Elijah Anderson | Vox

Black Americans are asserting their rights in “white spaces.” That’s when whites call 911.

2018-09-20T15:23:13-04:00

Protesters march past the Starbucks in Philadelphia’s Center City, where two black men were arrested for loitering, April 16. | NurPhoto/Getty Images

What is driving the surge of incidents in which white people have called the police to report black people who are simply going about their business — hanging out at Starbucks, eating lunch in a “common room” at Smith College, barbecuing in a public park?

Part of the answer has to do with the ubiquity of cell phones and social media, which allow news of racist incidents (which have always existed) to spread quickly.

Yet there is also a sociological explanation. Many white people have not adjusted to the idea that black people now appear more often in places of privilege, power, and prestige — or just places where they were historically unwelcome.

When black people do appear in such places, white people subconsciously or explicitly want to banish them to a place I have called the “iconic ghetto” — to the stereotypical space in which they think all black people belong, a segregated space for second-class citizens.

A lag between the rapidity of black progress and white acceptance of that progress is responsible for this impulse. This is also exacerbated by the current presidential administration, which has emboldened white racists with its racially charged rhetoric and exclusionist immigration policies.

The civil-rights revolution upended longstanding notions of what spaces counted as “black” and “white”

Over the past half-century, the United States has undergone a profound racial incorporation process that has resulted in the largest black middle class in history — a population that no longer feels obligated to stay in historically “black” spaces.

When members of this black middle class (and other black Americans, too) appear in civil society today, they demand a regard that accords with their rights, obligations, and duties as full citizens of the United States of America.

Yet many white people fundamentally reject that black people are owed such regard, and indeed often feel that their own rights have somehow been abrogated by contemporary racial inclusion. They seek to push back on the recent progress in race relations, and they now believe they have an ally in the White House.

As these whites observe black people navigating the “white,” privileged spaces of our society, they experience a sense of loss or a certain amount of cognitive dissonance. They may feel an acute need to “correct” what is before their eyes, to square things, or set the “erroneous” picture right — to reestablish cognitive consonance.

White people need to put the black interlopers in their place, literally and figuratively. Black people must have their behavior corrected, and they must be directed back to “their” neighborhoods and designated social spaces.

Not courageous enough to try to accomplish this feat alone, many of these self-appointed color-line monitors seek help from wherever it can be found — from the police, for instance. The “interlopers” may simply want to visit their condo’s swimming pool, something white people typically do without a second thought, or take a nap in a student dorm common room, make a purchase in an upscale store, or drive a “nice” car.

For the offense of straying — for engaging in ordinary behavior in public and being black at the same time — they incur the white gaze along with a call to the police.

In times past, before the civil rights revolution, the color line was more clearly marked. Both white and black people knew their so-called place, and for the most part, observed it. When people crossed that line — black people, anyway — they faced legal penalties or extra-judicial violence.

In those times, to live while black was to be both “free” and American, but to reside firmly within a virtual color caste — essentially, to live behind the veil, as W.E.B. DuBois put it in The Souls of Black Folk.

The role of the “iconic ghetto” in the white imagination

But social iconography is more complex today. Today, public spaces are understood by many urban dwellers as a mosaic of “black space,” “white space,” and “cosmopolitan space” — the latter referring to a relatively few virtual islands of racial civility located in a sea of segregation.

In Philadelphia, for instance, these cosmopolitan islands might include some large areas, like the Reading Terminal Market, or Rittenhouse Square, as well as smaller areas like certain coffee shops and restaurants (including some Starbucks).

In this sociological context, the urban ghetto is presumed to be, descriptively, “the place where the black people live.” But it’s also, stereotypically, a den of iniquity, a fearsome, impoverished place of social backwardness where black people perpetrate all manner of violence and crime against one another.

Between black and white space, travel usually goes in one direction. While white people usually avoid black spaces, black people are required to navigate the white spaces as a condition of their existence.

