Abstract
Writing at the turn of the twenty-first century, the urban planners Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton argued that “[m]etropolitan life throughout the nation now rests on a new foundation of economic, ecological, and social patterns, all of which operate in unprecedented fashion at a regional scale.” 1 In diverse ways, Wendy Cheng’s The Changs Next Door to the Diazes, Colin Gordon’s Citizen Brown, and Merrill Schleier’s Race and the Suburbs in American Film explore and complicate the “regional scale” of contemporary suburban life through the lens of race. Whether focusing on the granular level of local neighborhoods, politics, and institutions, or attending to the real and imagined geographies of the suburban nation, these studies locate race at the center of the practices and discourses that underwrite the planning, construction (literal and ideological), and reproduction of suburban neighborhoods. Whereas the texts by Cheng and Gordon reveal the concentric patterns that link localized policies and experiences to the politics of race and citizenship at the national level, Merrill’s edited collection clarifies the role of race within the suburban imaginary and how film, both as a capitalist industry and mode of representation, possesses the power either to reiterate patterns of racial marginalization or to subvert this historical legacy.
In The Changs Next Door to the Diazes, Cheng explores the quotidian: the everyday experiences of citizens in the neighborhoods, schools, and civic organizations in which “racial hierarchies are learned, instantiated, and transformed” throughout California’s racially and ethnically diverse West San Gabriel Valley (SGV; p. 3). Central to this inquiry is the processes of “regional racial formation” (p. 10) and Cheng is particularly adept at exposing the intersections among local spatial practices and national ideologies about race. Through in-depth research and interviews, Cheng unfolds a complex narrative that decenters “whiteness” from the story of the American suburbs. One of the most insightful contributions of this project is its regional framework for understanding how place encodes and embeds racial hierarchy. “By defining the ‘region’ in relation to racial formation as a set of social relations and processes common to a place or set of places,” she writes, “a regional approach provides a comparable lens through which to consider suburban as well as central urban and rural racial hierarchies” (p. 211).
Over the course of five chapters, Cheng explores homeownership, schools, the Boy Scouts, civic campaigns, and interracial relationships and how they reinforce or challenge macroscale, national ideologies of race. Three interrelated themes hold the inquiry together: “the development of an emergent ‘non-white’ identity rooted in middle-class and suburban contexts; the intertwined relationship of race, property, homeownership, and privilege; and the essential role of institutions of civil society in reconciling regional epistemes and practices with national ideologies” (pp. 13-14).
In the chapter on homeownership, Cheng traces the development of Monterey Park from a predominantly white suburb to a majority Asian American suburb. Central to this discussion is the relationship of Asian American and Latina/o residents to the hegemonic “white spatial imaginary” of suburban homeownership (p. 36). Property ownership in this “majority minority” suburb serves as means of negotiating identity in relationship to this ideology while resisting assimilation and gaining access to middle-class status. Cheng cites the example of the Ahn family from Korea, in which homeownership served as a means of welcoming family members into the country and helping them transition to life in America. “Thus, in the extended Ahn family,” Cheng argues, “homeownership was not synonymous with furthering the wealth and prospects of a heteronormative nuclear family but instead offered an entry point to the area for extended family members upon immigrating to the United States” (p. 58). Across West SGV, Asian Americans and Latina/os make strategic use of domestic space, not to reinscribe newly differentiated lines of racial exclusivity, but to embrace diverse patterns of living that reshape spatial norms and practices associated with suburban living.
Read in the contemporary moment, when conservative governors and state legislatures have limited or censored the ways educators can discuss race in the classroom, Cheng’s chapter on school and racial privilege seems prescient. She underscores the crucial role of academic institutions in the process of interrogating national ideologies and challenging existing power structures that are embedded, implicitly or explicitly, in racial hierarchies. (It is also a harbinger for how damaging the curtailment of that intellectual work will prove to be.) As civic institutions within suburban neighborhoods, schools “inculcate[e] dominant national ideologies” about race, where assumptions about “model minority” Asian American students and underperforming Latina/o students are shaped and internalized—by both students and teachers, importantly—but they are also a space in which these assumptions and ideologies can be challenged and, occasionally, destabilized (p. 81). The inciting incident at the heart of this chapter is an article published in the Alhambra High School newspaper by a Chinese American student. The article asserted that Latina/o students lack academic initiative and that the higher test scores and grade point averages earned by Asian American students are rooted in “cultural factors,” such as a disparity in levels of support and encouragement by Asian and Latino parents (p. 63). The often poignant interviews with students included in this chapter provide effective evidence for the dynamics of regional racial formation. One Latina student, for example, who was a vocal opponent of the article ultimately concludes, “well, why didn’t we just work harder to prove that that was wrong” (p. 86). This student offers Cheng the opportunity to reflect on the intractability of “color-blind” ideologies pertaining to individual effort, “in concert with immigrant success narratives such as the model minority myth,” which together undermine the possibility of disrupting, or even naming, structural inequalities within educational institutions, even at the majority non-white Alhambra High (p. 89).
