Whitewashing City Spaces

We cannot fully understand the history of the American city and its spatial arrangements without accounting for how urban spaces have been—and still are—marked by race. The Great Recession of 2007–2009 sits on a historical trajectory of urban renewal programs, deindustrialization, corporate disinvestment, real estate practices such as redlining, and municipal “quality of life” programs that have had a long lasting and devastating impact on poor and minority urban residents (Jackson, 1985; Massey & Denton, 1993; Moody, 2007). Despite the tangible and documented impact race plays in questions of housing, employment, education, and health (Báez & Castañeda, 2014; Bullard & Wright, 2009; Rugh & Massey, 2010), discourses of antiracialism perpetuate the idea race—and by extension, racism—is no longer a relevant marker of disparity (Bonilla-Silva, E., 2013; Brown et al., 2003; Giroux, 2003; Goldberg, 2009; Mukherjee, 2006; Squires, 2007). ¹ In this alleged “post race” context, how do news accounts cover stories on urban crisis and renewal?

This article takes up scholarly calls (Ono, 2010; Winant, 2002) to develop “conceptual tools” that may enable critical scholars to explore how racism continues undercover in the 21st century. I argue for the importance of exploring how strategic forgetting operates in conjunction with the familiar and formulaic frame of personalization (Cloud, 1996; Hess & Sobre-Denton, 2014; Romer, Jamieson, & DeCoteau, 1998; Squires, 2011) to erase or evade the continued presence of structured, systemic racism in the (re)construction/renewal of city spaces. First, media explain city decay and renewal through stories that frame success and failure in personal terms, as a result of the hard work/irresponsibility of individuals, as opposed to White privilege or systemic racism. As a frame for understanding city growth/decay, personalization resonates because it omits, or strategically forgets, histories of systemic discrimination and privilege that enable success or failure in the first place. We may view personalization as a mode of strategic selection that operates as a counterpart to strategic forgetting. Together, these frames uphold a broader ideology of antiracialism that renders past and present-day racist practices irrelevant in understandings of the well-being of urban spaces and their residents.

Race and Urban Spaces in the News

For this study, I use frame analysis to explore the ideological dimensions of the news, that is, the ways the ideas and images in the news “promote certain interpretations of issues and events” (Peer & Ettema, 1998, p. 256; see also Hackett, 1984) in ways that most often (but not always, nor uniformly) reinforce dominant relations of power. News frames consist of words, concepts, images, metaphors, and the like that suggest a particular way of understanding an event and operate through repetition, association, reinforcement, selection, and deflection (Entman, 1991, 1993; Gitlin, 1980). Frames gain persuasive force by promoting understandings/worldviews that appear as commonsense, natural, or readily apparent, and hence, frames have ideological dimensions. Ideologies circulate at the social level offering unified systems of belief or “mental frameworks” (Hall, 1986, p. 29) promoting specific understandings of the world that concord with dominant power relations/structures. Scholars have performed extensive analyses of how race is framed by the news. ² Here, I seek to expose the subtler forms of racism promoted in the news by asking: How do frames reinforce racist understandings of urban crisis and development in ways that are seemingly nonracist? How do frames reinforce the silence of White privilege?

Across disciplines, scholars have explored the city as a site of both symbolic construction and material reality shaped by (de)industrialization, capitalist accumulation, and racist/sexist practices. ³ Drawing on the work of the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre (2009), these scholars understand space as political, meaning it is not simply a neutral object “out there” ready to be empirically observed or described. Space “is a product literally filled with ideologies” (Lefebvre, 1976, p. 31). Critical/cultural communication scholars have entered the study of space through the “spatial turn” (Conley, 2010; Greene, 2010; Grossberg, 1993; Stormer, 2010; Wiley, 2005) suggesting “cultural studies must move from a temporal to a spatial logic of power and it must move from a structural to a machinic theory of power” (Grossberg, 1993, p. 7). Others (Shome, 2003) point out the continued need to explore the material impact spatial arrangements have in reinforcing power disparities.

Scholarship has also focused more pointedly on the city as mediated space (McQuire, 2007, 2008) and gentrified space (Bowler & McBurney, 1991; Glow, Johanson, & Kershaw, 2014; Makagon, 2010; Overell, 2009). Urban renewal through gentrification often relies on language that scapegoats, blames, or otherwise marks minority and poor residents as threats to the well-being of communities (Goldberg, 1993; Wilson & Grammenos, 2005) or as social “ills” harmful to the “life” and “growth” of the city (Gibson, 2004; Wilson & Wouters, 2003). Likewise, popular and political discourses frame city spaces as bereft or vacated but brought to life by “urban pioneers” such as artists and developers (Makagon, 2010; Wilson & Wouters, 2003).