Black ghettos, and whites’ attitudes about them, emerged after slavery, and reinforced what slavery had established — that the black person’s place was at the bottom of the American racial order, the ghettos helping to fuse in the public mind lowly status with black skin.

In the minds of the white majority, the ghetto became a fixture of mental as well as physical space. Each generation of white people became socially invested in the lowly place of black people; these people understood their own identity in terms of who they opposed, and this positionality was passed on from racist generation to racist generation.

In practical terms, whites know little about the iconic ghetto and the people who inhabit it. But despite that lack of specified knowledge, for many whites, the anonymous black person in public is always implicitly associated with the urban ghetto.

The link to the ghetto is so strong that it becomes the “master status” of the typical black person, to use a term coined by sociologist E.C. Hughes. It’s the feature that most defines black people in the white imagination.

Anonymous black people — wherever they may actually live, and whatever their profession — therefore move about civil society with a deficit of credibility in comparison with their white counterparts, who are given a “pass” as decent and law-abiding citizens.

In this system, the average black person wages a constant campaign for respect, which is lost before it begins. The judges are most often the contestants who compete with black people for place and position in our increasingly pluralistic and thus rivalrous society.

To some whites, every anonymous black person belongs in the “iconic ghetto”

Thus, the issue here is not simply the white supremacy of old. It’s also a powerful new form of symbolic racism that targets black people for behaving in ordinary ways while being black at the same time.

Often these attacks seem to come out of the blue, but they are deeply rooted in the psychological unease created in many white Americans by the shift from a segregated to a desegregated society.

Strikingly, the iconic ghetto impacts the image of almost every black person — even as black Americans now inhabit all levels of the national class and occupational structure. They attend the best schools; pursue the professions of their choosing; and occupy various positions of power, privilege, and prestige.

But for black people in public, the specter of the urban ghetto always lurks. In all walks of life, the iconic ghetto hovers over American race relations, shaping the conception of the anonymous black person.

Elijah Anderson is the Lanman professor of sociology at Yale University. This essay has been adapted from his forthcoming book, Black in White Space.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart discussion of the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.

The sociological theory that explains Trump’s assumption that all black citizens live in the “inner city”

2016-10-18T09:20:19-04:00

At the second presidential debate, Donald Trump assumed a question from a black audience member was about the “inner city.” | Saul Loeb/Pool via AP

During the second presidential debate, when a well-dressed black man asked Donald Trump if he “could be president of all the people,” Trump immediately launched into his now-familiar riff about the inner cities and how terrible they are. “You go into the inner cities, it’s 45 percent poverty,” he said. “The education is a disaster. Jobs are essentially nonexistent … It can’t get worse.” Trump apparently assumed this man had come from one of the worst neighborhoods in St. Louis.

It’s a type of assumption that many American blacks are familiar with, but today, while it may be true that everyone who lives in a certain ghetto is black, it is patently untrue that everyone who is black lives in a ghetto.

Although racial differences in economic status remain a negative feature of American society, many blacks now work in a wider range of occupations than ever. Though blacks remain overrepresented in menial jobs and many inner-city black communities have been decimated by deindustrialization, racial discrimination, and the resulting “structural poverty,” the black middle class is now the largest in history.

Many black people are now thriving in professional positions where they rarely appeared before — as doctors, lawyers, professors, corporate executives, respected entertainers, professional athletes, and major elected officials. Many of these people also live in racially mixed neighborhoods from which they were once excluded; they attend some of the best schools and universities in the country, places that only recently excluded them.

But this class of black people is generally obscured in the minds of many whites, by of the omnipresence and salience of what I have called the “iconic ghetto.” In sociology, a “master status” refers to a facet of identity that serves as the primary identifying characteristic of a person. The iconic ghetto acts as a “master status” in American life, superseding whatever else a black person might claim to be. This stereotypical image of the ghetto works to define the black body as a powerful symbol in American culture — the iconic Negro.

