Abstract
This essay explores the mapping of power geometries as public rhetoric within People’s Tribune’s coverage of Benton Harbor, Michigan. In doing so, the essay demonstrates three techniques for mapping power geometries: that they (a) oscillate between spatial scales, thereby managing a tension between framing place as unique and common to a broader geography; (b) articulate regions so as to locate the power dynamics of the nation; and (c) connect the place to a power geometry of resistance. Mapping power geometries also enables the production of a multi-scalar public: a set of strangers who understand their relationship to each other through a shared, yet differentiated, connection to variously scaled issues. The analysis consequently contributes to existing literature regarding spatial scale, the use of place-based argument in social movement rhetoric, and the formation of multi-scalar publics.
On August 15, 2010, around 100 people marched through Benton Harbor, Michigan, to protest the opening of the Jack Nicklaus–designed golf course, which is the centerpiece of the Harbor Shores project (Hunter, 2010). The Whirlpool Corporation funded the development, which in addition to the focal point golf course, included significant lakefront real estate and a luxury hotel. The corporation touted the project as initiating economic development. The protestors, however, contextualized Harbor Shores within a much different history and set of meanings: the development represented another instance of the colonization of Benton Harbor, a poor, majority-Black city, by a global corporation whose workers mostly live in St. Joseph, the upper-middle-class, majority-White city across the river. The fact that, corresponding to the building of Harbor Shores, Whirlpool closed its last manufacturing plant in Benton Harbor, laying off 216 workers, rendered any claim to economic development irrelevant.
Speakers focused on Benton Harbor as both a unique place and as a city connected to a broader socio-spatial terrain of struggle. New Orleans activist Belinda Brown told the crowd, “All is not well here in Benton Harbor . . . We know that Whirlpool started this 40 years ago . . . They corrupt our school system, they took away our hospital,” and then responded to an audience member’s contribution by repeating, “genocidal murder is being committed” (Shelley, 2010a). Other speakers maintained that the struggle against Whirlpool in Benton Harbor requires connecting multiple cities. Ron Scott of the Detroit Coalition against Police Brutality explained, We will not allow another drop of Whirlpool oil to take the land of the people . . . this week, in downtown Detroit, they’re talking about taking the land right on the water, they’re talking about taking the land in every major city in this country. (Shelley, 2010c)
Larry Pinkney, the brother of protest leader, Benton Harbor resident, and long-standing critic of Whirlpool, Rev. Edward Pinkney, told the audience, “you must link the issues . . . The struggle in Benton Harbor is the struggle that’s being carried out across this nation. Understand that this is not only about Benton Harbor” (Shelley, 2010b). For the speakers, countering the Whirlpool corporation required connecting Benton Harbor to other places and, ultimately, scaling those places up to locate a problem at the level of the nation.
A relatively small town in the southwest corner of Michigan, the struggle in Benton Harbor includes far more than the construction of Harbor Shores. Although Benton Harbor long thrived as a manufacturing city, by the 1980s, much of the manufacturing jobs and local tax base disappeared. Dumke (2005) explains that the last time the city’s unemployment rate was below 10 percent was September 1973, when it was 9 percent—still extraordinarily high by American standards . . . between a fifth and a half of Benton Harbor adults trying to find work are jobless—and have been, every single day, every single month, for a full generation. (p. 47)
In 2003, in response to a few nights of protest, the Benton Harbor police force received a US$25,000 grant from the United Way, supplying gas masks and riot gear, over US$500,000 from local donors to hire more officers, and a US Department of Justice grant that resulted in the placement of eight local officers in city high schools. Shortly after the protests, Whirlpool dedicated itself to building the Harbor Shores golf course and real estate development, framing the move as a revitalization of the city (Dumke, 2005). Tax cuts for Whirlpool and the globalization and automation of labor have decimated the tax base, and, rather than increase corporate taxes, in 2010 the state of Michigan, through various iterations of its “emergency manager” law, placed Benton Harbor, like Flint and Detroit public schools, under the control of a state-appointed manager who reduced city services (Stanley, 2016). The struggle in Benton Harbor requires taking action against organizational and human actors operating at different spatial scales and in complex networks.
