Wednesday 10 February 2010

Black Belt- Red Belt


Loic Wacquant (a French sociologist working in the US) has made a direct comparison between the North American ghetto (the black belt) and the banlieues on the periphery of Paris (the red belt- so called because of their historica association with the Communist party). This comparison is based on his research in Chicago and the Quatre Mille (les 4000) a public housing estate in the Parisian suburb of La Courneuve (also where I have carried out research). As we have already learned, the Parisian banlieues have suffered from deindustrialisation and the collapse of manufacturing jobs. As a consequence they have achieved increasing notoriety as zones of social disorder, with focus especially centred on ‘lawless’ minority ethnic youth (often of North African origin) who periodically clash with the police (the last major riots were in 2005- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_civil_unrest_in_France).

Wacquant argues that the banlieue and the ghetto share certain common features, not least a powerful ‘territorial stigma’ that is attached to living in a devalued space. Residents have to live with the indignity of living in the ghetto or banlieue, a stigma that results from the poverty that curses each area. For Wacquant, such spaces are the 'dumping grounds' of the city- site to contain an economically superfluous population. Both spaces also share similarities in terms of the bleak and oppressive atmosphere that suffuses them. Both spaces are also wrongly perceived as socially disorganised (see Wacquant's 'three pernicious premises' from monday's lecture).




Yet, despite these similarities- which often have more to do with perception rather than reality- the black belt and red belt are actually very different socio-spatial formations, produced by different institutional logics of segregation which results in ‘significantly higher levels of blight, poverty and hardship in the ghetto’.




Despite European societies experiencing similar neo-liberal economic restructuring to the US, they have not produced equivalent pathologies to those associated with the American city. As Wacquant states, when it comes to size, assimilating US ghettoes and the French banlieue is like matching heavyweights and flyweights. For example, the ghettoes of New York alone house a million blacks, while the largest banlieue estates only house around 35,000. Whilst joblessness is a problem in both the ghetto and banlieue, unemployment stands at around 50% in the banlieue while in Chicago’s projects barely 16% of residents held a job. Yet it is not just the extent and depth of wealth and income inequalities in the US that distinguish the ghetto from the banlieue. It is also the extent of racial segregation. Comparative studies of ethnic segregation suggest that levels of segregation for African-Americans are far higher than those found among minority ethnic groups in Europe and the UK. The US ghetto is racially homogenous, it is a legacy of slavery and a mechanism of racial confinement- ‘an apparatus aimed at enclosing a stigmatised category in a reserved physical and social space that will prevent it mixing with others and thus risk tainting them’.




Although ethnic enclaves can be found in France and the UK, they do not take the ghetto form found in North American cities. In French estates the social composition is drawn from a variety of ethnic groups. They typically bring together persons of West African, European and Maghrebine descent- ‘black, blanc, beur’ as they are sometimes stereotypically referred (La Haine's characterisation is an example of this). Even within the categories of black, blanc, beur, the nations of origin among banlieue residents are incredibly diverse.




The intensity of racial segregation and disadvantage in American cities combined with the intensity of poverty and paucity of welfare provision are therefore qualitatively different from the circumstances that can be found in European cities. There are also disparities in terms of criminality. While the French media create panics around banlieue disorder such as aggressive behaviour, vandalism and petty theft, in the American ghetto physical violence is ‘a palpable reality that overturns the parameters of ordinary existence'. According to Wacquant, such is the frequency of robberies, assaults and homicides that it has caused the virtual disappearance of public space. The homicide rate in the US is 75 times that of France.




The final divergence between the banlieue and the ghetto concerns the condition of public housing. Wacquant states that the historic African American neighbourhoods of New York, Chicago and Philadelphia have the look of war zones- abandoned or crumbling buildings, carcasses of burnt out stores, rotting factories, boarded up homes and vacant lots filled with garbage and rubble. In contrast, degraded working class banlieue have undergone considerable state assisted renovation. Buildings have been repainted, refitted or demolished. This may paper over the cracks, or mask deep-seated social problems but the environment is not as degraded as that found in the ghetto.

2 comments:

  1. Again, if anyone's interested, I find the ghetto can be classed as a seperate America, and a film that represents that well is Precious, about an illiterate girl in Harlem. Besides the actual plot, it just shows how people can be so marginalised that you can't believe it's Western society.

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  2. Here's a poignant clip from The Corner:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_ZChN6TnK8&feature=related

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