In the beginning of the book, Hayes states, “There are fundamentally two ways you can experience the police in America: as the people you call when there’s a problem, the nice man in uniform who pats a toddler’s head and has an easy smile for the old lady as she buys her coffee. For others, the police are the people who are called on them. They are the ominous knock on the door, the sudden flashlight in the face, the barked orders. Depending on who you are, the sight of an officer can produce either a warm sense of safety and contentment or a plummeting feeling of terror.” (Hayes, 2017, p. 1-2) The Colony is that in which the sight or sound of police brings about fear, while the Nation is that in which has trust in police and the justice system …show more content…
The first of these was the progress of the civil rights movement, which exposed America’s racial hierarchy and incited white backlash. Second was the significant increase in the crime rate across all types, especially violent crime from 1965-1979. Lastly, street protests and rioting were becoming increasingly frequent, particularly in Detroit and after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As a result, Richard Nixon ran for president and was subsequently elected under the premise of ‘restoring law and order,’ on the promise that the wave of crime was not going to be the wave of the future in the United States of America, and by playing on the fears of the predominantly white ‘nation’. Sounds familiar... Hayes then compares the fear that was used to further Nixon’s political agenda and increase law and order to the fear instilled in Americans by ‘threats’ like Ebola and terrorism. He also discusses the idea that Americans natural response to fear is to convert it into policy and respond with punishment, toughness, and violence. However, “because white fear is a constant, because it persists even when specific threats have subsided, it functions as a one-way ratchet in constructing the architecture of the Colony. It can build prisons but not knock them down.” (Hayes, 2017, p. 26) In other …show more content…
He talks about how cities were seen as ‘dirty’ and infested with homeless people, drug addicts, panhandlers, and porn shops everywhere, while the suburbs were seen as a ‘clean’ and orderly place to settle down and raise a family, particularly referring to the ‘white-flight’ that occurred in the 1970s and 80s. Hayes discusses how the migration of black people out of the South turned America’s cities into places of ‘concentrated blackness.’ “Federal policy facilitated both the construction of the ‘ghetto,’ large areas of black residents and disinvestment, and white flight to the suburbs, abetted by subsidized mortgages and racially discriminatory lending guidelines.” (Hayes, 2017, p. 40) Because of institutional racism and classism, the cities became concentrated areas for the Colony, and the suburbs became a place of escape and solace for the
“...Much of the recent crime increase threatens the vitality of America’s cities–and thousands of lives–it is not, in itself, the greatest danger in today’s war on cops. The greatest danger lies, rather, in the delegitimation of law and order itself’ (Mac Donald). In the book “The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe,” published in the year of 2016, author Heather Mac Donald provides credible evidence to expand on her viewpoint of our country’s current criminal crisis. In addition to “The War on Cops, Mac Donald has written two other books. Her works “Are Cops Racist?”
Isaac Shaw October 9, 2014 Hist 2020 Dr. Paulauskas Paper #1 In the 1890’s, America was starting to experience changes leading to new revelations in the way it functioned in mass communication, mass transportation, and urbanization. In Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, he brings the seemingly different stories of two men in this time period, one a mass murder, H.H. Holmes and, the other a grand architect, Daniel Burnham to explain how America was changing into a more modern era. First, both Burnham and Holmes used the popularity of urbanization to achieve their individual goals.
On a jet-black night, there was a white woman who was well dressed and looked early 20s. She was on an abandoned street in Hyde Park. She cast back a worried glance at Brent Staples several times. Brent Staples was six feet two inches tall with a beard and a curly hair. After few seconds later, she ran away fast as she could and disappeared within a second.
In Benjamin Markovits’ You Don’t Have To Live Like This, the reader experiences gentrification and views it from several angles. Because Detroit is a majority black city, being about eighty percent black, the racial tensions are severely heightened through gentrification. In context, race truly makes the first crack in the foundation of the gentrification project. Through the use of stereotypes, Markovits analyzes racial tensions throughout the novel and therefore, better satirizes and negatively characterizes gentrification in the United States. Robert James as a wealthy white man plays a pivotal role in the novel because he provides the funds for the entire gentrification project in Detroit.
John Sides’ LA City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present focuses on the migration of southern African Americans to the west between the early 1900’s and the 1970’s. Although there was a great migration of Southern African Americans to the north, there was more of an impact on African American lives in western cities like Los Angeles. Sides claims that the migration of southern African Americans was due to their desire to escape the bigotry and injustices that they faced in the southern states. Los Angeles was one of the many cities that provided hope for the southern African Americans to escape their prior social and economic conditions. While life in Los Angeles was better than the lives that the southern
In his piece “A Center City Walking Tour,” Elijah Anderson discusses the concept of “cosmopolitan canopies.” He takes us through a written tour of Philadelphia, going street by street in great detail. He begins his tour from Penn’s Landing and ends on 52nd Street. As he discusses these areas, a number of themes and issues can be identified. As Anderson moves on in the tour, the ideas of race and class become particularly prominent.
