Urban Outcasts

A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality

Loïc Wacquant

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745657479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Breaking with the exoticizing cast of public discourse and conventional research, Urban Outcasts takes the reader inside the black ghetto of Chicago and the deindustrializing banlieue of Paris to discover that urban marginality is not everywhere the same. Drawing on a wealth of original field, survey and historical data, Loïc Wacquant shows that the involution of America's urban core after the 1960s is due not to the emergence of an 'underclass', but to the joint withdrawal of market and state fostered by public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment. In European cities, by contrast, the spread of districts of 'exclusion' does not herald the formation of ghettos. It stems from the decomposition of working-class territories under the press of mass unemployment, the casualization of work and the ethnic mixing of populations hitherto segregated, spawning urban formations akin to 'anti-ghettos'.

Comparing the US 'Black Belt' with the French 'Red Belt' demonstrates that state structures and policies play a decisive role in the articulation of class, race and place on both sides of the Atlantic. It also reveals the crystallization of a new regime of marginality fuelled by the fragmentation of wage labour, the retrenchment of the social state and the concentration of dispossessed categories in stigmatized areas bereft of a collective idiom of identity and claims-making. These defamed districts are not just the residual 'sinkholes' of a bygone economic era, but also the incubators of the precarious proletariat emerging under neoliberal capitalism. Urban Outcasts sheds new light on the explosive mix of mounting misery, stupendous affluence and festering street violence resurging in the big cities of the First World. By specifying the different causal paths and experiential forms assumed by relegation in the American and the French metropolis, this book offers indispensable tools for rethinking urban marginality and for reinvigorating the public debate over social inequality and citizenship at century's dawn.

Part I: From Communal Ghetto to Hyperghetto

2

The State and Fate of the Dark Ghetto at Century’s Close

Tryin’ to survive, tryin’ to stay alive

The ghetto, talkin’ ’bout the ghetto

Even though the streets are bumpy, lights burnt out

Dope fiends die with a pipe in their mouth

Old school buddies not doin’ it right

Every day it’s the same and it’s the same every night

I wouldn’t shoot you bro’ but I’d shoot that fool

If he played me close and tried to test my cool

Every day I wonder just how I’ll die

The only thing I know is how to survive.

Too Short, ‘The Ghetto’¹

Twenty years after the uprisings that lit fires of rage in the black sections of the American metropolis in the mid-1960s, the ghetto returned to the frontline of national issues. Only, this time, the spectacular turmoil that tore through the African-American community of big cities in revolt against white authority had given way to the ‘slow rioting’ (Curtis 1985) of endemic crime, collective destitution and internal social decay. On the nightly news, the scenes of white policemen unleashing state violence upon peaceful black demonstrators demanding recognition of their elemental rights have been replaced by grisly reports of drive-by shootings, ‘welfare dependency’ and the crisis of inner-city ‘teen pregnancy’. Black ministers, politicians and concerned parents still agitate and demonstrate at the local level, but now their pleas and marches are less often directed at the government than at the drug dealers and gangs who have turned so many ghetto neighbourhoods into macabre theatres of dread and death.

From Race Riots to Silent Riots

The vision of Negro looters and Black Power activists reclaiming forceful control over their community’s fate (Boskin 1970), riding the crest of a wave of racial pride and self-assertion, has given way to the fearsome imagery of a vile ‘underclass’, a term purporting to denote a new segment of the black poor allegedly characterized by the behavioural deficiency and cultural deviance of its members (Auletta 1982; Sawhill 1989). This menacing urban hydra is personified, on the masculine side, by the defiant and aggressive ‘gang banger’ and, on the feminine side, by the dissolute and passive ‘welfare mother’, two twin figures whose (self-)destructive behaviour is felt to represent the one a physical threat and the other a moral assault on American values.

