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

3. Disruption and Dislocation of Black Spaces in Syracuse

23 3 DisruptionandDislocation ofBlackSpacesinSyracuse We tore down a row of houses in the old 15th Ward and put up Everson Museum . . . I think the change was worthwhile. —Former Syracuse Mayor William F. Walsh, nearly thirty years after urban renewal In my capacity as a Greenpeace campaigner, I was invited to become part of a mobilization to halt the licensing of a new nuclear-materials enrichment facility in northern Louisiana. The citizen’s group was called CANT, Citizens Against Nuclear Trash, and they were based in Homer, Louisiana . Perhaps the most extraordinary element of this campaign was the diverse racial composition of CANT. Black and white neighbors rallied together to oppose the facility in an area where the local Ku Klux Klan still sponsored marches on the town square during the month of February . A consortium of European and American nuclear companies had proposed building a facility that would enrich uranium for use in fuel rods for nuclear power plants. Plans for the facility included a road that bisected two historic African American neighborhoods, Forest Grove and Center Springs. These communities were founded by newly freed slaves after Emancipation. In the plans for the facility construction, there is not one mention of the neighborhoods’ residents. Fueling the residents’ ire, the map for the planned road did not even bother to include the names and boundaries of Forest Grove and Center Springs (Bullard 1998). To the planners, these historic communities were deemed invisible. This blatant 24 | A Place We Call Home disregard to the presence of African American space and to other spaces occupied by people of color gives testament to the treatment of racial and ethnic minorities by those in power. I see a direct correlation between the assumptions of those who design maps or plans of territories and their views of the people of color that occupy parts of those spaces. This is the type of process, I believe, that leads to the formation of racialized space. Defining Racialized Space and Environmental Racism and Injustice Ignoring the historic Black communities of Forest Grove and Center Springs in the plans to construct a nuclear plant in northern Louisiana is a prime example of a process that I refer to as racialized space, which illustrates the interplay of space, social relations, and power. I define racialized space as the historic practice and spatial designation of a particular area for racial and ethnic minorities as a means of containment and social control . This practice serves to reinforce preconceived notions of Otherness or results in the creation of culturally inferior Other (Ducre 2006, 2007). The key assumption of the racialized space hypothesis is that, historically , the mobility of people of color has been (at times) individually sanctioned or constrained through institutional discrimination. I am not the first to put forth the idea of racialized space. However, I believe that my approach is the most comprehensive, taking into account both the influence of racist thought and discriminatory action. For Bill Lawson (2001) and Charles Mills (2001), racialized space constitutes the dominant group’s affirmation of Otherness. Thus, their articulation of racialized space encompasses the idea of racist thought as praxis. They contend that Blackness has been equated with evil in a dichotomy against white, which is regarded good and pure. For Lawson, the process of racialization is the mechanism by which conceptualizations of racial superiority are organized in social life and experience. Hence, attitudes regarding urban (Black) versus suburban (White) socio-spatial relations also become racialized: “For many persons, their understanding of the patterns of behavior associated with a racial group is connected with space, giving meaning to the differences in lifestyles and standards of living based on a racial criterion” (2001, 48). Mills (2001) goes further by introducing the dichotomy between Black Disruption and Dislocation of Black Spaces | 25 and white within the body politic as one culturally superior and inferior, organic and inorganic, essential and nonessential. He contends that space is constructed by relations of power and that it is constructed discursively. Thus, if the Other is somehow demonized, containment as a strategy becomes critical. The racist attitudes behind the politics of containment are seen as a protection strategy against the scourge of evil. The distance can be physical, such as the separation of affluent suburban residents from inner city ghetto residents, or mental, such as viewing housing project residents as lazy, criminal, menacing, and intellectually inferior. In regard to the...