A similar commitment to color-blind ideology obscures the ways race and privilege operate within the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) Troop 252 in West SGV. In her brief history of the BSA, Cheng convincingly shows how the organization’s sense of the nation and American identity are inextricable from ideologies of whiteness and “manifest destiny” (p. 95). Yet, as Cheng argues, BSA troops in diverse or majority-minority communities have not primarily functioned to promote assimilation, but rather to serve “as a means for youth to ‘armor’ themselves against racist sentiments, to assert worlds of their own in which becoming white, or closer to white, was not necessarily the goal” (p. 98). In this way, Troop 252 in West SGV offered an alternative model for Asian American and Latino scouts to imagine and participate in American citizenship. Nevertheless, as was the case in Alhambra High, Cheng uncovers an almost unconscious adherence within the troop to the discourse of patriotism, meritocracy, and the American Dream. The case of Shawn Smith, the first African American Eagle Scout in the history of Troop 252, exposes how a commitment to color-blind rhetoric “consistently marked Shawn . . . as a representative of Blackness—as the noncooperative Other in a teleological narrative of national racial progress” (p. 126). This example of regional racial formation reveals the destructive persistence of national ideologies regarding blackness and whiteness and how they inform local notions of racial identity even within the diverse communities of West SGV.
As these previous examples suggest, even in the absence of whiteness, the “white spatial imaginary” can exercise a pernicious influence on the inhabitants of suburban spaces. In diverse, multiethnic suburbs, then, a question arises: What racial groups within the community have access to, and can avail themselves of, national myths and ideologies? This question animates the debates surrounding urban planning and revitalization projects in West SGV. Cheng examines three contemporaneous campaigns in which discourses of race, history, and identity shape the politics of public space: Alhambra’s “Diversity on Main Street,” San Gabriel’s “Golden Mile” proposal, and the successful effort by the Friends of La Laguna to preserve a section of Vincent Lugo Park in San Gabriel. While the latter effort to save “Monster Park,” as it was affectionately known, managed to avert divisiveness by appealing to a sense of shared history and community, “Diversity on Main Street” and “Golden Mile” revealed deep fissures within the SGV region in terms of who could define a communal identity.
Cheng’s research shows that Latina/o racial-spatial formations, although far from perfect or straightforward, were more easily integrated into the discursive history of Southern California—in part due to “the fabrication of a Spanish fantasy past” and a narrative of “Anglo American” succession—while Asian American identities and spaces “continue to be seen either as threats encroaching on implicitly white, American suburban space or as autonomous foreign spaces that serve particular functions but are not to exceed their prescribed bounds” (p. 134). As a redevelopment project, Alhambra’s “Diversity on Main Street” coordinated a safe vision of commodified multicultural identity, while systematically erasing markers of Asian American identity and marginalizing small, ethnic-Chinese businesses. The proposed “Golden Mile” on Valley Boulevard in south San Gabriel, which proposed to highlight the heritage and diversity of Asian culture, triggered a civic battle with the Mission District in the north, and plans floundered due to bureaucratic infighting and budget debates. Cheng argues that the proposed “Golden Mile” becomes a contested site in which an elite class of predominantly white leaders in the Mission District “continued to keep a tight grip on who could make claims to San Gabriel’s identity and history,” and, as a result, these civic leaders “reproduced in space the long-standing racial trope of Asians as unassimilable bodies” (p. 159). Taken together, these three campaigns offer perhaps the strongest example of regional racial formation in West SGV, exemplifying “how regionally specific conceptions of race, space, and history work in tandem with state-structured processes to maintain—or potentially reorganize—power relations, which are then sedimented and recodified in the landscape” (p. 170).