The surging social movements that accompanied the mobilization of the black community and helped lift its hopes during the decade of the 1960s (McAdam 1981; A. Morris 1984) have receded and, with them, the country’s commitment to combating racial inequality. This ebbing is well reflected in the changing idiom of public debate on the ghetto. As the ‘War on Poverty’ of Lyndon B. Johnson gave way to the ‘War on Welfare’ of Ronald Reagan and his successors (Katz 1989), the question of the societal connection between racial domination, class inequality and poverty was reformulated in terms of the personal motivations, family norms and values of the residents of the ‘inner city’, with welfare playing the part of the villain. The goals of public policy were downgraded accordingly: rather than pursue the eradication of poverty – the grandiose target that the Great Society programme was set to reach by 1976 as a tribute to the nation’s bicentennial – and the resolute reduction of racial disparities, at century’s close the state is content to oversee the containment of the first in crumbling urban enclaves reserved to lower-class blacks (and in the prisons that were built at an astounding pace during the 1980s to absorb the most disruptive of their occupants) and a policy of ‘benign neglect’ of the second.²

By the same token, the focus of social science research shifted from the urban colour line to the individual defects of the black poor, from the ghetto as a mechanism of ethnoracial domination and economic oppression (Clark 1965; Liebow 1967; Blauner 1972), and the structural political and economic impediments blocking the full participation of urban proletarians in the national collectivity, to the ‘pathologies’ of the ‘underclass’ said to inhabit it and to the punitive measures that must urgently be deployed to minimize their abusive resort to public resources and to push them on to the peripheral segments of a fast-expanding low-wage labour market (e.g., Ricketts and Sawhill 1988; Mead 1989).³

But this drift in the symbolic representation and political treatment of the ghetto cannot efface the fact that the ominous forewarning of the 1968 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission 1968, 1988: 396, 389), charged with scrutinizing the causes and implications of the riots of 1964–1968, has become reality: ‘The country [has moved] toward two societies, separate and unequal’ as a consequence of ‘the accelerating segregation of low-income, disadvantaged Negroes within the ghettos of the largest American cities.’ While the black middle class experienced spectacular growth and real advances – albeit fragile ones, since they rest largely on governmental efforts and (secondarily) on increased legal pressure upon corporate employers (Collins 1983; Landry 1987; Son et al. 1989), the poverty of black urbanites has grown more intense, more tenacious and more concentrated than it was in the 1960s (Wilson 1996). And the economic, social and cultural distance between the people locked in the vestiges of the historic ghetto and the rest of society has reached an amplitude unprecedented in recent American history as well as unknown in other advanced societies.

Farewell to the Eternal Ghetto

Is this to say, borrowing the words of historian Gilbert Osofsky (1968: 244), that there is an ‘unending and tragic sameness about black life in the metropolis’, that of the ‘enduring ghetto’, which perpetuates itself unchanged across the decades, unaffected by societal trends and political forces as momentous as the onset of a postindustrial economy, the enactment of broad civil rights legislation and affirmative action programmes, and the reorganization of metropolitan space under the twin pressures of suburban deconcentration and central-city gentrification? Quite the contrary. For beyond the persistence of economic subordination and racial entrapment, the ghetto of the 1980s and 1990s is quite different from its predecessor of the mid-twentieth century. The communal ghetto of the immediate postwar era, compact, sharply bounded and comprising the full complement of black classes bound together by a unified collective consciousness, a near-complete social division of labour, and broad-based agencies of mobilization and representation, has been superseded by what we may call the hyperghetto of the fin de siècle (Wacquant 1989), whose spatial configuration, institutional and demographic makeup, structural position and function in urban society are quite novel. Furthermore, the separation of the ghetto from American society is only apparent: it pertains to the level of the ‘life-world’ and not the ‘system’, to use a conceptual distinction elaborated by Habermas ([1981] 1984). It refers to the concrete experiences and relationships of its occupants, not to the underlying ties that firmly anchor them in the metropolitan ensemble – albeit in exclusionary fashion. Indeed, I shall argue in this and the next two chapters that there exist deep-seated causal and functional linkages between the transformation of the ghetto and structural changes that have redrawn the visage of the US economy, social space and field of power in reaction to the shock of the progressive movements of the 1960s.