The opening account of the Harbor Shores protest points to the importance of mapping power geometries to contesting the scales of power that intersect in Benton Harbor. For Massey (1991), the concept of power geometries accompanies a global, or progressive sense of place. From this perspective, any place forms a site in which multiple scales and trajectories of power—ranging from the relatively global to the relatively local—meet up and become entangled. Massey (1991) writes, what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalised history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus . . . each “place” can be seen as a particular, unique, point of their intersection. It is, indeed, a meeting place. (p. 28)
Thus, maintaining a global sense of place involves an affective attachment to a local site, but that attachment remains decidedly extroverted, or built upon a “consciousness of [the place’s] links with the wider world” (p. 28). The process of mapping power geometries, then, involves drawing outward the “real relations with real content—economic, political, cultural—between any local place and the wider world in which it is set” (pp. 28–29). Although Massey created the concept of power geometries in the early 1990s, and social movements such as the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela have even included the concept as a revolutionary slogan, communication studies still lack explorations of the mapping of power geometries as a rhetorical practice of social movements that helps build publics around a topic of shared concern (Massey, 2008).
In this essay, I explore the mapping of power geometries as a practice of public rhetoric central to the struggle in Benton Harbor. I analyze the ways People’s Tribune, a socialist Chicago newspaper that has been covering Benton Harbor for over a decade, and in particular essays written in the newspaper by movement leader Rev. Edward Pinkney, map connections between Benton Harbor and the wider world in which it is set. Essays in People’s Tribune demonstrate three techniques for mapping power geometries: (a) oscillating between spatial scales, thereby managing a tension between framing place as unique and framing place as common to a broader geography; (b) articulating regions so as to locate the power dynamics of the nation; and (c) connecting the place to a power geometry of resistance and counter-struggle. In doing so, these power geometries enable the production of a multi-scalar public: a set of strangers who understand their relationship to each other through a shared, yet differentiated, connection to variously scaled issues, from the hyper-local to the intensely global. The essay thus contributes to literature regarding the use of place-based argument in protest rhetoric (e.g., Endres & Senda-Cook, 2011) by presenting the mapping of power geometries as a practice designed to build publics around a multi-scalar sense of place. I begin by contextualizing the case of Benton Harbor and People’s Tribune’s coverage of the city. I then argue for the need to explore activist rhetoric through the tripartite lens of power geometries, spatial scale, and place-based rhetoric. Finally, I map power geometries in the discourse contained in People’s Tribune, with particular attention to the three aforementioned dimensions. I conclude by identifying the implications of this research and directions for future scholarship.
The social struggle in Benton Harbor
A little over a one-and-a-half-hour drive from Chicago and nearly three from Detroit, Benton Harbor is a small town with global significance. On a local level, Benton Harbor remains divided by a river from the majority-White St. Joseph, exemplifying the ways that “the materiality of the environment is racialized by contemporary demographic patterns as shaped by historical precedents” (McKittrick & Woods, 2007, p. 3). This “complicated mix of racism and economics” (Dumke, 2005, p. 45), which has shaped the city and its relations with the broader Berrien County, operates, as Louise Seamster (2016) explains, through a contradictory regulation of Benton Harbor citizens’ mobility: citizens experience both a restricted movement formed from the metaphorical walls around the city and a forced movement that restricts access to the city’s aesthetically pleasing landscapes. For Seamster (2016), material and discursive conditions, including intergenerational poverty and the Berrien County legal system, work to limit the mobility of Benton Harbor citizens. At the same time, other actors, including Whirlpool and governmental officials, enter the city to displace the residents, creating a contradiction in White philosophies regarding Benton Harbor. That is, the same actors who argue that the city needs to be contained and isolated—materialized, for instance, by the presence of the Berrien County jail right across the bridge, welcoming drivers as they move from Benton Harbor to St. Joseph—also argue that improvement to the city will only occur with the entrance of White external actors. Thus, the borders should remain open, but only for the selective entrance of what Seamster calls the White urban regime, a group of corporate executives, local officials, and philanthropists who reproduce inequalities in the city to profit from those very struggles (Seamster, 2016).
Benton Harbor also became an early site for Michigan’s experimentation with its emergency management law. Unique among all states, although common to conservatives’ broader efforts in the Midwest region, “Michigan has become the proving ground for neoliberal expansion and the taking of critically important social resources for private gain” (Fasenfest & Pride, 2016, p. 331). Central to this practice is the appointment of emergency managers through Public Acts 4 and 436. Public Act 4 extended an earlier bill, Public Act 72 of 1990. After voters voted down P.A. 4 through referendum, the state quickly replaced the act with a nearly identical one, P.A. 436 (Stanley, 2016). P.A. 4 and 436 greatly extended the capacities of the state-appointed emergency financial manager, giving governor-appointed officials the capacity to completely remove the legislative capacities of democratically elected local governments (Stanley, 2016). Emergency managers can break union contracts, grant social services contracts to private companies, and fire large numbers of public employees.