Similar to Cheng’s focus on the local and regional complexity of race and space in West SGV, Colin Gordon’s Citizen Brown examines the intersecting patterns of race and citizenship for African Americans in the neighborhoods, schools, and legal systems of St. Louis, Missouri. The murder of Michael Brown stands as one of Gordon’s primary examples of loss, tragedy, and dispossession, but he situates this catalyzing incident of police violence within an almost century-long struggle for black citizenship, from the Great Migration and the formation of the first African American enclaves to Brown’s death on the streets of Ferguson in August 2014. “Predatory policing,” Gordon writes, “. . . is but the bluntest example of unequal treatment and unequal protection hardwired into local politics, schooling, housing, social policy, service provision and economic opportunity” (pp. 145-46). In these overlapping patterns of inequality, one hears an echo of Gerald Frug’s argument that “[c]urrent law not only has fragmented the metropolitan area but is perpetuated by the kind of person this fragmentation has nurtured.” 2 This cycle of fragmentation haunts the pages of Citizen Brown and, over the course of four illuminating chapters, Gordon exposes its consequence for the segregation, displacement, and policing of black citizenship in St. Louis County.
The historical scope of Gordon’s project sheds light on evolving patterns of racial-spatial formations in St. Louis, beginning with the early African American enclaves of Elmwood Park and Meacham Park, which predate the boom era of postwar suburban development. In a story familiar to those who have studied race and twentieth-century urban history, these older enclaves were deliberately isolated through planning policies and practices: “private development, municipal annexation and incorporation, and municipal zoning were crafted in such a way as to effectively quarantine these older enclaves and their citizens” (p. 34). Unsurprisingly, as Gordon outlines, such spatial practices had a profound impact on local citizenship, “determining who was a member of the community and who was not,” which also compromised opportunities for employment, education, and homeownership (p. 49). Environmental and political fragmentation further contributes to a breakdown in municipal and social services, including personal and neighborhood safety, access to sanitary sewer lines, and educational opportunities. Regarding the question of safety, and Gordon will echo this point in his discussion of Ferguson, the only municipal service typically extended to black enclaves and neighborhoods was policing. The police functioned as a militarized arm “to enforce boundaries and punish those who transgressed them” (p. 73), effectively reinforcing patterns of segregation accomplished through annexation and zoning policies.
The housing market (including realtors), municipal boundaries, county resistance to public or subsidized housing, and cycles of white flight and racial succession have combined to embed segregation as a material fact of residential life in St. Louis. As a result, access to equal educational opportunities has languished across this fragmented landscape. In the decades since Brown v. Board of Education, efforts to upend de jure segregation have clashed with the entrenched, de facto segregation of city and suburban neighborhoods. Gordon shares the particularly bracing example of the Normandy schools in North County, a predominantly African American school district that lost its accreditation in 2011. Although the loss of accreditation offered the promise that students would transfer to more equitable schools, that prospect was short lived. Parents in the mostly white Francis Howell School District, which was designated as the primary transfer destination for Normandy students, protested and successfully petitioned to suspend the transfer program, “arguing—in candidly racial terms—that the transfer policy threated the opportunities enjoyed by their children” (pp. 64-65). The surprise twist in the story is that the Normandy district supported suspending the program because it could not afford the fees associated with the transfers. As Gordon sharply concludes, while school districts are often “constrained or hemmed in by larger patterns of political fragmentation and residential segregation,” it is also true, in other instances, that “the choices made by schools and school districts created, embraced, or reinforced those patterns” (p. 65).
Brown v. Board of Education failed to end segregation in schools, but it did result in “an unsettling of its boundaries” in suburbs across the United States (p. 63). White flight and racial succession, coupled with the abandonment of public for private schools, meant that racial boundaries and unequal schools became a fluid terrain, shifting from urban centers to first-ring suburbs and beyond. Gordon astutely reads the effects of Brown alongside two other momentous occurrences in 1954: the Supreme Court decision in Berman v. Parker and the latest iteration of the Housing Act. The former determined that “[t]he definition of ‘blight’ was now solely a matter of local discretion,” thus loosening restrictions on the ability of the government to seize property while easing standards pertaining to “public use” requirements (p. 82); the latter lowered the bar for relocation requirements when local governments engage in “slum clearance” projects. In tandem, Gordon argues, “The sorry history of this era underscores the threat to citizenship—and to democratic voice—embedded in postwar urban renewal” (p. 84). In St. Louis, as across the nation, “blight” and “black” became synonymous with urban renewal. In the ensuing decades, removal and clearance projects moved ahead, displacing entire neighborhoods with little regard for relocation opportunities, decimating African American homeownership and financial security in the process. Urban renewal has functioned as “another blunt reminder of unequal protection and unequal citizenship” (p. 118), Gordon concludes, and another mechanism in municipal efforts to quarantine black populations and to fortify the links among whiteness and suburban living.