Instead of repeating or extending previous analyses of racial domination in the Fordist–Keynesian era as if it were some timeless institutional contraption, we must historicize the state and function of the ghetto in the US metropolis and reach beyond its physical perimeter to elucidate its fate after the climax of the Civil Rights movement. Dissecting the economic and political forces that have combined to turn them into veritable domestic ‘Bantustans’ reveals that ghettos are not autonomous sociospatial constellations that contain within themselves the principle of their evolution. It demonstrates likewise that the parlous state of America’s Black Belt at century’s end is not the simple mechanical result of deindustrialization, demographic shifts or of a skills or spatial ‘mismatch’ between the supply and demand for labour governed by ecological processes, and still less the spawn of the coming of a ‘new underclass’, in statu nascendi or already ‘crystallized’ into a permanent fixture of the American urban landscape (Loewenstein 1985; Nathan 1987; Marks 1991), whether defined by its deviant behaviours, income level, cultural proclivities or social isolation. Rather, it is the product of a novel political articulation of racial cleavage, class inequality and urban space in both dominant discourse and objective reality.

The ghetto as instrument of exclusionary closure (as defined by Max Weber [[1918–20] 1968] ) is still with us, but it is a different type of ghetto: its internal makeup has changed along with its environment and with the institutional processes that simultaneously chain it to the rest of American society and ensure its dependent and marginal location within it. To understand these differences, what the ghetto is and means to both insiders and outsiders at century’s close, one must sweep aside the scholarly tale of the ‘underclass’ that has crowded the stage of the resurging debate on the intersection of race and poverty in the city and reconstruct instead the linked relations between the transformation of everyday life and social relations inside the racialized urban core, on the one hand, and the restructuring of the system of forces, economic, social and political, that account for the particular configuration of caste and class of which the hyperghetto is the materialization. Accordingly, this chapter gives pride of place to the external factors that have reshaped the material and symbolic territory within which ghetto residents (re)define themselves, and it addresses the internal production of its specific social order and consciousness only indirectly. This emphasis is not born of the belief that structural determination constitutes the alpha and omega of group formation and trajectory, far from it. It rests, rather, on two premisses, the one theoretical and the other empirical.

The first premiss is that elucidation of the objective conditions under which a collectivity comes to be constructed and identity asserted in the metropolitan core constitutes a socio-logical prerequisite to the analysis of the Lebenswelt of the ghetto and the forms of practice and signification embedded in it. It is in this objective space of material and symbolic positions and resources that are rooted the strategies deployed by ghetto residents to figure out who they are and who they can be. While it is true that such an analysis remains unfinished absent the complement of an ‘indigenous perspective’ (advocated by Aldon Morris (1984) ) throwing light on the complexities of signification and action from below (or, to be more precise, from within), it remains that the populist celebration of ‘the value of blackness’ and the richness of ‘oppositional black culture’ (hooks 1992: 17) offers neither a substitute nor a viable launching pad for a rigorous assessment of the state and fate of the ghetto after the close of the Fordist–Keynesian era.

The second premiss of this chapter is that the reality of the ghetto as a physical, social and symbolic place in American society is, whether one likes it or not, being shaped – indeed imposed – from the outside, as its residents are increasingly stripped of the means to produce their own collective and individual identities. A brief contrast between the opposed provenance, uses and semantic charge of the vocabularies of ‘soul’ and ‘underclass’ is instructive in this respect. The notion of soul, which gained wide appeal during the ghetto uprisings of the 1960s, was a ‘folk conception of the lower-class urban Negro’s own “national character” ’ (Hannerz 1968: 454). Produced from within for in-group consumption, it served as a symbol of solidarity and a badge of personal and group pride. By contrast, ‘underclass’ status is assigned wholly from the outside (and from above); it is forced upon its putative ‘members’ by specialists in symbolic production – journalists, politicians, academics and government experts – for purposes of control and disciplining (in Foucault’s sense of the term, entailing both subjection and subjectivation) and without the slightest concern for the self-understandings of those who are arbitrarily lumped into this analytical fiction. Whereas the folk concept of soul, as part of an ‘internal ghetto dialogue’ toward an indigenous reassessment of black identity (Keil 1966), was appraisive, the idiom of underclass is derogatory, a negative label that nobody claims or invokes except to pin it on to others. That even ‘insurgent’ black intellectuals such as Cornel West (1994) should embrace the idiom of underclass is revealing of the degree to which the ghetto has become an alien object, at once strange and estranged, on the social and symbolic landscape of the United States.

