforcing economic and sociopolitical changes..."

(25): three types of violence from above, then:

1. mass unemployment; labor precariousness and deproletarianzation.
   
2. relegation to decaying neighborhoods (disinvestment, etc.)
3. heightened stigmatization in daily life as well as in public discourse

(25): and the structural argument, which is critical--"this return of the repressed... must be understood as the result of the uneven, disarticulating development of the most advanced sectors of capitalist societies..." [again, i am concerned that we are not going to be able to explain, properly, widespread discontent in the 'fordist' moment if our operative variable is neoliberalization]

(27): 'deproletarianization' as the "outright denial of access to wage-earning activities..." a rise in the unemployed; but also in the long-term unemployed, who aren't captured by these figures, remember.

(27): notion of the formation of an 'excess reserve army of labor' (citing cardoso!), which arises through this widespread exclusion from wage-labor.

(28): new immigrants in this economy, "tend to congregate in the poorer neighbourhoods of large urban centres..." what's more, their arrival has coincided with 'flight' from the city centres, thus resulting in greater social polarization [again, i think he would be the first to admit that we are dealing in generalities, here]

(29): unemployment in S. Central LA up to 60% in 1992

(29): 'territorial stigma', not to be underestimated

(30): "lastly,there is the curse of being poor in the midst of a rich society in which participation in the sphere of consumption has become a sine qua non of social dignity -- a passport to personhood if not citizenship..."

(30-31): important--the infra-political is taking the place of the actively political--"formal means of pressure on the state have declined along with the disruption and decomposition of traditional machineries of political representation of the poor."

(31-33): role/place of the police -- "whenever the police come to be considered as an alien force by the population they are supposed to protect, they become unable to fulfil any role other than a purely repressive one..."

(34): the problem can be criminalized, or politicized--it is the former in the US, the latter in France, and somewhere in between in the UK

(35): important--but even in France, he's noting, the commitment to address these issues politically does not go far enough (because they focused solely on "urban redevelopment/housing")--"it does nothing to attack its root causes: the fragmentation of wage labour feeding unemployment and casual employment." [there is an important implication, here, about the radical nature of the kinds of reforms that would work--which makes this universal basic income advocacy seem out-of-place]

(37): identifying, again, the epochal transformation of the economies concerned as cause of urban disorder--"deregulation of financial markets, desocialization of wage work, revamping of labor to impose 'flexibility.', social polarizatio of the cities, and state policies that have promoted corporate expansion over social redistribution...

(38): noting, here, that the African-Americans were the "exception" in the Fordist compromise; what are the theoretical consequences of this 'exceptionality'? -- but isn't this all highly dubious? a romanticizing of the conjuncture, for sure, no? but maybe we don't want to overstate the rejoinder, either?

chapter two, the state and fate of the dark ghetto at century's close (43-)

(43): 'slow rioting' of internal social decay and endemic crime

(44): the image of the "underclass"

(44): from war on poverty, to war on welfare -- and decline of black social movements.

(44): Moynihan calling for 'benign neglect', rather than the massive state intervention called for by the Kerner Commssion (though this is in 1968, don't forget. sort of undercuts the notion that the Fordist period had this resolved--though, at the same time, he has already made an exception for african-americans)

(46): critical--for all of this questioning of his periodization, he has made the point quite clear: the contemporary american ghetto (the "hyperghetto") is substantively distinct from the ghetto of the Fordist years (the "communal ghetto"), in ways already elucidated. and this makes sense, so long as we are willing to make this explicit (i.e., the perpetual failure of capitalism to resolve this question..) [this is quite aside, of course, from what we might want to ask about his picture of the communal ghetto, which seems overly romanticized--and this is important, for it serves as a point of comparison.]

(47): key--America's black belt... "is the product of a novel political articulation of racial cleavage, class inequality, and urban space in both dominant discourse and objective reality." (and not simply economic, ecological change...)

(47-48): going to concentrate, here, on the external conditions of this development (and makes the reasons explicit)

(48): takes a swipe at cornel west, for using the idiom of the 'underclass' [there is the odd nativity game going on, which might just interact with wacquant's arrogance in interesting ways]

(49): three caveats, before looking at the ghetto

1. "not simply a topographic entity... but an institutional form... a distinctive, spatially based, concatenation of mechanisms of ethnoracial closure and control..."
2. not something to be exoticized
3. ghetto does not suffer from disorganization, but differential organization [reminds me of Simmel, no?]