Citizen Brown is filled with heartbreaking stories of displacement, disenfranchisement, social abandonment, and the predatory policing of black citizens, but because of the place that Michael Brown’s murder occupies in contemporary history, Gordon’s final chapter may prove most resonant for readers. He traces the formation of Ferguson, an inner suburb of North St. Louis County, amid an all too familiar history of residential segregation sustained by federal housing policies, restrictive covenants, zoning restrictions on multifamily units, white flight, and disinvestment in black neighborhoods. Ferguson, which lies just northwest of the St. Louis City border, was an early destination for white working-class populations fleeing the city. By the end of the twentieth century, however, it had become a destination for black families seeking refuge from urban neighborhoods gutted by urban renewal and the redistribution of resources toward commercial development. By 2000, the black population in Ferguson was more than 50 percent, and the township “was on its way to becoming a ‘secondhand’ suburb marked by aging infrastructure, growing public-service needs, and persistent fiscal troubles” (p. 127). This history serves as prelude to Gordon’s discussion of the predatory justice system in Ferguson that led most infamously to Brown’s murder. Unsurprisingly, the fragmentation of local municipalities and governments plays an outsized role in the uneven deployment of police forces, not only in the form of increased violence or mass incarceration, but also by fines and fees to supplement municipal revenue, all of which has had deleterious effects on black citizenship (pp. 141-42).
Read alongside Cheng’s and Gordon’s regional and local analyses of West SGV and St. Louis, respectively, Merrill Schleier’s Race and the Suburbs in American Film captures the myriad ways that cultural artifacts reflect, entrench, and perpetuate the material realities of systemic racism in metropolitan regions across the nation. This edited collection, which includes eleven chapters, covers cinematic representations of race from the immediate postwar era to more recent films, including Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), George Clooney’s Suburbicon (2017), and Greg Berlanti’s Love, Simon (2018). Collectively, the volume’s gambit is that not only do “suburb films” fail to capture the complexity of suburban spatiality, but they also fail to exemplify the lived experiences of the diverse populations that inhabit suburbia. In their introduction, Schleier quotes the urban geographer David Delaney on the ways space functions as “an ‘enabling technology’ through which race is produced” and, as a collection, Race and the Suburbs in American Film takes up Delaney’s invitation “to interrogate the spatial conditions under which one absorbs an assigned racial category and how one learns to negotiate its spaces” (p. 7). For too long, Hollywood has deployed a similar “enabling technology” to create a cinematic space that perpetuates racial exclusion and enshrines whiteness at the ideological center of suburban America. “This volume aims to remedy these exclusions,” Schleier writes, “by problematizing the very notion of the suburb or suburban film by reinserting those that have been neglected, rendered marginal, or invisible whether through lack of analysis, funding, distribution, or promotion” (p. 16).
As demonstrated in films, such as Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) and The Reckless Moment (1949), early postwar cinema tended to reiterate and reinforce the marginalization of black individuals, specifically through the figure of the black maid or servant, who “helps us to understand postwar racism—both on- and off-screen—as a mediator of a spatial regime of racism embodied and enforced by suburbia and the suburban house” (p. 36). The marginalized, “invisible” black figure in white domestic space draws the viewers’ attention to the suburban house as both the entitlement and embodiment of whiteness, defined precisely in opposition to the excluded other. Even later films ostensibly focused on “Black and brown suburb[s],” such as Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess (1973), remain “haunted by whiteness” and the “colonial entanglements and Black migrations—forced and otherwise” (p. 78). Racism, displacement, and violence, exercised by private citizens and through public force, have shaped the suburban landscape, and that legacy lingers beneath the surface of these spaces and their cinematic representations.
