Postmodern Suburban Spaces

Philosophy, Ethics, and Community in Post-War American Fiction

Joseph George

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783319410067
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book reevaluates fiction devoted to the postwar American suburb, examining the way these works imagine suburbia as a communal structure designed to advance a particular American identity. Postmodern Suburban Spaces surveys works by both canonical chroniclers of the middle class experience, such as Richard Yates and John Cheever, and those who reflect suburbia's demographic reality, including Gloria Naylor and Chang-rae Lee, to uncover a surprising reconfiguration of the suburban experience. Tracing major forms of suburban associations – racial divisions, property lines, the family, and ethnic fealty – these works depict a different mode of interaction than the stereotypical white picket fences. Joseph George draws from philosophers such as Emmanuel Levinas and Roberto Esposito to argue that these fictions assert a critical hospitality that frustrates the limited forms of association on which suburbia is based. This fiction, in turn, posits an ethical form of community that comes about when people share space together.

© The Author(s) 2016

Joseph GeorgePostmodern Suburban Spaces10.1007/978-3-319-41006-7_2

Begin Abstract

Chapter 1: Against Fence Thinking: Welcoming the Racial Enemy

Joseph George¹

(1)

University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA

End Abstract

Early in Neil LeBute’s 2008 thriller Lakeview Terrace, Los Angeles police officer Abel Turner takes new neighbor Chris Matson on a tour of their cul-de-sac. Abel pretends to do so as a form of friendly welcome, but he actually plans to show Chris that “not everybody up here is someone you want to live next to,” a point he underscores by suggesting that some of his fellow homeowners are wife-beaters or drug dealers. Realizing that he, by virtue of his mixed-race marriage, is included among the undesirables, Chris confronts Abel by saying, “We’re here, okay? And we’re counting on being here in a few years.” In response, Abel admits a degree of tolerance in the larger world while still insisting upon some privacy and sovereignty at home. “I’ve got nothing against you, or her. LAPD, I work with all kinds…I lay my life down for those guys,” Abel explains, before clarifying: “But that’s where I work; this is where I live.” The remainder of the film consists of Abel using both his acceptance as a respected member of the community and his power as a police officer to terrorize Chris, employing tactics drawn from real-world examples of what Jeannine Bell calls “anti-integrationist violence,” legal and extra-legal actions designed to be “strong statements about what residential communities should look like and who the perpetrator wants to see as part of his private, neighborhood life” (6). The twist, however, comes from the racial designations: Abel, played by Samuel L. Jackson, is black and Chris, played by Patrick Wilson, is white. The role reversal, intended to heighten the terror for white members of the audience and to lambaste weak, “everybody just get along”–style American liberal politics, also underscores the ridiculousness of the movie’s overall over-the-top tenor. ¹ But despite its absurdity, Lakeview Terrace effectively illustrates the tension between the rhetoric and the history of suburban racial integration. Racial inequality has long been a defining characteristic of the imagined postwar suburb, drawing from real-world phenomena such as covenants that restricted the sale of property to certain ethnicities, the proliferation of “white flight” in the 1960s and 1970s, and the high-profile shootings in this second decade of the 2000s. These incidents continue despite legal and social shifts that seem to mitigate such practices, such as the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer decision that outlawed racial covenants and a growing suburban immigrant population. This imaginary plays out, argue observers, in the way homeowners have sublimated the criteria for exclusion into a more communal discourse, one that restricts those deemed detrimental to the community’s way of life, who most often happen to be persons of color.

Given its central place in the popular perception, racial violence has unsurprisingly figured heavily in suburban fiction, but few have done so as powerfully as Gloria Naylor in her 1985 novel, Linden Hills. Early in the story, the two young African American men who serve as poet guides through Naylor’s hellish neighborhood, “White” Willie Mason and Lester “Baby Shit” Tilson, stop outside a school, where the latter launches a lament regarding the fences he finds surrounding him. These types of barriers, he claims,

get you used to the idea that what they have in there is different, special. Something to be separated from the rest of the world. They get you thinking fences, man, don’t you see it? Then when they’ve fenced you in from six years old till you’re twenty-six, they can let you out because you’re ready to believe that what they’ve given you up here, their version of life, is special. And you fence your own self in after that, protecting it from everybody else out there. (45)