(51-52): blacks as only group to have undergone ghettoization (others lived in ethnic clusters)--"total, involuntary, and perpetual segregation"

(52): (1) spatial decentering and institutional differentiation of the ghetto [what does this all mean, exactly?]; (2) the scale of the involution.

(54): important--"yet the most significant brute fact of everyday life in the fin-de-siecle ghetto is without contest the extraordinary prevalence of physical danger and the acute sense of insecurity that pervades its streets." "this is a "reasoned response" (both in the sense of echo and retort) to various kinds of violence from above."

(55): males in bangladesh over age 35 had a higher probability of survival than their counterparts in harlem in 1990s

(58): involution following the trend of increasing joblessness (from about half of the population employed in south side in 1950, to more than 77% of those above the age of 16 left w/o a job in 1980)

(58-59): the rise and fall of the communal ghetto (first, blacks of all classes were put together; than as 'white flight' opened up some space, the petty bourgeoisie, etc., fled)--"by the late 1970s, the urban colour line had effectively been redrawn along a class fracture at the behest of the government."

(59): in sum, a three-fold movement that has resulted in the present conjuncture

1. "the out-migration of stably employed african-american families made possible by state-sponsored white flight to the suburbs"
2. "the crowding of public housing in black areas;"
   
3. "the rapid deproletarianization of the remaining ghetto residents."
   

(62): "oppressive as it was, the traditional ghetto formed 'a milieu for negro americans in which they could imbue their lives with meaning." [come on, we are broaching the outlandish here--this is not necessary for the larger argument, as far as i'm concerned]

(63): 82 percent of adults without a savings account in the late 1980s (the wealth gap is extraordinary, in general, let's not forget)

(64): informalization, here too as survival strategy (in other words, need to pin-down what is happening here vs. third world--is the mike davis narrative distinction overstated, in a sense?)

(66): yes--this is the other side of the entrepreneurial coin (don't let them forget it!)

(67): drug economy as a "subterranean welfare system"

(69): important--as far as "causes" of hyperghettoization go:

1. the transition of the american economy from fordist system of production for a mass-market, to more open/decentralized/service-intesnive system geared to increasingly differentiated consumption patterns (70-75)
   
2. rigid residential segregation, deliberate stacking of public housing in urban areas (75-80)
   
3. widespread retrenchment of an already miserly welfare state. (80-83)
   
4. turnaround in federal and local urban policy; 'planned shrinkage' of public services in historically black districts. (83-88)
   

(71): the ghetto no longer plays the role of reservoir of cheap industrial labor, as it did in a previous era (owing to deindustrialization; suburbanization of opportunities; shift to 'higher-education' jobs; continued racial segmentation of low-wage labor)

(74): the "stigma" that accompanies being associated with the ghetto

(75): this claim is confused, no? "the perpetuation of the exclusionary mission of the ghetto is first and foremost the concrete expression of the persistence of the 'colour line' in the metropolis even as it became overlaid by a class divide to produce a dual structure of black entrapment composed of a (sub)proletarian core and a middle-class periphery" [but all the same--descriptively this is all very valid; it is just fields' point about mistaking explanandum for explanans...]

(78-79): very useful account of how state was complicit in the ghettoization by focusing on massively subsidizing middle- and upper-class housing in the suburbs, and also by fostering public housing authorities within the bounds of the historic ghetto (kerner commission: 'federal housing programs concentrate the most impoverished and dependent segments of the population into the central-city ghettos wehre there is already a critical gap...').

(79): wow--"to this day, the united states remains the only advanced country in the world without significant state support for low-income housing in the world without significant state support for low-income housing, despite the glaring fact that nowhere have private developers bulit for the poor--in 1980, publicly owned or managed housing represented about 1 per cent of the US housing supply, compared to some 46 per cent in england and 37 per cent in france."

(80): "contrary to popular neoconservative rhetoric, the last quarter of the century was not a period of expansion and generosity for welfare but one of blanket retraction..."