Three Preliminary Caveats

Three caveats are in order before we draw a portrait of social conditions and everyday life in the black ghetto of Chicago at century’s end. First, one must stress that the ghetto is not simply a topographic entity or an aggregation of poor families and individuals but an institutional form, that is, a distinctive, spatially based, concatenation of mechanisms of ethnoracial closure and control. Briefly put, a ghetto can be characterized ideal-typically as a bounded, ethnically uniform sociospatial formation born of the forcible relegation of a negatively typed population – such as Jews in the principalities of Renaissance Europe and African Americans in the United States during the age of Fordist consolidation – to a reserved territory within which this population develops an array of specific institutions operating both as a functional substitute for, and as a protective buffer against, the dominant institutions of the encompassing society (Wacquant 1991). The fact that most ghettos have historically been places of widespread and sometimes acute material misery does not mean that a ghetto is necessarily poor – certainly, the ‘Bronzeville’ of the 1940s (as residents of Chicago’s ghetto called it then) was more prosperous than the vast majority of Southern black communities – or that it has to be uniformly deprived.⁴ This implies that the ghetto is not a social monolith. Notwithstanding their extreme dilapidation, many inner-city neighbourhoods still contain a modicum of occupational and familial variety. Neither is the ghetto entirely barren: amidst its desolate landscape, scattered islets of relative economic and social stability persist, which offer fragile but crucial launching pads for the strategies of coping and escape of its residents; and new forms of sociability continually develop in the cracks of the crumbling system.

Second, one must resist the tendency to treat the ghetto as an alien space, to see in it only what deviates from the common norm, in short to exoticize it, as proponents of the scholarly myth of the ‘underclass’ have been wont to do in their grisly tales of ‘antisocial’ behaviour that resonate so well with journalistic reports (from which they are often drawn in the first place) and with ordinary class and ethnoracial prejudice against poor blacks. A rudimentary sociology of sociology would show that most descriptions of the ‘underclass’ reveal more about the relation of the analyst to the motley populations it designates, and about his or her racial and class preconceptions, fears and fantasies, than they do about their putative object; and that representations of ‘underclass areas’ bear the distinctive mark of the ostensibly ‘neutral’ (that is, dominant) gaze set upon them from a distance by analysts who, all too often, have never set foot in them.⁵ Contrary to appearances reinforced by the biased perception of the media and certain sociology inspired by them, ghetto-dwellers are not a distinctive breed of men and women in need of a special denomination; they are ordinary people trying to make a life and to improve their lot as best they can under the unusually oppressive and depressed circumstances thrust upon them. And while their cultural codes and patterns of conduct may, from the standpoint of a hurried outside commentator, appear peculiar, quixotic or even ‘aberrant’ (an adjective so often reiterated in discourses on the post-Fordist ghetto that it has become virtually pleonasmatic with it), upon close and methodical observation, they turn out to obey a social rationality that takes due stock of past experiences and is well suited to the constraints and facilitations of their proximate milieu.⁶

The third caveat stresses, against the core assumption of American poverty research, that the contemporary ghetto does not suffer from ‘social disorganization’ – another moralizing concept that would deserve to be retired from social science, considering the rampant abuse to which it has been put (Wacquant 1997a). Rather, it is organized differently in response to the relentless press of economic necessity, generalized social insecurity, abiding racial hostility or indifference, and political denigration. We shall see in the first part of this book that the hyperghetto comprises a particular type of social order, premissed upon the rigid racial segmentation of space, ‘organized around an intense competition for, and conflict over, the scarce resources’ that suffuse an environment replete with ‘social predators’ (Sánchez-Jankowski 1991: 22, 183–92), and constituted as inferior and inferiorizing by the ordinary functioning of the political and bureaucratic fields. Relatedly, those who dwell in it are not part of a separate group closed in on itself, as advocates of the ‘underclass’ thesis would have us believe (in spite of the absence of data showing a change in patterns of recruitment and mobility at the bottom of the class structure). They belong, rather, to unski...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Ghetto, Banlieue, Favela, et caetera
• Prologue: An Old Problem in a New World?
• Part I: From Communal Ghetto to Hyperghetto
• Part II: Black Belt, Red Belt
• Part III: Looking Ahead: Urban Marginality in the Twenty-First Century
• Postscript: Theory, History and Politics in Urban Analysis
• Acknowledgements and Sources
• References
• Index