Although the scene takes place outside a schoolyard, Lester’s speech serves as a useful tool for engaging with fictional portrayals of racial exclusion. In this chapter, I will argue that the “fence thinking” Lester so eloquently deplores represents another variation of the contractual thought that dominates suburbia; in the same way that contracts assert standard of similarity, racist exclusions assert that non-whites are intrinsically and unchangeably dissimilar. Using the concept of the political as articulated by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, which understands community to be formed on the basis of a friend/enemy distinction, I will demonstrate that the emphasis on conformity and exclusion on which suburbia is based invites the racial violence that has marked its history. The three novels I examine here will refute this ideology by picturing moments of critical hospitality that undermine the subject positions that sustain fence thinking. Richard Ford’s Independence Day deals with gentrification from the Caucasian perspective, with a narrator who tries to extend welcome to non-whites while unsuccessfully maintaining his normative position. Similarly, the Asian narrator of Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life ingratiates himself to his white neighbors by refusing responsibilities to his family and loved ones, who eventually force him to rethink his behavior. Finally, Linden Hills features characters who replace fences with intersubjective mirrors, imagining a community that understands other people, even undesirable people, are necessary to create an identity.

Defending Suburban Ways of Life

As discussed in the preceding chapter, proponents of explicit neighborhood contracts consider them practical applications of classical social contract theory. The members of the community—in this case the homeowners—determine its character and devise a legal framework to protect it. They justify this arrangement by appealing to notions of freedom and equality, of individual agency to choose one’s associations; however, a cursory glance at the application of this ideal in suburban America reveals a history of exclusion and often outright violence directed at non-WASPs, primarily African Americans. The third act of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun powerfully illustrates the effects of this phenomenon, in which a racist HOA prevents the African American Younger family from purchasing a house in an all-white Chicago suburb. The HOA representative makes his appeal on the grounds of familiarity and identity, stating that “a man, right or wrong, has the right to want to have the neighborhood he lives in a certain kind of way. And at the moment the overwhelming majority of our people out there feel that people get along better, take more of a common interest in the life of the community, when they share a common background” (III). Tellingly, Lindner only mentions race in passing, directing most of his appeal to notions of individuality and homeowner’s rights. According to this logic, the expulsion of the Youngers is only an accident of space, a moment of localized self-rule divorced from larger social and racial issues.

Several observers have traced the history of suburban racial exclusion to these liberal ideologies. David M.P. Freund argues that the racial covenants of the pre-war period and the violence and white flight of the postwar decades are rooted in nineteenth-century racial science, which “figured prominently in the early planning movement because urban congestion and unregulated development were often associated with migrant blacks, immigrant Asians, and immigrant Europeans, the populations whose cheap labor (and often squalid living conditions) made the era’s rapid industrial and commercial growth possible” (55). As these theories fell out of favor, a new myth based on white achievement and government aid to African Americans during the Civil Rights movement took its place, which understood white success as the inevitable result of its people’s predilection to homeownership, and the need for government intercession as evidence of non-whites’ inherent inability to care for property. With these myths in place, whites “justified racial exclusion by invoking what they viewed as nonracial variables: protecting the housing market, their rights as property owners and, linked to both, their rights as citizens”; so when they refused hospitality to potential neighbors of color, they did so on the grounds of something other than race (8–9). “White suburbanites (and urbanites) still discriminated against blacks after World War II because they were black,” Freund writes, “However, whites increasingly believed that they were discriminating not because black people were inherently different but rather because black people—for whatever cultural or market-driven reason—posed a threat to communities of white property owners” (12–13). This history results in what Brooks and Rose have called “ghost doctrines,” in which the connotations of exclusion still inform property law, remapped into language of communal cohesion. Ironically, racial covenants were more common in “white neighborhoods where the neighbors were reasonably well off but did not necessarily have particularly strong internal norms among themselves,” and less necessary in those with a cohesive identity (8–9). They stem from an ideology that allows “owners to tailor their control over neighboring uses, and because these restrictions are ostensibly private and consensual, they can do so in considerably greater detail than would be possible through publicly imposed constraints like zoning. Even more than public regulations, residential restrictive covenants allow home buyers to pick and choose among packages of limitations, knowing that the limitations will stick with the properties even when some of the neighbors sell” (48). As this emphasis on tailoring demonstrates, the language of individualism that “haunts” these ghost doctrines invites exclusion for those who do not belong. As Freund succinctly puts it, “Suburban officials and homeowners learned to see political autonomy and land-use control as practically synonymous” (219).