(82): total abandonment/disinvestment by the public housing authorities

(82-83): regressive fiscal policies, on the part of the revanchist state

(84): nixon undoing the minimal interventions of johnson's war on poverty

(84): a window into our earlier discussions--"the political isolation of the cities, in turn, reinforced their role as entrepreneurs at the expense of their mission as social services providers, further fragmenting the revenue base on which the financing of public institutions rests..."

(84): planned shrinkage--recalls 'gentrification'

(85): public schools as custodial institutions, rather than educational institutions

(88): infants born in the poorest black districts of chicago are three times more likely to die than those born in wealthiest white districts; black men aged 15-45 die at six times the rate of men in white affluent neighborhoods

(89): grave mistake, following portes, has been to impute psychological reality to social phenomena -- "transform sociological conditions into psychological traits [of individuals"

(90): taking on william julius wilson for ignoring the role of the state and the decline of public institutions (he focuses instead on the disappearance of work)

(90): accusing massey of ignoring the distinctions between segregation and ghettoization, the communal ghetto and the hyperghetto.

(91): important--"it is this policy of state abandonment and punitive containment that best explains..." [it is unclear how much work we want to attribute to this, exclusively--in part it seems like he has to distinguish himself from the rest]

chapter three, the cost of racial and class exclusion in 'bronzeville' (92-118)

(92): in the mind of the neocon, poor as a "formless aggregate of pathological cases."

(93-94): in sum: "...the central argument of this chapter is that the vague and morally pernicious neologism of 'underclass' and its behavioral-cum-cultural slant mask a phenomenon pertaining to the macrostructural order: the ghetto has experienced a crisis not because the macrostructures of the family and individual conduct have suddenly collapsed or because a 'welfare ethos' has mysteriously taken hold of its residents, but because joblessness and economic exclusion, by rising to extreme levels against the backdrop of rigid racial segregation and state abandonment, have triggered a process of 'hyperghettoization'--in the sense of an exacerbation of the exclusionary logic of the ghetto as an instrument of ethnoracial control."

(94): wow--in 1980, 38% of poor african americans in the largest ten cities lived in ghettos (where 40% live below poverty line), compared to 22 percent in 1970 and only 6 percent of whites. [but again: ethnoracial exclusion cannot be your explanation for this--this is what you must explain]

(97): important--here we have a more useful explanation: "the most powerful vector behind the irresistible economic pauperization and social marginalization of large segments of the population penned in the segregated heart of chicago is a set of mutually reinforcing spatial and industrial changes in the country's urban political economy that converged during the 1960s and 1970s to undercut the material foundations of the ghetto by stripping it of its traditional role as reservoir of unskilled labour."

(98): but does he want to say that it is this, plus ethnoracial discrimination? which is true, of course, but not perhaps theoretically interesting... how do we want to frame this?

(98): blacks traditionally relied on manufacturing and blue-collar employment--its end, then, has led to 'labor market exclusion'

(101): what does this mean, though? that organizational changes in the economy "have combined with the black rejection of the caste regime through the Civil rights movement to break up the social structure of the traditional ghetto and set off a process of hyperghettoization."

(102): violent crime, drug consumption, etc., have all reached qualitatively different proportions in the hyperghetto

(104): "thus, when we counterpose extreme-poverty areas with moderate-poverty areas, we are in effect comparing the historic heart of the ghetto, born in the industrial era, with it postindustrial periphery."

(105): "the first major difference between the historic core of the ghetto and its rim areas pertains to their class structure. a sizable majority of the residents of the peripheral zones of the black belt are integrated into the wage-labour economy..."

(108): contours of the 'welfare trajectory'

(110): and particularly for the jobless, who have been locked into welfare dependence by lack of opportunities

(111): "thus, if the likelihood of tapping public aid increases sharply as one crosses the line between the employed and the jobless, it remains the case that, at each level of the class structure, welfare receipt is notably more frequent at the core of the ghetto than at its rim, especially among the unemployed and among women."

(112): wow--wealth table

(114): lower social capital--"all in all, then, the concentration of poverty at the core of the crumbling ghetto has the effect of systematically devaluing the social capital of those who live in its midst."