The perils of crossing from one space into another

Educated and well-off black people are generally considered the exception, and not the rule. Thus, typically, when black people venture into the larger society — into the areas blacks generally perceive as “white space,” including corporations, universities, suburbs, and the auditoriums where presidential debates are held — the ghetto icon both follows and precedes their presence, hovering overhead and negatively affecting their relations with their fellow citizens.

This dynamic influences, if it does not outright determine, how their fellow citizens perceive and regard them — at least initially. If black people can negotiate, or “dance,” their way out of this, their status as acceptable occupants of white space is usually then only provisional. As black people, they can always have something more to prove, and almost any white person can demand such proof.

Recently, as the Washington Post reported, a black female doctor was traveling on an airplane when another passenger required medical assistance. The flight attendant, a white female, incredulous at the black doctor’s identity claims, initially declined her offer to help (“Oh, no, sweetie, put [your] hand down”). But when a white male passenger appeared and presented himself as a doctor, the flight attendant readily accepted his assistance.

Because of the legacy of American racism, but also the iconography of cities and the widely shared belief that blacks occupy only the very bottom rungs of society, many Americans are susceptible to this stereotype. This dynamic most often manifests itself in what Hillary Clinton, drawing on academic work, has called “implicit bias,” a subconscious and powerfully negative view of all black people that immediately burdens anonymous blacks with a deficit of credibility — regardless of their accomplishments or character. Thus, the ghetto icon works as a kind of yoke that all black people must navigate, or carry, as they seek regard from strangers they encounter.

As a result of historic racial segregation, including the dynamic of white flight, the wider society is replete with essentially white neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, churches, towns, and cemeteries, contributing to the dominant white sensibility.

White space, black space, and the "cosmopolitan canopy"

White Americans typically see these spaces as normal, everyday reflections of “civil society,” and may even regard them as “diverse.” But what others see as “diverse,” black people may perceive as homogeneously white and relatively privileged.

While the respective white and black spaces may appear to be racially homogeneous, typically they can be sub-classified in terms of ethnicity and social class. “White spaces,” for instance, often include not only traditional Americans of European descent but also recently arrived European immigrants and visitors as well as others who may be perceived as phenotypically “white.” Comparatively lighter-complexioned blacks, and members of some other ethnic groups, such as Asians, may be granted a pass.

Meanwhile, the people inhabiting “black space” are not always simply traditional African Americans, but may be sub-classified as African, Latino, Haitian, Caribbean, Cape Verdean, and so on. Accordingly, the racially mixed urban space, a version of which I have referred to elsewhere as “the cosmopolitan canopy,” exists as a diverse island of civility located in a virtual sea of racial segregation.

The city today can be conceptualized as white space, black space, and racially mixed space, and these spaces are typically in flux. But while white people usually avoid black space, black people are required to navigate the white space as a condition of their existence.

By definition, white people predominate in white spaces, and by implication blacks and other people of color are often absent there or when present made to feel uneasy. In the white space, the most acceptable black person is one who is either “in his place,” working as a janitor or as a service person, or one who is otherwise being vouched for by white people in good standing. Such a black person is less likely to be disturbing to the perceived racial order of the typical white setting. When the black person does not appear in a subordinate role, however, dissonance may occur.

In white space, "Can I help you?" can be an aggressive challenge

In many such spaces, black persons can expect to be racially profiled or to encounter acute disrespect on the basis of blackness. Blacks may be highly self-conscious in such settings, and may sense that they are in hostile territory even when this is not the case. The closer the ghetto, the more self-conscious the black person may feel, its proximity complicating his presence; on the outskirts of a ghetto, white people become more defensive and scrutinize the anonymous black person more thoroughly, wondering whether he or she may mean them harm.

Given the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the racial incorporation process that has produced the largest black middle class in history, blacks are now generally allowed to venture into places that are absolutely lily-white, and to expect to be present there uneventfully, often as the only black person present. But they may be mistaken for someone of menial position. Polite company may not overtly declare this as white space, which would draw unwanted attention to the observation, but some of the most marginal whites might do so, effectively drawing the color line and putting the black person in his or her “place.”