In general, Public Acts 4 and 436 targeted majority-Black cities. As Lee, Krings, Rose, Dover, Ayoub, and Salman explain, although “African Americans comprised 14% of Michigan’s population,” an incredibly high “51% of African Americans in Michigan were under an emergency manager at some point from 2008-2013” (Lee et al., 2016, p. 4). The non-Hispanic White population, on the other hand, comprised 76.6% of Michigan residents, but only 2.4% were under the control of an emergency manager (Lee et al., 2016). These statistics indicate broad assumptions about race and democracy. As Stanley (2016) explains, “Black majority cities in Michigan were starved of funds, creating crises, which were labeled ‘financial emergencies.’ These crises were linked . . . to images of out of control and corrupt Black citizens, unable to self-govern or manage their own affairs” (p. 5). In the case of Benton Harbor, members of the White urban regime transformed these broad discourses about race and democracy into specific rhetorics that located Benton Harbor’s struggles solely in the practices of its city leaders while positioning Whirlpool and others as benevolent outsiders (Seamster, 2016). Emergency management in Benton Harbor immediately followed the leasing of the public beach to Harbor Shores and resulted, among other implications, in a complete removal of the power of locally elected officials, the laying off of public workers, a reduction in public services, and the privatization (like Flint) of the city’s water management (Davey, 2011).
This overview, although brief, points to the ways that multiple trajectories of power—from local relations with St. Joseph and Berrien County to the policies of the state of Michigan and the transnational logics, policies, and practices of neoliberalism—intersect in Benton Harbor to generate a precarious geography. In response, the struggle in Benton Harbor has continued to grow. Rev. Edward Pinkney and People’s Tribune remain central figures in the struggle against these forces in Benton Harbor. Since moving to the city in the 1990s, Pinkney continues to be a prominent activist voice, critiquing Whirlpool, the state of Michigan, and the local governments of Benton Harbor and Berrien County. Multiple times, the Berrien County court sentenced Pinkney to prison on felony charges—once for embezzlement, another for breaking probation by quoting a biblical scripture in a newspaper, and a third due to supposedly altering dates on a recall petition. Each time, the charges and trial occurred after Pinkney made significant progress in the local struggle against Whirlpool and Berrien County (Bassett, 2016). Nonetheless, Pinkney continues to publish essays in People’s Tribune, as he has done since 2006. Pinkney’s rhetoric, and People’s Tribune’s broader coverage of the city, offer opportunities to enrich our understanding of the intersections between place and activist rhetoric, as well as the ways that publics can become built around a multi-scalar sense of power relations.
Rhetoric, place, power geometries, and scale
I define rhetoric as multi-modal social persuasion oriented toward the constitution, maintenance, and transformation of public life, including identity, relationships, and policy. Because a system of communication (linguistic, audible, and visual) forms a “public grammar,” featuring a “social basis of reference,” the mere use of rhetoric implies identification with the social (Burke, 1959, p. 342). At the same time, modes of persuasion rework the social in specific ways by soliciting communion between people previously thought to be strangers, or dividing up people previously identified as part of a collective (Burke, 1959). It is in this sense that rhetoric’s orientation to public life involves not just influence on policy, but also identity and relationships: rhetoric facilitates the formation of publics, social movements, counterpublics, and coalitions (Chávez, 2011; Warner, 2002), the unification of a group through division from a common “enemy” (Burke, 1959), and the constitution of identity categories that make and remake people’s relationship to each other and the state, including what counts as “normal” or “deviant” (Cherney, 2011; Foucault, 1995). One way to rhetorically cultivate public identities and relationships involves the circulation of linguistic descriptions and visual imagery that evoke senses of place.