Examination of news coverage of the renewal of Detroit and Cleveland points to the ways a “color-blind racism” underwrites frames that effectively deny or elide the continued racist symbolic and material construction of city spaces. Color-blind racism, antiracialism, and new racism are terms that refer to the ways racism continues to operate into the 21st century in ways that are “subtle, institutional, and apparently nonracial” (Bonilla-Silva, 2013, p. 16; see Giroux, 2003). Goldberg (2009) describes antiracialism in clear contrast to antiracism, as the “refusal of racism,” which allows “residues of racist arrangement and subordination [to] linger unaddressed and repressed” (p. 1). Antiracialism’s ability to hide or deflect runs parallel to the invisible privilege of whiteness, which “affects the everyday fabric of our lives but resists, sometimes violently, any extensive characterization that would allow for the mapping of its contours” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 291).

Antiracialism fosters a post race narrative of success that masks—or in the case of news coverage, strategically forgets—past and present-day policies and processes that privilege whiteness. Communication scholarship has explored the symbolic construction of public memory (Dickinson, Blair, & Ott, 2010) highlighting rhetorical processes of “selective amnesia” (Hoerl, 2012), “strategic forgetting” (Sturken, 1997), “omission” (Zelizer, 1992), and “countermemory” (Dunn, 2011), thus pointing to the culturally negotiated, partial, and politicized nature of collective public memory. Strategic forgetting works to silence histories, structures, and processes of oppression that privilege whiteness.

Cleveland and Detroit are representative of cities in the rustbelt region that have been affected by demographic changes and deindustrialization throughout the 1900s. In 1950, the Cleveland population was 28% Black and 71% White (Gibson & Jung, 2005). Detroit was similar with 16% Black and 83% White residents (Gibson & Jung, 2005). The cities mirror each other in terms of demographic shifts between 1950 and 2010, with Cleveland’s 2010 population 53% Black and 37% White and Detroit’s 82% Black and 10% White. ⁴ Detroit, home of the world’s automobile manufacturing industry in the mid-20th century, was decimated by industrial outsourcing and White flight, which began as early as the 1950s and led to widespread unemployment, a shrinking tax base, and vacated neighborhoods (Sugrue, 1996). Cleveland is a similarly situated city whose landscape was shaped by “automation and decentralization” in the 1950s (Kerr, 2011, p. 145).

For the following analysis, I examined local and national news articles about renewal efforts of Cleveland and Detroit spanning the 7-year period, 2008–2015. This period included the Great Recession (December 2007–June 2009) and 5 years of revitalization efforts following that period. For local coverage, I examined over 100 articles found by searching the online versions of the Plain Dealer and the Detroit News using the key words “blight,” “foreclosure,” and “renewal.” My analysis also includes national coverage of these two cities appearing in the New York Times, Time magazine, and on National Public Radio. I sought to uncover assumptions and associations implied through text and visual elements. Importantly, I note what is absent and tease out how omission acts as a news frame that makes other more recognizable news tropes (e.g., stories of individual failure/success) persuasive. This study does not seek to prove how actual readers interpret news stories of urban renewal as that is beyond the scope of this project. ⁵ Instead, I explore how frames participate in the repression of race that belies the ways racist assumptions and beliefs continue in more covert form in the 21st century.

Framing Through Selection

Stories of individual success—given structure in the myth of American individualism—are woven into the fabric of American culture and are widely disseminated in popular media (Cloud, 1996; Gray, 1994; see also Hess & Sobre-Denton, 2014). In media accounts of city growth/decay, the image of personal success/failure is a trope supporting color-blind racism as it constructs a moral and physical urban landscape that masks the unabated role racist practices play in urban living conditions. As a frame, personalization selects and spotlights individual stories suggesting “human agency as a matter of individualized choices” (Giroux, 2003, p. 194) and reducing problems of systemic racism to “private issues such as individual character” (Giroux, 2003, p. 193; see also Squires, 2011).

Framing Through Occlusion or Theorizing What Is Not Said

Reyes (2010) astutely points out, “whiteness is the invisible hand of official public memory” (p. 2). His statement suggests whiteness also plays a role in what we are encouraged to forget or as the case may be, to never really know. As an ideology undergirding the frame of personalization, antiracialism gains persuasive force equally through what is not said. Recalling the history of racism in practices of urban growth would render the individualized frame of success/failure untenable as readers would have to come to terms with the roles systemic racism played/s in city living experiences.

The frame of omission or strategic forgetting eclipsed the narrative of wide reaching economic abandonment in city cores and the more recent racist lending practices of banks, which led to the 2008 housing crisis. Emphasizing stories of individual suffering/success elided the structural forces leading to widespread urban displacement and dispossession and rendered spaces unmarked by racism. Through an ideology of antiracialism, news frames featured race by associating Black families with foreclosure blight but most often failed to mention processes of structural racism (Atassi, 2012; Gillispie, 2010; Larkin, 2012; Litt, 2010; Morris, 2012). In this way, the issue of foreclosure was folded into the longstanding stereotype of the chaotic black family ⁶ and blighted urban ghetto thus serving as foil to the urban entrepreneur/artisan who settles the cityscape through loft living and latte sipping.