(116): most male companions have jobs, even though the vast majority of males don't--"being unemployed radically devalues men..."

(117): he's noting general economic growth in the rest of chicago, but a fracturing of that economic fate from the fate of the ghetto--we can ask about sassen's global city observation, here

chapter four, west-side story (119-132)

(119): important--"the united states can rightfully lay claim to being the first society of advanced insecurity in history. not just because it engenders... levels of lethal criminality incomparably greater than those prevailing in other postindustrial societies..., but in the sense that it has elevated insecurity as an organizing principle of collective life and a key mode of regulation of individual conduct..." (privilege as enjoying a social position outside this web of insecurity)

(122): 1/3 of the built environment in north lawndale are unsound/unfit for human habitation

(124): the US 'semi-welfare state'

(124): key--"this is to say that welfare recipients--who are forbidden to work for pay on pain of seeing this miserly aid withdrawn [in 1990, standard aid packaged in chicago fell 16% below survival threshold]--are sentenced to a long term of state poverty. by the same token, they are fated, whether they want it or not, to turn to the informal economy, legal and illegal, which has experienced spectacular development of late."

(126-127): wow; violence--"residents of the five african-american police districts in chicago... are eleven times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the... residents of the two white districts covering the north and south-west sectors of the city..."

(128): come on, what's the point of a hobbes citation?

(129-130): police corruption

chapter five, from conflation to comparison--how banleues and ghetto converge and contrast (135-162)

(135-136): critical--"...two profoundly different processes and scales on the two sides of the atlantic... [1] the cumulative incidence of segregation, poverty, isolation and violence assumes a wholly different intensity in the United States. [2] on the other hand, and this is the more crucial point, banlieues and ghettos are the legacies of different urban trajectories and arise from disparate criteria of classification and forms of social sorting: sorting operates first and foremost on the basis of class position... in the first case, and of ethnoracial membership in a historically pariah group... in the second. [3] finally, the french red belt and the american black belt have been the object of diametrically opposed political constructions and bureaucratic managements in the 1980s and 1990s. this is to say that the chasm that separates these two sociospatial constellations is not only of a quantitative order but pertains more fundamentally to the sociohistorical and institutional registers." [a place, clearly, to problematize the race/class confounding]

(137): "i wish above all to urge the utmost caution in the transatlantic transfer of concepts and theories pertaining to the articulation of racial domination, class inequality, and the structuration of space..."

(141): as in the US, linked in france, to "the relentless rise of unemployment and assorted forms of underemployment linked to the 'flexibilization' of the labor market..." [but he is pushing back against the equation in general, so this isn't to be taken out of context]

(145): "we will now demonstrate that such assimilation is in several respects fradulent, even dangerous. it proceeds simultaneously from ignorance about the black american ghetto and its historical trajectory (especially in the period following the civil rights revolution and the great riots of 1965-1968) and from an incomplete and incorrect diagnosis of the french working-class banlieues."

(145): noting, first, though that there are surface-level similarities (social morphology (145-147), and lived experience (147-150)

(146): remember--these areas have experienced de-population, not other way round

(147): between '68 and '84, la corurneuve lost 10,000 of 18,000 manual labor jobs. "ghetto and banlieue are thus both territories ravaged by deindustrialization."

(150): but this is all a "surface convergence..." there are five key differences:

1. disparate organizational ecologies (150-152): enormous difference in size, which expresses also the fact that the american ghetto really is a self-contained city, whereas the french banlieue is more of a 'residential island'
2. racial cloistering and uniformity, vs. ethnic dispersion (152-155): "whereas the popular banlieues of france are fundamentally pluri-ethnic zones where a multiplicity of nationalities rub elbows..., the US ghetto is totally homogeneous in ethnoracial terms..."
3. divergent rates and degrees of poverty (155-156)
   
4. criminality and dangerousness (156-158)
5. urban policy and the degredation of daily surroundings (158-160): "parlous state of housing stock and public infrastructure."
   

(150): interesting, gesturing towards reality/possiblity of a latino hyperghetto (this requires that we re-assess, no, the notion that ethnoracial domination is a cause?)