In the first few chapters of Black Metropolis, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton provide historical context on the early development of Chicago as the site for an emerging city, which became the American Midwest epicenter that incited significant social, economic and political changes that transformed the country. The authors also establish a foundation that helps to understand the allure of the Windy City, which contributed to the mass exodus of African Americans from the South during the Great Migration that ultimately created the “black metropolis.” While examining the text, what specifically stood out was the following quote: “The distinctive thing about the Black Belt is that while other such “colonies” tend to break up with the passage of time, the Negro area becomes increasingly more concentrated.” This quote indirectly references the
However, the residents against the African American family all share a corresponding rationalization of fear. They fear (a) becoming outcast among their own race, (b) sharing
Sugrue focuses on the economic and racial inequalities that have plagued America for over a hundred years. Just like Heather Thompson, Sugrue realizes that there is a plethora of factors that contributed to the urban crisis, and no one-factor can be blamed for America’s urban decline. However, Sugrue believes, “… that capitalism generates economic inequality and that African Americans have disproportionately borne the impact of that inequality” (The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 5). These two factors fall into the arguments made by Heather Thompson (although for she does not directly name capitalism, it is the umbrella that covers the economic effects of mass incarceration). Sugrue continues to argue that, “…the coincidence and mutual reinforcement of race, economics, and politics in a particular historical moment, the period from the 1940s to the 1960s, set the stage for the fiscal, social, and economic crises that confront urban America today”
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is a documentary that explores public housing in Saint Louis, Missouri, in particular the history of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex. Pruitt-Igoe was a public housing project billed as the perfect solution in the early 1950s, to solve the problems of slums in Saint Louis and to bring people back into a city that had seen a population decline from previous years. Saint Louis was an ageing city desperate to regain their postwar prominence as a bustling city, but faced many challenges pertaining to the racial makeup of the segregated city and the loss of many jobs to suburban areas. Many whites had begun to participate in what is now referred to as “white flight”, or the migration of middle class whites to
Lance Freeman, an associate professor of urban planning in Columbia, wanted to investigate if there was any displacement going on in two predominantly black neighborhoods that was briskly gentrifying. Much to his dismay, he couldn’t find any correlation between gentrification and displacement. What was surprising to Freeman was his discovery, “poor residents and those without a college education were actually less likely to move if they resided in gentrifying neighborhoods”. (Sternbergh, 19) Freeman adds, “The discourse on gentrification, has tended to overlook the possibility that some of the neighborhood changes associated with gentrification might be appreciated by the prior residents.” (Sternbergh, 19)
Originally, during Colonial times, policing in the United States consisted of little more than night watches. These watches weren’t very effective, as watchmen often drank or slept on duty, and many of the volunteers were only there as a way to get out of military service or helping with the watch as a form of punishment (Potter, 2013). It wasn’t until 1838 that the city of Boston established the first formal organized police force in America. Other cities soon followed, and by the 1880s, all major metropolitan areas had a formal police force. These changes took place largely due to the rapid population growth in American cities.
Kenneth Jackson, the author of the book Crabgrass Frontier, provides an extensive overview of the history of and explains the causes to the suburbanization in the United States. He sees such development in the United States as unique due to the extent of cities’ suburban sprawl, the number of commuters, and the proportion of homeowners (190). Jackson explained that because of the inexpensive land, low construction cost, improvement in transportation technology and along with government’s involvement, Americans settle in the crabgrass frontier. However, Jackson describes that “[s]uburbs, then, were socially and economically inferior to cities when wind, muscle, and water were the prime movers of civilization… Even the word suburb suggested inferior
He speaks about the story of Clyde Ross, a black man who fled horrible conditions in Mississippi to find work in Chicago. Like many Americans Ross dreamed of owning a home. However, the only way for a black person to buy a home in Chicago in the mid-twentieth century was to buy from predatory “contract” sellers who charged unbillable rates with few legal protections for buyers. Clyde said “To keep up with his payments and keep his heat on, I took a second job at the post office and then a third job delivering pizza.” Like many blacks in Chicago at the time he got two jobs just to keep up with the payments of the house, overall being kept away from his
As suburban Americans began to own the same consumer goods and believe in the same values, the prospect of inclusive thought began to disappear. The aesthetic homogeneity with men’s clothing, for example, left very little room for men to dress up in anything other than the bland suits characteristic of the 1950s. Among the varying forms of homogeneity present in the suburbs, none had the effect on conservatism that racial homogeneity did. From the 1950s until “the 1990s, nearly 90 percent of suburban whites lived in communities with minority populations of less than 1 percent,” showing how the suburbs created conservative thought that would last nearly half a century in the suburbs. In order to achieve this racial ubiquity, “the suburban builders…openly advertised the fact that their communities excluded minorities,” revealing their conservative and racist beliefs William Levitt, the father of the suburbs, argued 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,” further showing how minorities were feared to be a threat in a white society These racialized advertisements and thoughts encapsulated the attention of their audiences by reinforcing the idea of minorities (primarily African-Americans) being a threat to security, which dates back to the 17th Century with the institution of slavery.