Power & Place: Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment

C CC CCC CC

POWER & PLACE

CULTURE AND CONFLICT IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Notes from the Critical Conservation Colloquia Spring 2016 at the

Harvard University Graduate School of Design

POWER & PLACE

CULTURE AND CONFLICT IN THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Notes from the Critical Conservation Colloquia Spring 2016 at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Edited by Susan Nigra Snyder & George E. Thomas with Javier Ors-Ausin

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CONTENTS 3

Introduction

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Notes on Contributors

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A Tale of the Three Cities Theodore Hershberg

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Citiscapes of Denial and Confrontation Stephanie E. Yuhl

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Exclusionary Amenities and Exclusionary Vibes Lior J. Strahilevitz

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The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life Elijah Anderson

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INTRODUCTION This publication is a record of lectures that were part of the Critical Conservation Colloquia, organized in Spring 2016, by the Master in Design Studies (MDes) program in Critical Conservation at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. The goal of the Critical Conservation Colloquia was to foster an understanding of urban ethics and an awareness of the political uses of history and identity. The present booklet presents conversations with noted scholars in support of 04479: Power & Place: Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment.

This course was part of a wider GSD initiative borne out of distress over the rising awareness of discrimination and violence against the African American community that resulted in the fall 2015 Black in Design Conference. At that time, Dean Mostafavi remarked that, “The relationship between race and space, the way in which one could say the racialization of space is becoming more extreme, is continuing. These issues have remained absolutely pertinent.” Critical Conservation is a natural center for this discussion because we focus on places where cultural conflict and the spatial patterns of exclusion such as historic districts and red-lining have suppressed racial, ethnic, economic and religious differences, leaving an indelible imprint on the material character of the city. The array of ideas and scholars presented here exemplifies the broader investigation that Professors Susan Nigra Snyder and George E. Thomas are leading through the Critical Conservation research agenda.

The lecture/workshop course 04479: Power & Place: Culture and Conflict in the Built Environment was offered in Spring 2016 as part of the MDes program in Critical Conservation. It was taught by Professors Snyder and Thomas, with Teaching Assistant Javier Ors-Ausín. Three cities in North America were chosen for study that represent differing situations of power and expressions of exclusion and have an extensive literature—Charleston, SC, Baltimore, MD, and Seattle, WA. The goal was to foster an awareness and discussion about processes and expressions of power in urban form and design in the built North American environment.

The MDes program in Critical Conservation has been formed to shape a broader conversation about design and development that engages 21st century questions of environmental, social and economic sustainability to serve an ever more pluralist and global society. Critical Conservation provides designers with a methodological foundation to research the cultural systems that frame conflicts inherent in making progressive places—the cultural ecology of place. It provides a theoretical understanding of the social construction of dynamic cultural meaning associated with places, artifacts and history. The knowledge gained provides an understanding that decisions involving the uses of history and group identity— critical to place-making—demand that urban ethics be considered as part of the design process.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Theodore Hershberg, Ph.D. is a Professor of Public Policy and History and Director of the Center for Greater Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania He served as Assistant to the Mayor (Philadelphia) for Strategic Planning and Policy Development (1984-85) and Acting Dean of Penn’s School of Public and Urban Policy. Hershberg has had three major research interests: Education Reform, Regional Cooperation and Urban-Industrial Transformation. From 1969 to 1981, Hershberg founded and directed the Philadelphia Social History Project, a cross-disciplinary research effort aimed at understanding the black experience in an American city and the larger impacts of industrialization on urban space.

His scholarly writings analyzed Philadelphia’s industrial development and the experience of its diverse immigrant groups.

