We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

Gentrification is key to understanding what happened to our cities at the turn of the millennium. But it is only half of the story. It is only the visible side of the larger problem: resegregation.

Institutional neglect of racism and injustice is the exercise of power, the kind of power that refuses to notice and refuses to speak.

What does it mean to be in-between? It means one can afford to sit on the fence, decide not to take a stand, to always reserve the privilege - while the battle rages all around - to disengage.

Lives were complicated. The smallest things could trip you up. Those who could least afford it paid the most. Things could escalate in a heartbeat. The biggest mystery was how to turn it down without bowing down. And a life, in all its singularity and strangeness, was always worth the lifting, the telling, and the protecting, and never only for its fragility.

Segregation is still linked to racial disparities of every kind. Where you live plays a significant role in the quality of food and the quality of education available to you, your ability to get a job, buy a home, and build wealth, the kind of health care you receive and how long you live, and whether you will have anything to pass on to the next generation.

But racism and inequality would never end if Blacks focused on easing white anxiety.

People of color are allowed, even required to perform, and, especially these days on issues of race, to edify as well. 'Here you are, now entertain us'. But are we allowed to lead?

For Trump diehards in a time of danger and disjunction, the media's job was not to challenge, but to affirm. So when demonstrators poured not the streets to protest police killings of Blacks, the media was supposed to confirm for them that those chaos makers were actually supporting the killing of cops, that somehow the Movement for Black Lives was a Black version of the Ku Klux Klan. And some pundits - Hannity, the same O'Reilly who confronted Trump - dutifully filled this role. In their telling, 'Black Lives Matter' was not a call to end state violence against Blacks-and in that way, to end state violence against all-it was evidence of hatred against whites, a premonition of racial apocalypse.

Culture, like food, is necessary to sustain us. It molds us and shapes our relations to each other. An inequitable culture is one in which people do not have the same power to create, access, or circulate their practices, works, ideas and stories. It is one in which people cannot represent themselves equally. To say that American culture in inequitable is to say that it moves us away from seeing each other in our full humanity. It is to say that the culture does not paint a more just society.

The horizon toward which we move always recedes before us. The revolution is never complete. What we see now as solid and eternal may be disintegrating inward from our blind spots. All that signifies progress may in time be turned against us. But redemption is out there for us if we are always in the process of finding love and grace.

Finding grace is an individual process that changes the social. It is about seeing each other in the world and seeing one's own place in the world anew. In that way grace can counter the lies, refusals, and aggressions that drive us toward segregation. We live in serious times, in which we need to be roused to the inequity in our neighborhoods, our schools, our metro areas, our justice system, our culture. Ending resegregation is about understanding the ways we allow ourselves to stop seeing the humanity of others. It is about learning again to look, and never stopping.

Nations are made of papers. Papers make the border. Papers also turn the migrant into the immigrant. The word 'immigrant' is a formal legal term. It centers not the person, but the nation in which the person hopes to become a citizen. 'Migration' centers bodies. 'Immigration' centers bodies of law. The immigrant is therefore always troubled by the question of status: 'legal' or 'illegal.' When the immigrant is between the migrant and the citizen, their freedom - and others' freedom, in turn - depends upon the answer. How can a human being be illegal? Laws come from people. That is to say, they come from citizens. And yet what does it mean to be a citizen?

Migration is always a choice to live. The opposite of migration is not citizenship. It is containment, the condition of being unfree shared with all who are considered less than citizens. The migrant reminds the citizen of the rights that they should be guaranteed.

The word 'citizen' confers rights, rights that are invisible, that really appear only when they are denied... You live in a racial state that formally denies difference, but in practice avows it, through the barrel of a gun or the conferring of papers.

Later, many would debate whether [Michael Brown Jr.] actually had his hands up when he was shot. Some pundits asking if the movement had been built on a lie. But that debate missed the point: the image resonated--and would continue to grow in the public imagination--because it captured a bigger truth, a deeper feeling. 'Hands Up' was about the ways we saw race in post-civil rights America, and perhaps especially about what we refused to see--the blindness of a 'post-racial' era. If, as intellectual Ruth Gilmore had written, racism was about the ways in which Blacks, whites, and others differently experienced 'vulnerability to premature death,' 'Hands Up' was an argument for the right to live.

Black Lives Matter' articulated an impatience with the politics of respectability. Proponents of respectability politics, Randall Kennedy wrote, 'advocate taking care in presenting oneself publicly and desire strongly to avoid saying or doing anything that will reflect badly on Blacks, reinforce negative racial stereotypes, or needlessly alienate potential allies.' Such politics were resurgent during the Obama era. The president himself was both a source and symbol of respectability politics.

By itself, gentrification can't explain the new geography of race that has emerged since the turn of the millennium... Gentrification is key to understanding what happened to our cities at the turn of the millennium. But it is only half of the story. It is only the visible side of the larger problem: resegregation.

Youth movements are always fueled by a combustible mix of pain, defiance, imagination, inexperience, commitment, and risk. The most successful of them turn what look to elders like insurmountable liabilities into virtues. The most moral of them open up new ways to see how we can live better together.

And so diversity remains a premonition of racial apocalypse; a photo op and dash; a commodity conveying value; a marker of moral credibility, even fitness in the Darwinian sense; a term of corporate management; an offering of racial innocence and absolution; a refusal of protection to historically negated communities of color; a performance for entertainment or edification or exploitation; another boring lesson in tolerance and civility; a mark of Otherness.

Diversity allows whites to remove themselves while requiring the Other to continue performing for them.

Resegregation matters because it pulls communities and regions downward, and because it impacts us not just right now, but the life chances of those not yet born.

Millions wanted to see shows written, directed, and acted by people of colour telling stories about themselves. Duh.

A turn in fortune should move us toward empathy and solidarity....But we live in a time when merchants of division draw us away from mutuality and toward the undoing of democracy itself.

... He turned to face the police now. 'You are on the wrong side of history, and we have already won,' he said to them. 'We are peacefully gathered here in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Gandhi .. This multiracial gathering is possible because of nonviolence. And that is the heartbeat of democracy that you here.' 'And so whoever your captain is, stand down. Go home,' he said. 'We'll be alright.' The crowd laughed again. All along the police lie, stiffened backs seemed to wilt. Then the cops turned to the left in file, turned again, and marched silently away down Grand Street.

The truth would be difficult to speak, but it would be necessary to begin to right the wrongs done to Blacks and Coloureds. Reconciliation would not be a gift, but an 'exchange for truth.' In other words, peace and justice are inseparable from each other.

Resegregation grows not from white ignorance, but from white refusal and denial. And so half a century after the perk of the civil rights movement, the nation has moved again into crisis.

Racism is not merely about individual chauvinism, prejudice, or bigotry. Ruth Glimore reminds us that it is about the ways different groups are 'vulnerable to premature death,' whether at the hands of the state or structures that kill.