Press accounts of Detroit’s and Cleveland’s renewal efforts crafted a story of urban uplift that seemingly had little to do with segregated settlement patterns and capital accumulation throughout the 20th century. Instead, the heroics of the (White) pioneer upstaged the role of class and race politics and effaced the roles played by industry and housing segregation in the creation of the urban landscape. The idea that the city is a “scary” place in need of the taming influence of high-scale developments, bicycle lanes, breweries, and coffee houses is a notably White understanding of the urban that ironically turns the tables on the very real history of White violence against Black residents and the city-backed demolition of Black neighborhoods.

In short, forgetting becomes an exercise of power and a way to assign blame for the present by rooting problems in a selective past that eclipses the history of race and neighborhood settlement patterns of the mid-20th century that should be understood as part and parcel of the 2007–2015 subprime mortgage crisis. The creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation in 1933 and the Federal Housing Administration the following year supported the growth of suburban development and sanctioned redlining, which ensured racial segregation, led to White flight and further neglect of city housing where minorities had no choice but to remain (Powell, 2009). By 1949, cities (re)turned to urban development and revalorization spurred by the Federal Housing Act, whose stated purpose was to “provide a decent home and suitable environment for every American family” (Kleniewski, 1984, p. 205). The Act provided federal funds for urban renewal projects and slum clearance—often referred to as “Negro Removal” by displaced Black residents (Schwartz, 1993, p. xv; Sugrue, 1996, p. 50)—and proved a boon for “stimulat[ing] economic growth and making cities more profitable places for capital to invest” (Kleniewski, 1984, p. 205; see also Beauregard, 2003; Mollenkopf, 1981; Walker, 2012).

Federal housing policies authorized discriminatory practices including redlining and urban “renewal” projects such as the Detroit Plan mentioned earlier upended home and community spaces for Black residents in Detroit. In Cleveland, for example, the homes in a Black neighborhood between East 40th and East 50th were demolished and replaced with more expensive housing and a host of restrictions on tenants (e.g., income requirements, prohibitions against boarders, etc.) that resulted in a markedly middle class residential make up (Kerr, 2011, pp. 99–101). In both Cleveland and Detroit, the result of federally backed renewal programs for Black families was overcrowded, run down housing often miles from their original homes and communities. And when Black workers moved north to cities like Cleveland and Detroit, they faced hostility and violence at the hands of White residents. Restrictive covenants shut off certain areas to potential Black homeowners. White homeowners’ associations used intimidation tactics and direct violence to deter Black families from moving into areas rhetorically and physically marked “white” (Sugrue, 1996).

Coupled with personalization, the frame of strategic forgetting promotes a sanitized understanding of urban renewal without a history that would fill in the story of city abandonment that elicited regeneration in the first place. Strategic forgetting effaces the histories of ethnic and minority groups who built self-sustaining communities with their own groceries, bodegas, barbershops, and churches, all of which maintained vitality until they were bulldozed to make way for upscale businesses and housing. The notion of the vacated, boarded-up downtown hangs suspended in time as though there were no forces creating the decimation and as if there was no community activity prior to their decimation. To gain a sense of the community networks, family histories, and local businesses that occupied city spaces prior to capital and White flight, press accounts would have to include the voices of long-time Black and Latino/a residents. In contrast, stories of urban crisis and renewal relied on the perspectives of developers, entrepreneurs, and lenders who were granted moral authority over spaces occupied by long-time residents.

Conclusion: Missing Histories

The following analysis expands studies of the mainstream media and race by analyzing how news framings of urban crisis and renewal deflect attention away from a longstanding history of race and racism in urban growth and renewal. News frames that personalize and omit or “forget” operate ideologically to provide a cover for racism, a way to “refuse race” (Goldberg, 2009) through a supposed color-blind celebration of urban renewal. The corporate media’s imperative for the simplistic and formulaic—as in personal stories—over the complex and contradictory goes hand in glove with antiracialism’s color-blind renderings of urban practices and policies that “cannibalize” memory (Zelizer, 2011, p. 29).

Zelizer (1992) reminds us remembering—and I add, forgetting—is a political process, one that plays out in mainstream media. Given the role cultural memory plays in supporting dominant understandings of race/racism in America, scholars must continue to explore how the media utilize memory as a conceptual frame of both selection and deflection.

Michael Eric Dyson (2003) notes “one of the most powerful ways of challenging and ultimately destroying the…myth of white superiority is to unearth sites of resistive memory, history, and practice” (p. 119). Future studies may explore how residents deploy “black critical memory” (Reyes, 2010) in order to challenge official public memory particularly in collective efforts to resist gentrification and displacement due to renewal. For instance, we may find robust counterarguments to the supposed benefits of urban renewal in the rhetoric of long-time residents, which may be accessed by exploring noncorporate media outlets and social media platforms. Critical scholars, then, may explore how counter-memory is steeped in space and location (Zelizer, 1995) and competes with dominant news narratives that serve as the authoritative accounting of past and present symbolic iterations of the city.