Stephanie E. Yuhl, Ph.D. is Professor of History and Director of Montserrat, a dense exposure to the liberal arts for first year students at the College of the Holy Cross. Her research and teaching fields are the social and cultural history of the twentieth-century United States, with emphases in Southern history, public history, memory, gender/sexuality, and social justice movements. Yuhl’s booklength treatment of Charleston, South Carolina’s cultural and touristic renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston has won two national awards. Her article, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Centering the Domestic Slave Trade in American Public History,” won the 2014 Green-Ramsdell award from the Southern Historical Association.

Lior J. Strahilevitz, J.D. is the Sidney Austin Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. He is the author of Information and Exclusion (Yale University Press 2011) and is a co-author of the leading Property law text book in the United States, which is now in its eighth edition. Strahilevitz writes about property and land use law, as well as privacy law, law and technology, contracts, and criminal procedure. He graduated with highest honors from the University of California Berkeley and earned his JD from Yale Law School, where he served as Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal. After graduation, Strahilevitz practiced land use law in Seattle. He is a member of the American Law Institute and is an Adviser to the Institute’s Data Privacy Project.

Elijah Anderson, Ph.D is the William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Sociology at Yale University. For four decades he has been a leading urban ethnographer examining urban life in American cities. His publications include Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999), Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community (1990), and the classic sociological work, A Place on the Corner (1978; 2nd ed., 2003).

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“Were the burdens and

disabilities facing African Americans unique to their historical experience?�

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A TALE OF THREE CITIES Theodore Hershberg, Ph.D.

The tale that I want to share with you is about one city—Philadelphia. But it was so different at each point—three different points in its historical evolution, that I am being a little dramatic, and referring to it as three separate cities.

The data used in this presentation were collected by the Philadelphia Social History Project, which was founded at Penn in 1969. We got funding initially from the Center for the Study of Metropolitan Problems of the National Institute of Mental Health. The initial question that I posed was: “were the burdens and disabilities facing African Americans unique to their historical experience, or were they simply obstacles that every immigrant group entering American society had to overcome?”. Over the next decade, we had funding from NSF, from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

We were able to build a remarkably broad and quite granular database that included information on hundreds of thousands of individual people from the manuscript pages of the federal population census, as well as an inventory of thousands of firms from the manufacturing census. We had city directories, (similar to white pages and yellow pages) except obviously no telephone numbers. We incorporated birth registers, death registers, transportation data, sewer systems—the fabric of the city. And every person and job was geocoded down to a block by block and a quarter unit of urban space. It was quite an amazing experience. This database functioned like a magnet and brought together an extraordinary array of scholars from various disciplines: historians, sociologists, demographers, geographers, economists, regional scientists, and epidemiologists. . We even had an architectural historian – my good friend George Thomas!

In 1981, Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience was published by Oxford University Press as a collection of our essays, of which “The Tale of Three Cities” was the last chapter; by that time 17 doctoral dissertations from seven different universities across many disciplines had

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Fig. 1.3

Fig. 1.2

Fig. 1.1

been completed that relied on the PSHP database In addition, somewhere between 100 and 200 published articles had been based on this work. The thread that is tied all my academic and professional interests together has been the notion of human capital. So I want to start by describing a very simple three-part model. The first element is human capital, a concept that comes from economics literature. Human capital generally refers to the education and the job skills that people have. But you could also evaluate capital by looking at who the people are, where they are coming from, their culture, values, goals, expectations, the source of their motivation.

In this illustration (Fig. 1.1), the immigrants are carrying rucksacks and suitcases. They have arrived at their destination—in this case, Philadelphia.

The second element (Fig. 1.2) is the opportunity structure, or structure of opportunities. This is literally everything that the immigrants will encounter when they get to the city, again, Philadelphia. It is obviously very complicated when you include everything. But I really want to focus on what I like to call the building blocks of cities—jobs, and housing, and transportation, and access to these things. The central focus of this presentation is the concept of “match-up.” How does the skill set of the individual groups match up with the nature of opportunities that are extant in the opportunity structure? You will experience this when you graduate from school, and enter marketplace to find a job. That is your human capital matching up with opportunities. In a perfect world, these match-ups would be solely determined by your human capital, and how well you fit with the opportunities. But of course the world is not

9 perfect --the match-up is mediated by discrimination. In this illustration (Fig. 1.3), discrimination is portrayed as a soldier guarding the gate to the city. The nature of discrimination changes over time. At one time it might be race, at another time its religion or gender, etc. But discrimination is there to mediate that match-up. All of these things change over time: the immigrants and their human capital, the nature of the opportunity structure, and finally the nature of the discrimination that’s encountered.