(152): wow--97 percent of black women marry black men, which is very different from the situation in france

(153): critical--"the ghetto is above all else a mechanism of racial confinement, an apparatus aimed at enclosing a stigmatized category in a reserved physical and social space that will prevent it from mixing with others and thus risk 'tainting' them..." [another excellent place to problematize race/class--this is the purpose of the ghetto!?]

(155): con't--"the confinement of blacks inside the ghetto is the expression of a racial dualism that cuts across the gamut of institutions of US society and is barely inflected as they climb up the class ladder: increasing education and income did not significantly lower the isolation of african americans from whites after the 1960s..."

(155): con't--"racial basis of their exclusion... explains why ghetto residents experience poverty rates and degrees of destitution with no equivalent in france..." [do we accept this? i think not--he is, again, confusing explanandum and explanans. or, rather, he's caught in a tautology--what's your evidence for racial exclusion. segregation. what's your explanation for segregation? racial exclusion. and on, and on, and on]

(159-160): important--in france, a different, more meaningful attempt at state support for these communities--"bear[s] witness to a collective will and sense of political responsibility that is diametrically opposed to the attitude of 'benign neglect' adopted by the american authorities..."

(161): important--admits "the historical specificity of the ethnoracial division of US society..." [about this there's no disagreement, just about the work we can make this do--i.e., does it take on a life of it's own, essentially]

chapter six, stigma and division, from the core of chicago to the margins of paris (163-197)

(163): the 'new poverty' and its contours--"all of these phenomena can be observed, to varying degrees, in nearly all advanced societies."

(166): purpose here is to evaluate the thesis of "transatlantic convergence" through a cross-national comparison

(168): again--"to simplify: relegation operates on the basis of ethnoracial membership reinforced by both social class and state in the fin-de-siecle black belt, whereas it proceeds principally on the basis of class and is partly mitigated by public policy in the red belt."

(169): important--'public taint', following bourdeiu, which "allows us to identify the main factors accounting for the muted social potency of ethnoracial categorization in the red belt..." [this is interesting--must follow this to make the c-arg complete]

(171): i am not following this claim, though--what does it mean for joblessness to produce 'taint'? discrimination on the basis of address, association. [but let's be careful to understand this as consequence, as 'ideology'...]

(179): important--talking about a triple disjuncture between objective conditions and this ideology of intolerance--reasons it 'weighs more heavily in france, than in US'

1. in france, institutionalized social inferiority stands in violation of french notions of unitary citizensihp; much more acceptable to americans
2. US has much more individualistic conception of causation (no one being penalized, really)
3. "a third and perhaps the most crucial difference between Red Belt and Black Belt relates to the nature of the stigma they carry: this stigma is essentially residential in the former but jointly and inseparably spatial-cum-racial in the latter." [ok, this is perfect place to tease out the shortcomings of this distinction--so clearly this is a consequence of the way in which these communities have formed, not a cause of their distinctive formation]
   

(182): critical place to question--ghetto as a "specifically racial formation"--"designed to encase a bounded category that has spawned a society-wide web of material and symbolic associations between colour, place, and a host of negatively valued social properties."

(184): and here, too--"negative representations and sociofugal practices then become articulated to set off a deadly self-fulfilling prophecy through which public taint and collective dishonour end up producing that which they claim merely to record: namely, social atomism, community 'disorganization' and cultural anomie."

(185): preliminary response--i suppose my position would simply be that the more theoretically coherent claim is to suggest that their homogeneity explains the severity of ethnoracial domination, rather than ethnoracial domination explains their homogeneity--and then the task is to understand homogeneity (and through that, one can understand ethnoracial domination, too)

(186): seeing 'race' everywhere in the ghetto--in the 'objectivity' of space?

(188): he is saying in france you have a perception that is youths arrayed against society, rather than it being racialized (but insofar as he is being descriptive, ok; insofar as he is appealing to folk concepts, he is forcing himself to ignore possible paths toward 'racialization'?...)

(190): noting racism in a british working-class town -- well what of american exceptionality, then?