Rhetorical studies consider the relationship between place and rhetoric in a number of ways. Although much scholarship emphasizes places as material modes of persuasion, or the way specific sites such as monuments, memorials, and sites of protest combine material affectivity with symbolic meanings (e.g., Blair et al., 2010), other scholarship emphasizes the ways linguistic descriptions and visual imagery frame, make, or evoke senses of place to facilitate identifications and move others to action (e.g., Endres & Senda-Cook, 2011). In the context of protest rhetoric, for instance, Endres and Senda-Cook (2011) explore the practice of place-based argument, or the ways in which social movement discourse draws upon a sense of place to convince audiences to organize and take action. This might occur, for instance, through the use of wilderness photography to evoke experiences of the sublime (DeLuca & Demo, 2000). The rhetorical study of mapping also contributes to the study of how discourse shapes, makes, and frames place. For instance, studies of counter-mapping demonstrate how cartographic rhetoric—building maps that create connections between local sites—can frame places to motivate collective behavior (Barney, 2019). Na’puti (2019), for instance, studies how re-mapping efforts performed by residents of the Marianas contest the framing of the islands as land surfaces for US militarization. An emphasis on oceanic places as fluid and containing cultural histories remains particularly important to these re-mappings. Dempsey, Parker, and Krone connect the study of social movement communication to spatial scale by demonstrating how the rhetoric of transnational feminist movements negotiate the spatial tension between emphasizing particularities/differences and generalities/commonalities. In doing so, the movement actors construct a scaled sense of place that enables coalition-building (Dempsey et al., 2011).
Nonetheless, scholarship on mapping power geometries as a specific, place-based mode of activist rhetoric remains comparatively marginal. Communication and rhetorical scholars have certainly utilized Massey’s approach to space and place. Chávez (2009), for instance, remaps Latinidad to temporarily center Latinx subjects in non-urban, non-border rural spaces, understanding those places as both a part of, but unique from, a broader topography. This approach, termed performance cartography, uses storytelling to “map space and the subjectivities and identities it produces” (p. 168). In a separate article, Chávez again uses Massey’s approach to place to explore the case of Victoria Arellano, a transgender HIV-positive Mexican migrant who died while in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention in 2007. Through the case, Chávez demonstrates how places play an important role in both the reiteration and subversion of gender norms (Chávez, 2010). Shome (2003), moreover, explores the U.S.-Mexico border through Massey’s understanding of the constitutive power of space. Shome (2003) formulates a spatial approach to critical communication studies that attends to how operations of power work through particular spaces and constitutes identities out of those spatial arrangements. This scholarship has undoubtedly offered productive contributions to the critical communication study of space and place. However, these essays generally position the critic or the author as the subject doing the mapping of a place’s formative links to an external world of power operations (e.g., Baeten, 2000; McAlister, 2010). As such, there remains a need to connect the study of place in activist rhetoric with the study of power geometries, exploring what power geometries actually look like when developed within social movements as a mode of cultivating social relations, building publics and counterpublics, and ultimately influencing policy. Thus, through the case of Benton Harbor, I ask: What do we learn about the intersections of place and activist rhetoric by exploring how activists map power geometries as part of movement rhetoric?
When exploring this question, it is particularly important to remain attentive to issues of spatial scale. As Fraser (2010) explains, “sensitivity to scale . . . is sin qua non for understanding, let alone overcoming, core injustices in the twenty-first century” (p. 363). For Fraser, thinking about issues of (in)justice through spatial scale maintains importance for two reasons. First, different practices of power and injustice are most appropriately mapped at different scales: In our time, injustices are routinely mapped in a plurality of different scales. Some injustices, such as the US government’s abdication of its responsibilities to the (largely non-white) victims of Hurricane Katrina, are situated squarely on the national scale. Others, such as that same government’s practice of extra-legal “rendition,” whereby suspected terrorists are kidnapped and flown secretly to foreign locations for interrogation (read “torture”), are more plausibly located on a broader, transnational scale. Still others, such as the rise throughout the Global South of mega-slums utterly cut off from formal work, are credibly imagined, even more broadly, on a global scale. (Fraser, 2010, p. 364)
Second, a single issue might require thinking through the intersection of differently scaled operations of power as they intersect within a place or policy. Thinking about wildfires in the western United States, for instance, entails attention to the specificities of local place, the national policies of the United States, and the global crisis of climate change. Thus, attending to, and working to overcome, issues of localized injustices often requires connecting a local practice to multiple historical operations of power that function at multiple space scales. I consequently ask: how do power geometries, generated and mobilized in social movement rhetoric, facilitate attention to, and oscillation between, multiple scales of power as they intersect in a single place?