This next illustration (Fig. 1.4) shows you a cross section of the city’s population at the end of three periods that I want to talk. To simplify, think of it as the industrializing city from 1850 to 1880. Those are the years we studied with the data we had in the census. The next image represents the industrial city, covering the years between 1900, 1930, or 1940. And then finally there is the post-industrial city, which we depicted as 1970, when our research was underway. In 1880 the population of the city was 840,000; it was 1.95 million in both 1930 and 1970. Philadelphia, like most Northeastern cities, peaked between 1950 and 1960 with a little over 2 million people. Today, 1.5 million people live in Philadelphia. The colors of the illustration (Fig. 1.4) are as follows: the black population is always shown in black, the Irish in green, the Germans in red, the British in orange, the Italians in yellow, the Poles in purple, the Russian Jews in blue. Where there are two shades of the same color, the darker color represents the foreign-born, and the lighter color their Americanborn children. These do not add up to 100 percent, because there were, in

Fig. 1.4 Ethnic Composition of Philadelphia in Percentage 1880-1970

addition, a residual – native whites (meaning those usually of English stock,

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• • • •

Fig. 1.5 Segregation

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Fig. 1.6 Segregation from Native Whites (248 Census Tracts)

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both of whose parents were born in the U.S.). The black population was 4% of the city in 1880. It grew to 11% by 1930, and it 34% by 1970. Today, is a little more complicated when you start factoring, Hispanics and race, but blacks are probably 45% to 47% of the city’s population.

The next illustration (Fig. 1.5) focuses on segregation. It is a very familiar term, but it is measured by something called the Index of Segregation. This is a measure of how separate one group is from another.

The measurement looks at spatial zones and determines how far blacks are from whites; how separate they are. The scale ranges from 0, where there is no segregation, to 1, where there is complete segregation. To simplify it, if Italians were 10% of a city, and if there were no segregation, Italians would be found as 10% of each geographic unit, whether it was a block, or a census tract, or a ward, a collection of wards, or a catchment area. It is very sensitive to the size of the geographic unit that you’re going to look at. Segregation— residential segregation—is seen by sociologists as related to a much more complicated process we call assimilation. It functions as a crude proxy for the more complex phenomenon. Because the U.S. Census always collected data on race, an index of segregation could be easily calculated. Generally speaking, there is a relationship between residential patterns and assimilation.

The more integrated the residential pattern, the more likely the group being studied was to do better. And the converse is true. The more segregated the residential pattern, the more likely a group is to do poorly. Now there are many exceptions to this. You can think of affluent Jewish suburbs, which can be close to homogeneous. But this is not a function of external control but rather of choice. So in the case of the affluent Jewish suburb, there is high segregation but, it is not a measure of ill being.

Let me move then to the next illustration (Fig. 1.6), which tells the story of immigration settlement in America, one that is deeply embedded in our culture and found in literature and film and folklore, although it actually applies factually only to Manhattan at the turn of the last century—that is, the turn from the 19th into the 20th century. It describes immigrants settling

Fig. 1.8 Segrgation from native whites (248 Census Tracts)

Fig. 1.7 Segregation from native whites (248 Census Tracts)

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in dense ethnic ghettos—Jews with Jews, Italians with Italians, Poles with Poles—because of a desire to be with their countrymen, springing from the need for security, friendship, and familiarity in a new land. A piece of Europe transplanted as it were in the streets of America. A classic study of this is Irving Howe’s 2001 book World of our Fathers: the Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life That They Made. Over time, the forces of assimilation operated on these groups. In the initial generation, only a small minority were able to move up and leave the ghetto for better neighborhoods. But over successive generations, each of these groups would make the move and were assimilated into the mainstream. Through integrated residential patterns, upward economic mobility, and intermarriage with native-born Americans, the children and grandchildren of the initial immigrant cohorts had become assimilated.

