Theory & Event

Several years ago, I interviewed a thirty-five year old Columbus, Ohio man, who self-identified as "African-American."ⁱⁱ His racial identity, this man told me, is "embedded in [his] mind." "[Race] was installed in my mind as a child," he explained. "You know, there's certain places you don't go. There's certain people you don't socialize with." He characterized the neighborhood in which he grew up as, "an all-black neighborhood." He said the school he attended was "an all-black school." He identified by name what he referred to as the "white" neighborhoods that were near to his own: neighborhoods he said he had been taught at an early age to avoid. If my interview respondent's racial identity is "embedded in his mind," these and similar comments suggest, this is the case in significant part because he learned race through place.

The starting-point for the present essay is the claim—Bourdieuian, at base—that constructed social identities, when they are institutionalized in material form, are reproduced especially efficiently, because extra-discursively.ⁱⁱⁱ When identities are (to borrow a word from Bourdieu's lexicon) "objectified"—when they are translated, that is, from discursive forms, such as identity-narratives, into objects, or into things—then competent social actors master them practically. They learn them and they re-learn them, less by mastering the meanings from which they have been constructed, than through a kind of "know-how" that supplements deliberate, conscious learning.

To be sure, at times, as my respondent's comments suggest, people are expressly informed of identitarian conventions: "This is your place. That is not, because you are a member of this race and not that." But such explicit lessons are inherently vulnerable. They invite difficult questions. "What is a black person?" for example. "What is it that makes me black, and how do you know?" "What is a white place, and how is it that a place becomes white?"

When, by contrast, identities are written in material form, they acquire a facticity that renders them lived reality. If race is embedded in our minds, if race is installed in our minds when we are children, this is not simply because we are told, "There's certain places you don't go." It is because we come to know—as a matter of fact, as a matter of practical knowledge—that "there's certain places you don't go. There's certain people you don't socialize with." Learning to function as competent actors in racialized space means learning the common sense of racial practice.

In what follows, my principal question is, "How was racial ‘common sense' built into the American urban and suburban fabric?" My principal claim is that, over the course of the twentieth century, racial identity and difference were, quite literally, objectified in the physical spaces of the American metropolis. Discourses of race as a significant and an enduring form of human difference were lent material form—and hence resilience—by the construction of the black ghetto and the racially exclusive (white) residential development (section one). The channeling of public and private investment away from black ghettos and toward white suburbs layered material inequalities atop identitarian distinctions, helping produce and reproduce, not just racial identities, but also racial interests (section two). At the same time, the concentration in "black places" of housing problems, of joblessness, poverty, and a host of social ills that accompany concentrated poverty, transformed what were, in a causal sense, collective problems into, in both practical effect and popular consciousness, "black problems" (section three).