Such a practice should also produce a multi-scalar public. Stephenson (2019) argues that an appropriate conceptualization of the global public sphere might be “neither a unified communication space at the global scale nor a networked public driven by the personalized . . . communication practices of individuals” (p. 356). Instead, Stephenson maintains, “it is perhaps better conceptualized as an always-emergent formation, responsive to shifting contexts and needs, made up of multiple, overlapping public spheres at different scales” (p. 356). In such cases, the content of mediated communication, directed at the issues around which publics congregate, can maintain a place-based orientation even as it also introduces “imaginaries of the global” (p. 350). Such communication practices, Stephenson argues, can produce an “affective investment in the idea of globality,” which in turn becomes “an important factor in the constitution of global publics” (p. 350). Thus, it should be reasonable that publics and counterpublics, as self-organized groups of strangers brought into being through common attention to texts featuring both personal and impersonal modes of address and which either reinforce (publics) or counter (counterpublics) the normative conditions of the public sphere (Basnet, 2019; Squires, 2002; Warner, 2002), could be oriented around the multi-scalar character of issues of public concern. Moreover, mapping power geometries, and thus a place’s multi-scalar relations with the wider world, might form a mode of address capable of generating such a multi-scalar (counter-)public by inviting readers or viewers to consider their shared, yet differentiated, stake in place and the external power relations from which the place is formed and to which it remains connected. My final question thus reads: how does the mapping of power geometries invite the constitution of a multi-scalar public?
To answer these questions, I turn to the public rhetoric about Benton Harbor performed by People’s Tribune, and in particular essays written by Rev. Edward Pinkney. As evidenced by the protest speeches in the introduction, the case of Benton Harbor offers a very strong opportunity to explore questions of place, power geometries, and the production of multi-scalar publics. I began my exploration of this case through a process of “abduction,” or a back and forth movement between text and theoretical concepts (Jasinski, 2001, p. 256). I collected articles contained in the “Voices from Benton Harbor” section on People’s Tribune’s website. I also searched the website using the words “Benton Harbor.” In total, I printed 76 articles published between 2005 and 2017, ranging from brief updates to multi-page opinion pieces. I then began reading the articles, looking specifically for the ways the authors framed a sense of place. This led to the concept of power geometries as a central theoretical concept since I began to note that authors framed place in relation to its external connections. With the concept as a critical framework, I then returned to the texts to develop three themes of the power geometries: (a) oscillating between spatial scales, (b) articulating regions so as to locate the power dynamics of the nation, and (b) connecting the place to a broader power geometry of resistance. I selected representative examples to include in the analysis. My goal was not to address the totality of the case, suggesting that all articles in this corpus map power geometries as a mode of rhetorical address; rather, I aimed to demonstrate how maps of power geometries function as a mode of public-building rhetorical address by assessing and parsing out the corpus in the context of that framework. Finally, with the theme of scale specifically, I began to consider theoretical literature related to scalar publics and the scalar condition of public issues in a global society, offering more nuance to the theoretical framework I used to analyze this case. In what follows, I provide my analysis of the ways essays in People’s Tribune map power geometries to invite the production of multi-scalar publics.
Mapping power geometries in People’s Tribune
Oscillating between spatial scales
Rev. Pinkney’s essay, “Build a Society where the People, Not Corporations, Make the Decisions,” is illustrative of rhetoric that maps Benton Harbor as a point where differently scaled systems of power intersect. The essay begins at a local level: “The Whirlpool Corporation and government joined together to destroy the people of Benton Harbor” (Pinkney, 2015, para. 1). He then names that system as “fascism,” which locates the city of Benton Harbor in relation to an operation of power unfolding at the level of the nation: “We call it fascism. It is part of the process underway across America in various forms” (Pinkney, 2015, para. 1). However, accounting for injustices in Benton Harbor also means tracing the city’s relationship to a system of power that works at a global level. Pinkney (2015) writes, We live in a failed system. Capitalism has no solution to poverty. It does not permit an even flow of resources . . . It is like a monstrous octopus, spreading its nagging tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world . . . It is in Latin America, Africa, Asia and right here at home in Benton Harbor, Michigan. (Paras 2–3)
Pinkney further explains that transformations in capitalist production, including “automation and globalization,” devastated “the once stable working class of Benton Harbor,” and Benton Harbor citizens began to resist. In response, an alliance between local government and Whirlpool, a cross-sector alliance common to American fascism, became mobilized “to contain the struggle” (Pinkney, 2015, para. 1). Benton Harbor represents a place where American fascism meets the transnational terrain of global capitalism, which intersect with the politics of Berrien County.
