Abstract
Spatializing Blackness merits attention from those interested in the dynamic relationship(s) between race, gender, urbanization, punishment, and place. Readers of this journal, in particular, will find much to consider and admire. The book is described as “a historical geographic study of race and gender” (p. 3), but it is interdisciplinary in nature and it is written in refreshingly accessible academic prose. Shabazz argues that carceral power in Chicago—manifest in a multitude of architectural, policing, surveillance, and imprisoning techniques—has served to “spatialize blackness” in specific ways during the past 125 years. If the book is “concerned with tracing the emergence of carceral power and the implications of that spatial form over time” (p. 4), it is because those implications are so disconcerting. For Shabazz, the racialized and gendered consequences of this carceral power are unambiguously dire. His analysis is placed on Black Chicago’s South Side, where a long century of segregation, wars on vice and crime, and subsequent rounds of concentrated poverty, imprisonment, and disease have all too often caused death and suffering.
Spatializing Blackness is an intentionally—and intensely—personal academic endeavor. This is a major strength of the text, in my view. Shabazz tells us in the Preface that his “most important geographic lessons… came from growing up in Chicago” (p. vii). He concludes with a polemical condemnation of Chicago’s carceral power and its abuses that is told through anecdotal readings of contemporary neighborhood transitions (e.g., a neighborhood is described as having gentrified and become “hipster chic” (p. 114)). If Chicago is the formally defined case study in question, Spatializing Blackness also hints at an autobiographically informed tone in places. For example, Chapter Four opens with the details of a tragic murder. Shabazz writes, “How could an eleven-year-old boy kill a fourteen-year-old girl, we asked” (p. 76, emphasis added)? Similar personal touches throughout the text help to convey Shabazz’s deep humanistic sensibilities alongside his more abstract arguments about socio-spatial structure (more on these structural arguments in a moment).
The book consists of five central chapters, with a Preface, Introduction, Acknowledgements, and Conclusion. The first of the central chapters (pp. 11–75) is designed to illustrate the establishment and implementation of carceral power in 20th century Chicago. Chapter One argues that policing entered Chicago’s Black Belt as a form of carceral power in an attempt “to control interracial sex and socializing in the Black/white sex districts” (p. 11). This effectively demarcated Chicago’s segregated housing landscape along racial lines, and criminalized bodies and behaviors unequally along those same lines in years to come. Chapter Two argues that police power “migrated into the homes of Black migrants” (p. 33) within the Black Belt, and it analyzes kitchenette housing, specifically. For Shabazz, following the writings of Richard Wright and others, the kitchenette was “amenable to the expression of carceral power—particularly containment and restriction” (p. 33) and he documents the prison-like qualities of Black migrant housing—“the lurking prison or extension of carceral mechanisms into Black homes” (p. 32)—leading up to and during the use of restrictive covenants (pp. 39–42). Chapter Three analyzes postwar reactions to Black migrant housing as “planning, architecture, and security measures became the outward expressions of carceral power” (p. 56) in high-rise housing projects.
The lattermost chapters (pp. 76–113) in Spatializing Blackness are centered on the disastrous consequences of carceral power’s historical and spatial evolution in Chicago. In Chapter Four, Shabazz argues that, “the criminal justice system, where Black men have moved in and out for decades, was a masculinity-making institution … it shaped gangs and performances of Black masculinity” (p. 77). In order to adequately understand “the insidious ways prison has affected and continues to affect Black men” (p. 94), Shabazz argues that the historical and spatial context established in Chapters One through Three must be taken into account. Chapter Five examines the relationship(s) between high rates of HIV/AIDS and incarceration in Black Chicago. Here, Shabazz argues that public policies and politics created a “geography of risk” for residents of Black Chicago by concentrating exposure to HIV/AIDS in particular neighborhoods and, in turn, socio-spatially producing HIV infection (p. 98). These arguments each link disastrous personal outcomes to structural, carceral causes in compelling fashion in Spatializing Blackness, and in ways that are often woefully underappreciated in the broader literature.
I was initially frustrated with the text on two points, although upon further reflection most of my frustration stemmed from what I now view as two of the book’s greatest strengths. First, the book inspires a great many questions more than it answers. (And what more could a reader possibly ask of a good book?) “Mapping” is part of two chapter titles, yet there is not a map or any other form of geo-visualization in my copy of the book. I often found myself asking, “Yes, but what would that look like?” This type of geographic presentation and analysis was not what Shabazz had promised, in fairness, and I look forward to seeing the mapping work and visual analysis that his text no doubt inspires in others. Specifically, I am hungry and excited to see this text more fully and formally engaged with the rapidly growing subfield of carceral geography, but believe that centering the text more firmly within the discipline might have missed a large portion of its intended audience.
Second, the book makes many claims that can appear at face value to be unsubstantiated and unsupported by the evidence as presented. In hindsight, I think that this most often happens because many of the book’s arguments move from the personal and materially embodied, to the abstract and structural, scales. This is not uncommon in relational analyses, and that is precisely what Shabazz had promised his reader. With the first sentence of the first chapter, Shabazz tells us that, “This is a book about the relationship between people and place” (p. 1). The book’s commitment to explicitly relational analysis is, in my view, its central strength. For example, Shabazz instructs that “its capacity to foster relationships” is a “fundamental element of the prison industrial complex” (p. 72), and he uses that complex to relate public housing (e.g., Robert Taylor Homes), to the geography of gang violence, to the performance of masculinity, and to the geography of risk. It is the relational analytic that Shabazz seems to have internalized throughout that allows him to tether his empirical “collage of sources” (p. 3) to such a vast and ambitious array of topics, times, people, and places. He has produced, in a sense, a ‘collage of analyses’ that is purposefully provocative.
Spatializing Blackness is direct and uncompromising in staking its political claims against the harms done by carceral power against Black Chicagoans. Shabazz does not mix words or pull punches. However disheartening the subject matter may be at times, most readers will be glad they have taken this historical and geographic exploration with Shabazz. It can—and already does—inspire substantive discussion and debate in college classrooms and organizing halls alike. For example, arguments made throughout the text can be provocatively worked into curricula that engage (and challenge) debates in gang studies (e.g., “Because the social space they created was constituted within the politics of racist containment, tension, and ultimately violence, these elements became part of [the Stones gang] social world” (p. 82)); or medical geography (e.g., “The geography of risk [see above] emerged through public policies and political decisions, not internal moral failings” (p. 99)). In sum, this is a short book that ambitiously engages big, structural social problems with big, structural arguments, thoughtful personal touches, and much needed compassion.