(193): key, explaining lack of this ethnoracial notion in france--not just (1) the comparatively heterogeneous character of the Red Belt, but (2) also the notion that ethnic difference is not a legitimate idiom in the french state [are we sure that this can do the work we want it to? how can you perform a notwithstanding le pen?], and (3) the notion that there is much more assimilation going on in these areas than in the US.

(196): argument that in france, the social schism between these communities and the working-class is narrowing, whereas in the US it is getting greater and greater...

(198): "racial separation... radicalizes the objective and subjective reality of urban exclusion..."

The origins of republican America were addressed above - to create a nominally democratic government Adam Smith said should be "instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor." The nation's founders achieved mightily, handing down their legacy to succeeding generations of leaders always mindful of who gave them power and who they had to serve. At the nation's birth, only adult white male property owners could vote; blacks were commodities, not people; and women were childbearing and homemaking appendages of their husbands. Religious prerequisites existed until 1810, and all adult white males couldn't vote until property and tax requirements were dropped in 1850. States elected senators until the 17th amendment in 1913 gave citizen voters that right, and Native Americans had no franchise in their own land until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act gave them back what no one had the right to take away in the first place. Women's suffrage wasn't achieved until the 19th Amendment passed in 1920 after nearly 100 years of struggling for it. The 1865 13th Amendment freed black slaves, the 1870 15th Amendment gave them the right to vote, but it wasn't until passage of the landmark Civil and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s, abolishing Southern Jim Crow laws, that blacks could vote, in fact, like the Constitution said they could decades earlier. Today those rights are gravely weakened for all through unfair laws still in force and a nation growing more repressive and less responsive to the needs of ordinary working people and the nation's least advantaged. The limited high-water mark of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society has steadily eroded since in loss of civil liberties and essential social benefits.

assimilation is a double-edged sword for immigrants:
Italian, Polish, and Jewish immigrants may not have identified with, or been accepted into, white society when they first arrived in the United States. But they, or more often their children, assimilated by becoming "white" and experienced upward mobility as they melded into the white majority. And part of the assimilation into whiteness meant the adoption of white racial attitudes.
(...) For immigrants of color, assimilation means something very different than it historically has for European immigrants. For Latin American immigrants, assimilation more often means shedding their American dream and joining the lowest rungs in a caste-like society where Native Americans and African Americans, the most "assimilated" people of color, have been consistently kept at the bottom. When Haitian immigrants assimilate, explains one study, "they become not generic, mainstream Americans but specifically African Americans and primarily the poor African Americans most vulnerable to American racism."

choices for black labor:
As we enter the 21st century, Black labor is in disarray. Within the ranks of organized labor, the various institutions that have often spoken on its behalf have ossified. Black caucuses in various unions have stepped back from challenging and pushing the union leaderships and instead have in all too many cases degenerated into social clubs or step-ladders for individuals to get positions in the union structure.
(...) Suffice to say that the economic crisis affecting Black America, a crisis that became very evident in the mid-1970s, cut the ground underneath a major portion of the Black working class. Combined with political attacks on Black America by the Right, we went on the defensive. In organized labor, the declining percentage of workers organized in unions, along with the brutal climate built up during the Ronald Reagan years, worsened the conditions under which struggle could take place.
(...) Yet in my humble opinion what was particularly lost by Black labor leaders was vision. The vision that was articulated beginning in the 1930s with the growth of the National Negro Congress and the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and advanced in the 1950s with the National Negro Labor Council and, later, by the A. Philip Randolph-led Negro American Labor Council, and in the 1970s with the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists, justifiably emphasized the inclusion of Black workers at all levels of the union movement.
(...) Nationally, the prevailing emphasis, even among many younger activists, is on individual solutions to problems that are mainly collective. Within the Black working class there is a less of a sense that unions are the instruments to deal with the larger problems facing Black America. This does not mean that unions are disregarded, but it does mean that there is little sense that they can or do have an expansive role.
(...) Gaining considerable attention over the last few years has been the growth of anti-immigrant sentiment within Black America, including within the Black working class. The fact that much of this sentiment has been actively fueled by white, right-wing anti-immigrant groups is secondary to the fact that the fear of competition and displacement on the part of the Black working class has made it susceptible to ‘nativist’ arguments. Black labor leadership has, for the most part, failed to engage and rigorously challenge this sentiment with much more than platitudes. As the Black working class faces continued battering, the immigrant—documented and/or undocumented—becomes, for many, the target of convenience for our anger. Rather than understanding the nature of the problem we face as lying within capitalism itself and the search by business for cheaper and more vulnerable workforces, the immigrant becomes the safe and convenient enemy of the moment.
(...) Black labor has historically played an interesting role, something akin to the irritant in the oyster that brings forward a pearl. Whether we organized independent unions when we were refused entry into the American Federation of Labor, or when we and Chicanos became decisive supporters of a new labor movement, as in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s and 1940s, Black labor has little history of passivity. The time has come for Black labor to step back into that role of irritant to the oyster, but with a 21st century frame of reference.
(...) To this should be added that the Black Freedom Movement has nearly always been an essential ally for other efforts to expand democracy and oppose injustice and inequality. This core—the fight for consistent democracy/opposition to injustice and inequality—must remain the guiding principles for Black labor and its challenge to organized labor today. The implications are quite profound in that what is being asked of Black labor—as a contingent of both organized labor and the Black Freedom Movement—is to push for a reconstructed and redefined labor movement that is emphasizing social transformation.
(...) Jobs do not necessarily begin high-wage. They can, however, become high wage through worker organization. This means that organized labor must have a program to organize economically depressed regions—such as our central cities—to transform the jobs. This, again, becomes a community affair.