Another example occurs in Pinkney’s essay, “Standing Together for a New America.” Pinkney (2014a) demonstrates how Benton Harbor connects to differently scaled systems of power: The USA proclaims itself the “land of freedom,” but the reality is we live under the world’s most corrupt legal system. It has rigged courts, bribed judges, phony trials, extortion by lawyers, and over two million prisoners . . . The truth is hidden by America’s corporate owned media, and by Berrien County’s media. They are all afraid to tell the truth about Michigan’s Emergency Manager system where rule is without the consent of the governed. (Para. 1)
By developing connections between Michigan’s Emergency Management law, the media of Berrien County, national media, and a national legal system, Pinkney immediately locates Benton Harbor within a multi-scalar terrain of power. He then elaborates on this power geometry in two ways. First, he explains how Benton Harbor remains controlled by a “transitional team” (designed to transition out of emergency management), a group that combines multiple scales of power: “The team includes two former Whirlpool employees, one county treasurer, and a member of the State Treasury Department” (Pinkney, 2014a, para. 2). Second, he demonstrates how, when the citizens of Benton Harbor have exercised their democratic rights to contest this regime, other actors, operating at a variety of scales, have worked to counteract that resistance. For instance, when Benton Harbor citizens recalled the city’s mayor, an effort led by Rev. Pinkney, the alliance between Whirlpool and government officials called upon “an all-white jury that may be motivated by something other than the truth” to convict Rev. Pinkney of voter fraud (Pinkney, 2014a, para. 3). Thus, when a judge decided the recall vote should be placed on the ballot, “the county clerk” and the state of Michigan’s “attorney general” challenged the decision (Pinkney, 2014a, para. 4).
Pinkney’s essay “State of Michigan Forces Greater Debt on Benton Harbor” further emphasizes this strategy. Pinkney (2014b) identifies an instance of state power: “The State of Michigan forced a $2.3 million loan down the throat of the citizens of Benton Harbor” (para. 1). He then contextualizes this action within the national and transnational scales, explaining the city in relation to the national experience of capitalism: Benton Harbor has a lot of financial problems. It is one of many cities in the Union that have lost their industrial tax base. Like other cities, the city continually bleeds residents while doling out financial give-a-ways to the corporations that remain, like the Whirlpool Corporation. Many municipalities like Benton Harbor, due to budget cuts, have abandoned their police force and many services. (Pinkney, 2014b, para. 2)
Thus, Benton Harbor, like many cities and municipalities in the nation, experienced a decreased in tax revenue due to a loss of industrial labor and corporate tax breaks that followed globalization, creating a situation of financial distress. This generates a situation wherein county and state actors intervene, reducing public services and forcing loans upon the financially distressed cities: This allows the county and State agencies to come in and take over. Governor Snyder signed an Emergency Manager bill that allows him to take over or even eliminate whole cities, schools, and locally elected officials. Then puppets are installed to help giant corporations like Whirlpool take over cities. (Pinkney, 2014b, paras. 2–3)
The mapping of power geometries enables Pinkney to locate Benton Harbor within a broader, multi-scalar geography of power relations, and thus invite the constitution of a counterpublic oriented around their shared relationship to place, which also entails relationships to systems of power operating at local, county, state, national, and global scales.
Articulating regions to locate a problem at the level of the nation
Although oscillating between scales represents an important component of mapping power geometries, multi-scalar publics might also need, at times, to organize around a single scale of power, thereby making claims for justice at one specific level of a multi-scalar public sphere. Essays in People’s Tribune do precisely this, indicating the ways the specific place of Benton Harbor can be understood in relation to what occurs on a national scale. In an editorial entitled “Michigan and the Country: The Struggle is for Life Itself,” the editors of People’s Tribune (2015) write, Babies in American go hungry while 442 billionaires wallow in wealth. A powerful movement for food, housing, water and other necessities is arising. Everywhere, the people are coming into conflict with a murderous police state that stands in the way of the movement achieving its demands. Michigan is an example. Here, the once stable working class cities are shattered by automation and globalization. As the people struggle for their needs, the police, the watchdogs of the private property of the billionaires—who are the owners of the corporations that have taken over the government and our nation—rear their head. (Para. 1)
The editors affect a movement from the nation to the scale of the state, but the state functions primarily as an example of the broader national power. The editorial continues to discuss specific cities, including Benton Harbor and Flint, but the focus remains on the cities as particular (even if early) instances of a more general phenomenon: The largely Black cities are the starting point for the dismantling of democracy, but the real target is the whole working class and the whole of society. Already the emergency manager system has reached 17 municipalities and school districts in Michigan. Now, this model is appearing in other states, too. (2015, para. 6)