As Race and the Suburbs in American Film turns toward films of the late-twentieth century, the collection draws attention to “contiguous cycles of Black cinema” and the links between capitalism and racism in the film industry (p. 113). Charles Burnett’s To Sleep With Anger (1990) serves as a case study. The film offers a “magical realist” portrait of black life in suburban Los Angeles that simultaneously evokes Southern folklore in the figure of Harry (Danny Glover), who arrives unexpectedly from Mississippi, an avatar of a mystical past. In contrast to the promotion of contemporaneous films about black life in Los Angeles, such as John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991) and Albert and Allen Hughes’s Menace II Society (1993), “publicity for To Sleep With Anger often obscured the central position of place and race within the narrative” (p. 113). In short, advertising for the “hood films” portrayed and fortified the belief that violence and crime were “problems confined to a pathologized, minority inner city rather than as a result of structural racism, political corruption, and predatory economic policies, all of which extended to the suburbs and were in fact addressed directly by the films themselves” (p. 113). In the 1990s, Hollywood’s industrial and financial complex enacted its own version of racial quarantine, determining what spaces black films can occupy and how they can inhabit those spaces within the cultural imagination.
In the twenty-first century, cinema invites a broader, more diverse conversation about race and suburbia, and Schleier’s collection explores how suburban spatiality makes room for or, more to the point, fails to accommodate “interracial kinship” (p. 125); how films focused on the Asian American experience in suburbia, such as Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow (2002) and Tze Chun’s Children of Invention (2009), “ultimately converge in imagining Asian American suburban aspiration as dysfunction, loss, and failure” (p. 144); and how Arab American narratives “exhibit the nuanced ways that films can ‘inhabit’ the typical suburban film . . . while altering the meaning of [familiar] tropes to depict the ways in which Arab American characters experience the suburbs differently” (p. 183). Separate chapters on Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight (2016) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) illuminate the “geographies of racism” that inform the construction of suburbia as a white space. In the case of Moonlight, the film’s setting, Liberty City, calls to mind the New Deal federal policies that mandated the containment of race and, after World War II, urban renewal projects that displaced racial minorities, resulting in the transformation of a “functioning inner-ring suburb to a ‘notorious’ and ‘crime infested’ area, a scourge that the city plans on razing” (p. 194). Evoking Jim Crow-era racial terrorism and the federal policies that created the American suburbs, “Get Out recovers the historical narratives and residues of violence obscured by neoliberal forms of racism that still haunt suburban spaces” (p. 209).
Indeed, in these latter chapters, neoliberalism emerges as a central concern. To return to the Asian American films cited above, Better Luck Tomorrow and Children of Invention opt not to portray “alienation in terms of racial isolation with the suburbs, as both films feature a critical mass of Asian Americans.” Rather, these films depict a particularly neoliberal version of anomie in which suburban spaces “are governed by an instrumentalist logic that would reduce communities into markets and constitute subjects as isolated individuals of self-enterprise” (p. 161). A similar logic pervades Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes (2014) wherein diverse suburban neighborhoods have been ravaged by foreclosures and displacements in the wake of the 2008 housing crisis. Rather than framing the suburban home as a site of security and stability, “The materialist-realist aesthetic of 99 Homes foregrounds the house as a site of labor and property as an ongoing transaction within a fluid marketplace” (p. 240). Collectively, these more recent films remind viewers of the inextricable connections among neoliberalism, racial hierarchies, and suburbia, as well as the disproportionate effects of the housing crisis and Great Recession on black and Latina/o communities. 3
After World War II, the Federal Housing Authority, the Home Owners Loan Corporation, the G. I. Bill, and private developers worked in tandem to codify whiteness as the predominant identity of the emergent suburban nation. Under the aegis of the federal government, suburban development propelled the advancement of the white middle class to an extent that no subsequent affirmative action program could ever hope to replicate. While the works discussed here all offer sober accounts and clear-eyed appraisals of the past and future of race, citizenship, residential segregation, and unequal protection, one can also find possibilities for subverting dominant ideologies and decentering whiteness. As The Changs Next Door to the Diazes draws to a close, Cheng discovers in interracial affiliations “the potential to disorder dominant racial and social hierarchies” (p. 196), and this notion of “disorder” surfaces as a central tenet of her conclusion. Regional racial formation, Cheng claims, “opens up a ‘third space’ that shows us how people find commonality and connection in ways that escape and disorder dominant hierarchies of power, without ignoring or denying them” (p. 211). The authors presented here all offer new insights into race and suburban space—at local, regional, and national levels—and they should find welcome audience among an interdisciplinary set of educators and researchers.