The next illustration (Fig. 1.7) shows what sociologists at the University of Chicago found when they studied immigrant residential patterns in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. They sent their students to survey and

“The year 2013 was the first time in American history where the majority of public school students came from low-income families.”

12 measure the space of various cities which led to what is called the Chicago theory of urban space as concentric rings around a center. Every place they looked, they found big arcs of residence with greater poverty toward the center in the old portions of the city and elite neighborhoods on the perimeter served by suburban trains and automobiles. By 1930, there were very low levels of residential segregation for the “old” immigrants on the perimeter of the city, by which they meant the cohort that came in the middle of the 19th century. By contrast, the new immigrants, the people that came from Southern and Eastern Europe, the Poles and the Italians, the Russian Jews, experienced much higher levels of segregation and were located in the oldest districts of cities that had been abandoned by the earlier groups.

We can ignore for the moment the experience of African Americans. This data appeared to support the notion of assimilation that I just described.

The old immigrants, primarily Irish and Germans, who had moved to the new neighborhoods on the perimeter, had been in America the longest and had the lowest levels of segregation; and the new groups, the southern and eastern Europeans, had the highest levels of segregation and concentration in the old neighborhoods.

The new immigrants, the story goes, settled in dense, immigrant ghettos, and would integrate over successive generations. And from their historical experience we can project forward in time, and say this is what’s going to happen to other groups as they arrive in cities as well. But as my adviser at Stanford told me when I was a graduate student, “You know, Ted, history is not logic. History is based on facts.” So we have to have to get to the factual evidence. So here’s what actually happened. And when I say “actually,” with the Social History Project we could work our way using real data on real people and their jobs down to the individual city block. This is all 100% from actual samples. Unlike most historians looking at urban history through their general experience, we could make claims based on real data—we are not making the stuff up. In this illustration (Fig. 1.8) for example, we see that the low levels of residential segregation for some groups are not evidence of some automatic assimilation process underway, but represent the initial low levels of segregation when they settled in America.

The new people wanted to live with their countrymen. I can explain that if there is time in questions where we have microdata on Germany before it consolidated in 1870. Before 1870, immigrants in the census did not report that they were Germans, but rather that they came from one area or another in what is now Germany. In the Philadelphia data, we could see small areas representing all of the little German states. People tried to live together. But in order to have an immigrant ghetto (dense concentrations of respective immigrant groups) you need vacant housing, that is both inexpensive and

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Fig. 1.9 Irish Population 1880

near jobs. In this period of time, population growth dramatically outstripped housing growth. And so there were precious few places, where despite the desire to be with your countrymen, you actually could find accessible housing and available jobs. Between 1850 and 1880, Philadelphia doubled in its size, growing to 840,000 people. People settled wherever they could find available housing. In sum, there wwere no concentrations of cheap, vacant housing near jobs into which Irish and Germans could move. We used what passed for a high-speed printer in the 1970s to chart population density by dividing the city into tiny block by a block and a quarter units. This map (Fig. 1.9) shows those claiming Irish ancestry, some 30% of the city’s population in 1880. When you get down to the micro level, you can find five clusters in the city where the Irish were really present. These areas according to our maps appeared to be the Irish ghetto. But the reality was that only one person in five of Irish background lived in those five clusters. The rest were native whites, early settlers and the new immigrant groups. The same was true of the German settlement pattern. What is more, even in these areas that represented the heaviest concentration of Irish stock in the city, they composed less than half of the population in these clusters. In other works the various ethnic groups were never the majority.