One way of zeroing in on a national scale is to develop connections between different regions, thereby emphasizing the way a region’s characteristics, rather than unique to that scale, represent a national phenomenon. Pinkney frequently connects the Midwest and Southeast. In “Benton Harbor and Jena, Louisiana are one and the Same,” Pinkney (2007) develops a connection between the two cities to map a common geography of criminalization. Pinkney connects his own voter fraud trial in Benton Harbor to the case of the Jena 6 in Louisiana where six Black students were convicted of attempted murder during a schoolyard fight despite violent provocations by White students, including hanging nooses from a tree and designating another tree as “Whites only.” The Black students, not the White students, were prosecuted. As he writes, There are a thousand cities and towns in this country that openly practice racism—- the case of the Jena 6, is no different than the voter fraud case of Rev. Edward Pinkney in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Both cases are only two that prove that racism is alive and well in the United States of America . . . The problems we face are racism and all-white juries . . . All too frequently, white juries find guilt beyond a reasonable doubt when the defendant is Black. It is an indication that white juries normally violate the sanctity of their oath and are usually motivated by something other than the pursuit of truth and justice. (2007, para. 1)
Pinkney embeds Benton Harbor within a national map of all-White juries. The connection Pinkney develops between the regions of the Southeast and the Midwest enables him to argue that, rather than unique to a specific region of the United States, the use of all-White juries to uphold systemic racism remains common to the networked geography of the nation.
Pinkney (2017) further employs this rhetorical strategy in an essay entitled “Charlottesville: We Must Organize the People.” First, he locates the problem at the scale of the nation. He writes that he is “challenged that many of my fellow Americans are not surprised by the actions of this country’s leadership and the growth of the racist, anti-Semitic marchers” (para. 1). He then locates the issue at a more precisely regional scale: “Charlottesville, 2017, shined no different light than Birmingham, 1963 . . . I see that Charlottesville, Virginia, showed us unequivocally that confederate statues, confederate monuments, and symbols offer pre-existing acts of racism” (Pinkney, 2017, para. 2). However, despite mapping some of the specificities of the Southeastern region, Pinkney then identifies the ways that such racism is in fact more appropriately a national phenomenon common to the United States by connecting the Southeast to the Midwest: “I personally found that when opportunities were measured, including education levels and poverty, Michigan, Mississippi, and Wisconsin were three states at the bottom for providing opportunities for Blacks” (para. 6). This leads to the rhetorical strategy that guides the essay. Pinkney locates systemic racism not just in the region of the southeast, but in the broader nation by making a rhetorical movement from the confederacy to the United States: I personally feel that General Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson statues, the confederate flag and all other confederate symbols should be removed. But if we are going to protest the confederate symbols and flag, we should also protest the American flag, the red, white, and blue, because Black people have caught just as much Hell under the red, white and blue as the confederate flag and symbols. (2017, para. 7)
Rather than simply the history of its Southeastern region, the nation remains the scale at which racial injustices should be mapped. In these geometries, Benton Harbor, as a city within the Midwest region that is equated with the Southeast, becomes positioned as a specific manifestation of a system of power that is most appropriately mapped at the national scale. In doing so, the counterpublic being constituted around multiple scales of power can become, when necessary, focused almost exclusively on battling the power relations of the nation-state.
Power geometries of resistance
Finally, power geometries in People’s Tribune also connect Benton Harbor to broader terrains of struggle to develop power geometries of resistance. If Benton Harbor can be understood through its embeddedness in a broader terrain of power unfolding at multiple scales, then the people’s efforts to resist can also be understood in relation to a broader topography.
The year 2011, with its cycle of transnational uprisings, for instance, provided a particularly strong moment for developing connections between Benton Harbor and a broader terrain of social struggle. Moon (2011) connects Benton Harbor to the struggle in Egypt: “We must stand up and fight like the Egyptian people did!” (para. 1). Rev. Edward Pinkney (2011) connects the struggle in Benton Harbor to the uprising in Wisconsin, writing “The laborers are finally taking on a new vitality. Unionists and their supporters are winning big fights in Wisconsin. The U.A.W. has taken up social justice and the world is rapidly changing” (para. 1). The editors similarly point to the connections between Benton Harbor and Wisconsin, but they do so to highlight a disjuncture between the two sites in terms of their place in left-wing activism: When the Public Sector Unions came under attack in Wisconsin, it created a fire-storm as it should have. Labor unions and progressives rallied to defined the unions of the public service workers. The American Left is rooted in and responds to the economic struggles of the unions. Meanwhile, corporate power moved swiftly and decisively to destroy democracy in Benton Harbor—a poor Black community that few care about. (Editors of the People’s Tribune, 2011, para. 3)
In all of these cases, the broader struggle in 2011 creates an opportunity for activists writing in People’s Tribune to connect their local struggle to a broader national and transnational terrain of resistance, pointing to both the resonances between the local, the national, and the transnational, and the disjuncture between those scales and spaces. It also, however, orients the Benton Harbor counterpublic to the broader counterpublics of which they are both a part of and apart from.
