Goldeberg

Goldberg Polluting the body politic

If space is effected by power discourses, then in modernity space results from discourses of racial distinction, and then becomes a means of institutionalization and normalization of racism. The logic of reason regulates and presents as a natural organization the racial division of space. The polis as a microcosm of the state is configured through spatial differences that magnify social hierarchies and thus affects the modes of social relations of power. The racialization of the city goes hand in hand with the colonial domination, to conquer space is to conquer people and then subject them to a rational order. This organization deals with the anxiety of pollution of the body politic. The place of the city become then one of the tropes for the making of identities.
Coloniality wipes the history of violence during the conquest with the notions of colonies as desert spaces, then it justifies interventions through the notion of civilization and creating the civilization of others as a mission of the West. In this the difference us / them became racialized and boundaries were demarcated to avoid the transgression of social order. In the spatial delimitations of these relations it is human bodies that are defines and confined, delimitated yet dislocated” (187) The racialized city emerges then with the end of colonial, era with the need to reproduce the racial marginalization created in the colonies (white colonizers vs black colonized) in their own cities and with the adveniment of this racial others to the European home communities. The doctrine of segregation consolidates mostly during the 20th century, especially in 1950-60 slum administration replaces colonial administration. Slums were racially defined and located in the peripheries to separate the white form the racial other and avoid contamination. “Periphratic” refers to the simultaneous spatial and social segregation that happens not only in the cities “it entails the circumscription in terms of location and their limitation in terms of access to power, to the realization of rights and to goods and services” (188).
In the 60-70s (i add in North America) the flight of the middle class to the suburbs creates a deserted city center while it further pressured the racial ghettoes in the peripheries. The 80s get a new reversal of ratio-spatial pressure, as the city center gets renewed and gentrified. Gentrification in the centers generate an explosion of homeless as rent is no longer affordable for the urban poor, with no alternative housing massive sectors of population get evicted.
Racial marginality may assumes different forms, in which the intersection between race and class is generally significant (if there are middle class black the poverty among blacks still remains significant). Fear of the slum becomes the locus to justify segregation and even to remove the slums from the city altogether. He takes F. Fannon description of the colonial city that laid siege to the native city, then through the discourse of efficiency the siege is transformed into segregation. The slums gets to be defined through the tropes of comparison of racial inferiority, moral degradation and repulsiveness. The slum serves as an example of the contradictions identified in Foucault´s notion of heterotopia. Apartheid is an extreme example of these points, but is not an exception, rather it offers a model for racial domination west wide.
The racialized containment is achieved through the control over communication, speed and territory, what Foucault identifies as three variables of urban design and spatial organization in which power over space remains in the hands of the whites. When there are no possible sanctions, (ie policy becomes politically correct), exclusion is effected as a preference, as private freedom, as movements that are defined in a free market, and as class gets associated with race, blacks are excluded form middle class neighborhoods because of income. This also serves to locate different public services in different areas.
Race is then more than a site of stratification, it is a sphere of subjugation of and subjectification through which graduations of difference are produced. Place delimits the way we think the world. That the state insists in overseeing –policing – the precise and detailed forms that housing must take for the poor and the ratialized suggest that we really are committed to the kinds of disciplinary culture that inform current practice. (204-5)