The connections between “political autonomy” and “land-use control” that allow communities to choose their own character have remained a stumbling block for those who have tried to forcibly integrate suburbia. The most prominent example is George Romney, the former Michigan governor and director of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) during Richard Nixon’s first term. Despite resistance from both suburbanites and an administration preparing to orchestrate a re-election campaign built on support from conservative homeowning whites, Romney—who had witnessed firsthand the disarray caused by exclusion in Detroit suburbs—made de-segregation a primary departmental goal. Declaring that “[w]e’ve got to put an end to the idea of moving to suburban areas and living only among people of the same economic and social class,” Romney executed “Operation Breakthrough” in 1968, a HUD mandate to help African Americans purchase houses in middle-class neighborhoods (qtd. in Lamb 63). Operation Breakthrough took a punishment/reward approach to integration, allowing “localities [that] waive restrictive requirements in their building codes and zoning ordinances” to receive “low-income housing” and to be given “highest priority when applying for other forms of HUD assistance”; however, if the city refused this carrot, “Romney threatened to rely on the stick as well, cutting or even revoking HUD assistance to communities refusing to cooperate” (Lamb 64). The policy angered homeowners and their representatives, as indicated by Georgia congressman Fletcher Thompson’s warning that HUD “must end” initiatives like Operation Breakthrough or “suburbanites would make every effort to over-turn the administration, which they believed was denying them their quality of life and devastating their property values” (Lamb 67). And as Fletcher predicted, suburbanites from Macon, Georgia to Warren, Michigan launched sometimes violent protests to express their dissatisfaction. The latter, within Romney’s own home state, provided a concise example of the backlash he received as Warren residents resented HUD’s 1970 decision to suspend the funds on which the working-class town relied. Although Romney did his best to frame the HUD’s actions as a defense of citizens already in Warren—“Look, we’re not going to bring any people here…We’re not going to ask you to provide housing for anyone other than those who want to live in Warren”—mayor Ted Bates responded with language that characterized the Department as a bunch of meddlers who want to use Warren “as a guinea pig for integration experiments” (qtd. Bonastia in 106–107). The mayor’s rhetoric underscores the assumption driving the racial exclusion: he is not barring African Americans, but rather protecting the rights of his community. If the community deems African Americans as too other to join, so be it.

Despite this incident and the many others like it, recent data seems to endorse Romney’s vision. The economic prosperity of the mid-90s has created what Brookings analyst Audrey Singer calls “twenty-first-century gateways,” in which the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina and Phoenix, Arizona replace the ethnic ghettos of New York and Detroit. On a more disparaging note, Brookings researchers also find that the economic downturn impacting suburbia has “cut across the blue and red political divide,” making suburbs into the “quintessential political battlegrounds” (Berube “Shifting”). And yet, high-profile acts of violence remind us of the persistence of “ghost doctrines” and the ideologies on which they are based. In February of 2012, neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman trailed, wrestled with, and eventually fatally shot unarmed African American teenager Trayvon Martin, who was walking back to his home in a Florida gated community. In November of the following year, African American motorist Renisha McBride was shot and killed by Theodore Wafer after she knocked on the door of his suburban Detroit home in the middle of the night, looking for help for her disabled vehicle. Both of these cases differ from traditional stories about suburban violence in important ways—Zimmerman identifies himself as Latino, and Wafer’s possible senility may have contributed to his actions—but the assumptions are familiar. The African American victims are labeled threats simply because of their race and their presence; in both cases, the shooter feared for his life because an other had entered a space in which they were not allowed. In that way, these incidents correlate with traditional anti-integrationist violence, which share a primary assumption that “offenders do not want minorities in their neighborhoods because they feel that the very presence of minorities will lead to the ruin of the offender’s white neighborhood in a variety of ways” (Bell 107).

To better address this connection, particularly in light of the violent need for security and the emphasis on “ways of life” discussed here, I turn to the political theology of Nazi Jurist Carl Schmitt. It may seem irrelevant, if not outright inflammatory, to equate the behavior of American suburbanites to Nazi ideology, but Schmitt’s vision of community based on exclusion, to say nothing of his emphasis on the possibility of war, provides terminology to analyze the “color-blind” racial violence enacted by some suburbanites, particularly as imagined by authors of suburban fiction. ² According to Schmitt, the legal structure founded in the state “presupposes the concept of the political”—that is, the communal interactions that are codified in law—and all of these “political actions and motives can be reduced” to the division “between the friend and enemy” (19, 26). Simply put, the friend and enemy are understood according to their relationship to a community’s perceived way of life. Although individual members enforce the nomenclature by identifying friends and enemies they encounter—“Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence”—Schmitt stresses that these designations are not founded on personal biases; “the morally evil, aesthetically ugly or economically damaging need not necessarily be the enemy; the morally good, aesthetically beautiful, and economically profitable need not necessarily become the friend in the specifically political sense of the word”; so while it may be “advantageous to engage with him in business transactions…he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible” (27). This emphasis on the metaphysical aspects of the enemy, as a figure who—despite the decisions or aspects of any one individual (save the sovereign) represents all that is antithetical to a group—gives his thought a universality that helps us think about communities in the USA.