interview with kevin cooper from death row:
Kevin Cooper's case exemplifies everything that makes my stomach turn about capital punishment: it's racially biased. It punishes the innocent. And every last person is on death row innocent or not because they couldn't afford the representation that would have saved their lives. As the saying goes, "Those without the capital get the punishment." When we actually read and hear the voices of those on the row, it makes it that much harder for executioners like Schwarzenegger to sell the idea that they are somehow less than human and should be put down like dogs.
(...) DZ: Why has sports, in your mind, become such a central part of the Black experience in the United States?
KC: Throughout the history of America, white people have always loved to be entertained by Black people, especially Black men. The masters of certain slaves would put their slaves up against other slaves from another plantation and they would fight, sometimes to the death. Just as dogs or roosters did. This evolved into sports such as boxing and wrestling. As new sports were invented, and more white people wanted to be entertained, more Blacks were either forced to participate against their will, or they joined in because they found some type of respect if they were good at it. The master's prize fighter got good food, access to women, and was respected and treated pretty goodThat is until he lost.
(...) DZ: In New Orleans, when Katrina hit, the only place available for emergency shelter was the stadium, the Superdome. What does that tell us about our world today?
KC: After Hurricane Katrina hit and the poor people of New Orleans found themselves in the Superdome, it showed the world that, in this country, if you are poor then you are shit out of luck. Nobody will help you when and how you need help, and if you can't make it on your own you are in trouble.
(...) KC: Sports and life are both full of contradictions because both have rules and sometimes the rules are broken and ignored. Mistakes are made but not admitted to. Certain people make calls in both, and for the most part it is the ordinary people who suffer because of the calls made by the leaders or owners. It's the people at the bottom who pay for the mistakes made by the people at the top. It's a dog eat dog world, the winner takes all, and too many people are set up to lose from the get-go.

virginia tech and massacres:
the Gunther Island Massacre of Wiyot Indians, committed on Feb. 26, 1860, when a small group of white men murdered between 60 and 200 Wiyot men, women and children. The massacre was encouraged by a local newspaper. Extermination was once the official policy of the California government toward Native Americans, as Gov. Peter H. Burnett stated in 1851: "That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected..."
(...) On April 13, 1873, 350 miles northwest of New Orleans in Colfax, Grand Parish, La., 280 blacks were victims of a group of armed white men that included members of the White League and the Ku Klux Klan. Known as the Colfax Massacre, it was said to be sparked by contested local elections, although more generally its cause was white opposition to Reconstruction, which in 1875 resulted in a legal ruling, United States vs. Cruikshank, an important basis of future gun-control legislation, because it allows that "the federal government had no power to protect citizens against private action (not committed by federal or state government authorities) that deprived them of their constitutional rights under the 14th Amendment."