Educated and well off black people are generally considered the exception, and not the rule. Thus when black people venture into the larger society — into corporations, universities, suburbs, and the auditoriums where presidential debates are held — the ghetto icon both follows and precedes their presence.

Black people sometimes refer to such incidents as the “nigger moment,” a moment of acute disrespect based on their blackness. Such moments vary in intensity, ranging from incidents they consider to be minor to those they know to be major. Black people generally try to ignore minor incidents — yet they understand that major incidents can change their lives or even get them killed. When such a moment occurs, the black person may be so affected that his or her orientation towards the white space can be altered, at times profoundly.

Several years ago, I vacationed in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, a pleasant Cape Cod town full of upper-middle-class white vacationers, tourists, and working-class white residents. During the two weeks that my family and I spent there, I encountered very few other black people. We had rented a beautiful cottage about a mile from the town center, which consisted of a library and a few restaurants and stores catering to tourists. Early one weekday morning, I jogged down the road from our cottage through the town center and made my way to Route 6, which runs the length of the Cape from the Sagamore Bridge to Provincetown. It was a beautiful morning, about 75 degrees, with low humidity and clear blue skies. I had jogged here many times before.

At 6 am, the road was deserted, with only an occasional passing car. I was enjoying my run that morning, listening to the nature sounds and feeling a sense of serenity. It seemed I had this world all to myself. Suddenly a red pickup truck appeared and stopped dead in the middle of the road. I looked over at the driver, a middle-aged white man, who was obviously trying to communicate something to me. He was waving his hands and gesticulating, and I immediately thought he might be in distress or in need of help, but I could not make out what he was saying.

I stopped, cupped my hand to my ear to hear him better, and yelled back, “What did you say?” It was then that he made himself very clear. “Go home! Go home!” he yelled, dragging out the words to make sure I understood. I felt provoked, but I waved him off and continued on my way. Black people in white spaces commonly experience such incidents, and generally try to disregard them, but are affected by them nonetheless.

In some public white spaces, such as upscale shops or restaurants, a black person is often approached with a disingenuous question such as “Can I help you?” Most blacks, particularly young males, have experienced this question time and again; of course, it is not an actual offer of assistance but a challenge to the black person’s right to be on the premises. A more direct question might be: What are you doing here? But most defenders of such spaces prefer to be indirect in their challenges, which avoid direct insult based on skin color (and also possibly a lawsuit). Nonetheless, the perceptive black person on the receiving end of such encounters understands that he has been assigned a provisional status: One false move and the police or security will be summoned.

If black people wish to succeed, they must enter white space

Given these difficulties, many blacks approach the white space ambivalently, and usually for instrumental reasons. When possible, they may avoid it altogether or leave it as soon as possible. In exiting the white space, however, a black person can feel both relief and regret — relief for departing a stressful environment and regret for perhaps leaving prematurely. For the white space is where many social rewards originate, whether the brief pleasures of an elegant night on the town or life-course affecting sources of cultural capital: education, employment, privilege, prestige, money, and the promise of general acceptance among the successful.

To obtain these rewards, blacks must venture into the white space and explore its possibilities. To prevail, they must manage themselves within this space. But all too frequently, prejudiced actors pervade the white space and are singly or collectively interested in marginalizing the black person, actively reminding him of his outsider status.

The existence of racial segregation is a pervasive feature of American life, rooted in the assumption that whites and blacks “belong” in different physical spaces — with some of those spaces offering more opportunities and amenities than others. Donald Trump’s blithe assumption that all black people live in ghettos with sky-high unemployment and desperate schools takes what is usually an unspoken fact of American life and makes it brutally explicit.

Elijah Anderson is the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale University. He is the author of, among other books, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life.

The Big Idea is Vox’s home for smart, often scholarly excursions into the most important issues and ideas in politics, science, and culture — typically written by outside contributors. If you have an idea for a piece, pitch us at thebigidea@vox.com.