A Place We Call Home: Gender, Race, and Justice in Syracuse

4. Exploring Black Mothers’ Spatiality through Community Mapping

48 4 ExploringBlackMothers’Spatiality throughCommunityMapping A 1998 National Geographic study revealed that people in the United States have a poor grasp of global geography, particularly young Americans (RoperASW 2002). I suspect that most have extensive mental maps of their local communities. My own community map is quite convoluted, because I moved a lot as a child. My mother and I never lived anywhere longer than two years. As an adult, my map became even more complex; instead of moving within the same metropolitan area of Washington, DC, I moved from state to state, region to region. So, when someone inquires about the nearest retail drug store, I can conjure up images of those stores in Lanham, Maryland; Syracuse, New York; or Atlanta, Georgia. I assumed that the South Side mothers in this project would have a better grasp of their community geography than I do of mine. In addition to determining how well these mothers could map their community, I felt it was also important to explore the ways they evaluated their landscape in terms of safety and security. The preceding chapter focused on the external forces that shape the South Side neighborhood. This chapter, however, explores the agency of the women who call the South Side their home. To do this, I rely on community mapping. This chapter is an analysis of the community mapping exercise as it makes an empirical case for Black women’s spatiality. This methodology characterizes the South Side mothers as agents, rather than victims of those external forces that shape their community. In doing so, we can see how they actively shape their environment and assume control of their surroundings, a concept that I refer to as place-making. Exploring Black Mothers’ Spatiality | 49 Eva-Maria Simms (2008) explored the psychology of place in a predominantly African American neighborhood called the Hill District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her goal was to understand the social and cultural impacts of dislocation and displacement caused by racial residential segregation and urban renewal programs. A group of twelve Hill residents, ranging from age twenty-four to eighty-four, were asked to draw maps and provide narratives about their neighborhood when they were ten years old. The result is a rich, multigenerational portrait of a single area. Simms was able to analyze how political and economic forces changed the neighborhood and shaped the lives of young children. She divided her analysis by generations. The first generation included those who were ten between 1930 and 1960. This generation experienced strict racial residential segregation , but their childhood world was quite stable, with a strong sense of belonging (or what she refers to as situatedness), strong peer relations among school-aged children, friendly and lifelong neighbors, and a committed community of adults who watched over the children. The second generation of participants in Simms’s study was ten years old between 1960 and 1980, and the third generation was ten between 1980 and 2004. The second generation was the first to see dramatic changes to the landscape of their community, marked by urban renewal programs that demolished sections of the neighborhood and by race riots after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The third generation grew up following the social upheaval of the 1960s and witnessed a rise in substance abuse, street crime, and gang influence, matched with decreased adult presence in and around the neighborhood. Simms saw that the second and third generation of ten-year-olds experienced a loss of situatedness and communality among their peers and among watchful neighborhood adults. Public spaces among the second and third generations became ominous spaces, marked by danger and insecurity. Moreover, Simms notes that mothers were significantly affected by this upheaval, as they were unable to rely on the network of adult support that had characterized life in the neighborhood during the first generation. Simms’s work takes an ecological approach to understanding not merely the physical changes in the Hill District but also how those changes are manifested in the social fabric of the community. 50 | A Place We Call Home Beverly Xaviera Watkins’s case study of Central Harlem in the latter part of the twentieth century (2000) offers another example of understanding dislocation and displacement from an ecological perspective. Key factors that led to Central Harlem’s disintegration included suburbanization ; deindustrialization; epidemic diseases like heroin and crack addiction , tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS; and discriminatory policies related to...