Many essays also map Benton Harbor in relation to a broader struggle against corporate colonization. An essay entitled “The Corporations vs. the People: What Will it Take to Win” begins by pointing to a broader national struggle against the corporate control of government and the privatization of the commonwealth: The people are standing up to corporations across America, and the corporate state is on the rampage, trying to contain them. The situation appears bleak, but the people also have the opportunity to take the next step forward in their fight to break the corporate stranglehold on America. (Editors of the People’s Tribune, 2014, para. 1)
The editorial then suggests that both resistance to the corporate state and efforts to subdue that resistance are appearing everywhere, before spending multiple paragraphs on the case of Benton Harbor and the trial of Rev. Edward Pinkney. The editorial then concludes by drawing this back out into a broader socio-spatial terrain of resistance: The people must go on the offensive and build a mass movement for a new society. Whether it is defending our leaders in Michigan, confronting police violence in Albuquerque, demanding our needs be met through the moral Mondays demonstrations, or the occupy gatherings, we must confront the ruling class without flinching. (Editors of the People’s Tribune, 2014, para. 8)
To understand Benton Harbor, one has to understand the ways the city connects to a broader terrain of social struggle, and see oneself as consequently a part of a multi-scalar public.
Conclusion
The case of Benton Harbor, and the rhetoric of Reverend Edward Pinkney, demonstrates how maps of power geometries function in complex rhetorical situations that require organizing against differently scaled actors. Systems of power that belong to, or enlist actors at, city, county, state, regional, national, and global scales meet up in Benton Harbor to create precarious living conditions for many of its residents. The rhetoric of Rev. Edward Pinkney, and related essays published in People’s Tribune, map these intersecting networks, and, in doing so, organize counterpublics around a progressive sense of place. This place-based rhetoric solicits action from readers by developing a common understanding of Benton Harbor as a place where multiple socio-spatial relations meet up and interact, specifically highlighting the scale of the nation, which includes connecting disparate regions, and locating Benton Harbor within a broader topography of resistance, thereby generating readers who might see themselves as part of multi-scalar counterpublics.
This essay extends our understanding of place-based discourse in rhetorical studies by understanding how the discursive mapping of power geometries functions as activist rhetoric. Although scholars have employed the concept of power geometries to map relations between a place and its broader socio-spatial terrain of power, we still lack models of what such power geometries actually look like as a rhetorical practice within social movements. This essay offered one such account through the work of Rev. Edward Pinkney and People’s Tribune coverage of Benton Harbor, Michigan. Moreover, this essay demonstrates the importance of scaling as a rhetorical component of power geometries. Rhetorics of place might benefit from the kind of scaling practiced in the rhetoric studied here: oscillating between scales while also focusing on one particular scale when necessary. Doing so offers a flexible and thorough mapping of the ways that different scales of power intersect in a single place to reproduce injustice. Finally, the essay demonstrates the ways that mapping power geometries invites a multi-scalar public, a group of strangers, united through a common text, that understand their common place-based identity as related to multiple operations of power and resistance unfolding at multiple scales.
Future scholarship can continue to consider how framing specific places in light of their relation to a broader terrain of power and resistance adds to our understanding of place-based rhetoric in social movement struggles. In particular, future work might consider other questions of spatial scale, such as how figures—synecdoche or metonymy—enable oscillation between multiple spatial scales, or how digital tools enable visually oriented oscillations. Scholars should also consider longitudinal studies that demonstrate the ways activist rhetoric shifts the counter public it produces between different scales over time, according to changing issues. In all, activist discourse about Benton Harbor contributes to existing literature regarding the use of place-based argument in movement rhetoric and provides a deeper exploration of activists’ attempts to ensure their survival, as well as that of democracy and public life, in a precarious geography.
