What's Wrong with the Poor?: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty

Chapter Five: Environmental Psychology and the Race Riots

142 Chapter Five Environmental Psychology and the Race Riots On a spring night in 1964, as Catherine Genovese was returning to her NewYorkapartmentfromherworkasanightmanagerat abar, shewasraped and murdered. Initial reports (later found to be unsubstantiated) indicated that as many as thirty-eight of her neighbors witnessed the attack or heard her screams, and none had called the police or offered their help.1 The crime itself was gruesome, but what mainly aroused public debate at the time was the fact that it had taken place in the victim’s home neighborhood and that none of her neighbors had come to her aid. This attack occurred at a time when the urban environment was seen to be dangerous and threatening. Following Genovese’s death, Stanley Milgram and other mental health experts tried to explain how such an attack could have happened. In interviews and articles, these experts analyzed the psyche of inner-city residents, making sense of their perceived detachment and lack of empathy.2 These attempts to gain psychological insight into Genovese’s neighbors’ inaction typified current trends in American mental health sciences. The 1960s saw a surge of interest in the environment’s role in human development and psychology, and scientists and politicians alike exalted the relations between a healthy environment and a healthy psyche.3 Environmental psychology received its impetus from sensory deprivation experiments of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Theories of deprivation provided the intellectual framework for basic tenets of environmental psychology . In the wake of urban riots and their investigation by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (commonly known as the Kerner Commission after its chair, Illinois governor Otto Kerner), deprivation theory enabled social scientists and psychologists to promote a simultaneously medicalized and highly political understanding of urban violence. Theresurgenceofenvironmentalistapproachestohumandevelopmentin the 1960s led many researchers to attempt to examine, isolate, and quantify Environmental Psychology and the Race Riots 143 thecomponentsoftheenvironmentthatweredeemedmostcrucialtohuman development and individual psychology. This interest in the environment also reflected a growing concern about the detrimental effects of living in innercities.AsaffluentwhiteAmericansgraduallymovedtothesuburbsafter World War II, inner-city neighborhoods became home to African Americans . In turn, white families abandoned urban neighborhoods in fear of a decrease in property values and quality of life. By the late 1950s, this process, later known as “white flight,” had amplified even further, as white Americans fled cities with a growing sense of urgency. The inner city remained home to impoverished minorities, as white Americans ensconced themselves in segregated suburbs.4 In the late 1940s and 1950s, the inner-city “slums” that had hastily been left behind served as an inspiration for a film noir genre that provided a vivid and racialized portrayal of urban decadence, including black nightclubs, Turkish baths, and decrepit Chinatowns.5 As cultural historian Eric Avila has shown, these films, with titles such asDark City, City of Fear, The Naked City, andCry of the City,reflectedfearsofbothurbanviolenceandethnicOtherness.These fantasiesservedasthebackdropforthegrowingpublicandacademicinterest intheevilsofurbanization.Manywhiteobserversbelievedthatovercrowded and dilapidated houses in run-down neighborhoods provided evidence of individual deficiency rather than being the result of poverty and inequality . These decaying urban neighborhoods populated nearly exclusively by low-income African Americans further confirmed many white Americans’ deep-seated beliefs of their own racial superiority.6The race riots of the 1960s further consolidated the view of inner cities as inherently violent and menacing . These images of violent black inner cities hastened the rise of urban psychology. By 1968, this field of inquiry was so well established that parents and children could play the “cities game,” a board game similar to Monopoly developed by Psychology Today’s editor, David Popoff. Players could take on the role of the government, “agitators,” businessmen, or “slum dwellers.”7 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, scientists and concerned citizens warned the public of modern life’s cost to the natural environment. Pollution, overpopulation , and the indiscriminate use of pesticides became highly contested topics. In 1962, environmentalist and marine biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, in which she warned of the devastating effects of pesticides. The book was pivotal in bringing environmental concerns to the center of public debate.8 Environmental studies referred both to the effects of modernization on the natural environment and to how the modern, urban Environmental Psychology and the Race Riots 144 environment affected individuals. The detrimental effects of urban living on individual psychology became the new front for environmentally minded and politically savvy behavioral scientists. The Group for the Advancement ofPsychiatry(GAP)organizedasymposiumdedicatedtothetopicofmental...