For example, the language of the first Federal Housing Administration (FHA) zoning handbook echoes Schmitt’s emphasis on the communal enemy. These guidelines, writes Kenneth T. Jackson, specially highlight the similarity according to communal aspects by advocating “suitable restrictive covenants” used to avoid “inharmonious racial or nationality groups” in neighborhoods (208–209). According to David Fruend, the FHA’s guidelines allow the community to decide for itself who or what is considered inharmonious: “In other words, if a city council or zoning board declared a particular land use to be a threat to the community’s safety and welfare, and if it created restrictions that outlawed or controlled that use, the courts were instructed to accept the community’s judgment. Once local elites identified a particular land use to be inharmonious, the law said that it was so” (87). It is this idea that Abraham Levitt, founder of the postwar suburb Levittown, invokes when he defends racial contracts; he identifies himself as “a Jew” with “no room in my mind or heart for racial prejudice,” but also insists that “if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 or 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community…This is their attitude, not ours” (Kushner 106). Levitt’s rationale here embodies both the non-racial discrimination identified by Fruend and the disavowals attempted by Mr. Lindner in A Raisin in the Sun, who expressed personal admiration for the Youngers while insisting that a community could decide who it admits or rejects. This line of thought recalls Schmitt’s insistence that “the enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to a whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship,” and as such, the enemy “in the political sense need not be hated personally” (28–29). According to this logic, the feelings Linder or Levitt or any other suburbanite might have about would-be African American neighbors is irrelevant, because they are fundamentally enemies and would be better off among their own friends.

Schmitt’s theories also help explain the acts of violence that accompany suburban exclusion. Schmitt repeatedly insists upon the practical reality of his political concept, arguing that the friend/enemy designations have meaning “precisely because they refer to the real possibility of physical killing” and “remain a real possibility for as long as the concept of the enemy remains valid” (33). It is important to recall here that the first Levittown subdivision, which sparked the suburban boom of the last 70 years, was a product of war: it was facilitated by industrial techniques perfected in World War II, first inhabited by vets returning from the front, and promoted by the US government as an alternative to Soviet-style communism. Furthermore, the anti-integrationist violence described by Bell is justified by concerns about security, as indicated by the defenses launched in the Martin and McBride shootings: they were real enemies who were viewed as actual threats, and action must be taken. Rhetoric surrounding suburbia focuses on the reality of the enemy, of the barbarian in the city, and the “inevitability” of killing—in the proliferation of private firearm ownership to defend one’s family, in the erection of gates and employment of private security firms, in the covenants that determine who may live within a neighborhood—and continues to operate according to the friend/enemy distinction.

Finally, Schmitt’s intellectual history as a social contract theorist is particularly helpful when examining the disruption of contractualism illustrated in suburban fictions about racial plurality. Once again, these suburban contracts—explicit or implicit “ghost doctrines”—serve to make individuals legible as friends or enemies to their neighbors. The person who shares a group’s way of life will demonstrate him or herself to be a friend, not only in performing the role of a “good neighbor”—for example, mowing the lawn, owning the proper mod cons, adhering to social standards—but also in being understood as capable of being a good neighbor. If they fail to uphold these terms or if, as Fruend has found, they are predetermined to be incapable of doing so, then they are expelled. But suburban fiction rarely portrays relationships in such clear and static terms, and rejects the friend/enemy distinctions that allow for suburban racial exclusion by telling about people who find their assumptions called into question and are forced to redefine themselves in relation to the other they did not want.

This is particularly true of the three novels examined in this chapter. Although they are all written well after the Civil Rights peri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Introduction: Nowhere to Now Here
• Chapter 1: Against Fence Thinking: Welcoming the Racial Enemy
• Chapter 2: My Home Is Your Home: Property, Propriety, and Neighbors
• Chapter 3: Domesticated Strangers: Fissures Within the Nuclear Family
• Chapter 4: Assimilation and Appropriation: Contest and Collaboration in Global Suburbia
• Conclusion: Changing the Suburban Myth
• Backmatter