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The same was true of the German settlement pattern in 1880, but was even more pronounced. Only one person in eight of German background lived in a single dense cluster. As was the case with the Irish, the Germans neighborhoods never were majority German. And here, if I had a lot of time, we would talk about what it was about the magic of integrated residential patterns that makes them so important to the process of assimilation. And the answer is not very difficult, if you think it through. You are living next to native people, native white Americans that know the system. They understand how the game is played. They know the rules. From their knowledge and information you are able to develop networks to share information. Think about how you get a summer job. It usually is not based on merit – most people get jobs because of who they know, and who can get you that job. This is what we now call networking. And of course, you put people next to each other. And if there is an intense racial segregation, which was the case for—I mean intense racial discrimination case for African Americans. There is a lot of intermarriage. The irony is that those who feared miscegenation in the South were right. If you put black and white people together, you are going to have mixed marriages, because people fall in love. It is just who we are, right? And I do not have a map up here for the African American experience, with such a tiny 4% of the population. But the point I want to make is there was never an area in the middle of the 19th century, or even the late 19th century, where the majority of African Americans settled where the majority of the people in that area were African American. They were with lots of other people who were white. But because of discrimination they were prevented from taking advantage of the integrated housing patterns that were so helpful for the Irish and the Germans. So why could the African Americans not pull themselves

“If you are poor and black, you are three times as likely as a poor white person to live with other poor people, almost all of whom are black”

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Fig. 1.12 Ethnic Groups & Occupations: 1880

Fig. 1.11 Typical Ethnic Worker: Manufacturing Jobs within One Mile 1880

Fig. 1.10 Ethnic Group and Manufacturing Jobs 1880

up by their own bootstraps – and, in other words, make it on their own?

“Bootstraps” are a metaphor for opportunities. The opportunities of the middle of the 19th century were industrial. The factory system was taking off.

These were the jobs that people swarmed into Philadelphia to take.

Most Irish immigrants were laborers. But look how quickly (Fig. 1.10) their children got into manufacturing. Almost immediately after their arrival, The Irish were rural, and were coming from an agricultural background. The

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Fig. 1.15 Ethnic Groups & Manufacturingng: 1930

Fig. 1.14 Ethnic Groups and Occupations: 1930

Fig. 1.13 Ethnic Group and Occupations: 1900

Germans were much more urbanized, many of them are coming with crafts and skills, etcetera. So the Germans, despite the language barrier, move in and take off quite quickly. But it is still amazing how rapidly the American-born children of the heretofore rural Irish were able to do the same thing.

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The next illustration (Fig. 1.11) describes what I call it the ecology of access. In our research using the manufacturing census data, we asked the question, how many manufacturing jobs were within a mile of the typical member of one of these groups? And remarkably the blacks by their location were perfectly situated to be able to take advantage of these bootstraps. If you were white, if Irish or German, we learned that the closer you were to these factories, the more likely you were to get work within them. In fact, industrial relations dominated residential patterns. German shoemakers more likely to live in residential patterns like other shoemakers of different ethnicities than they were to live with other Germans. But for blacks this was never the case. Our hypothesis was that this could only be explained by the virulent nature of racial discrimination. Only 10%, I should emphasize this— only 10% of African Americans—were able to secure jobs in manufacturing.

And most of these were menial jobs—sweeping floors within factories. They ended up being identified that way in the census.

The next illustration (Fig. 1.12) describes occupational structure.

Very quickly, we are able to take everybody and sort them out because the census taker recorded each person’s occupation. So we end up with whitecollar proprietors and professionals at the top. Then came the skilled laborers, craftsmen, tool makers. The last two rows are essentially all unskilled. But we discovered that if you told the census taker something other than “I am a laborer,” even if you said you are a ditch digger, these people can be thought of as semi-skilled, because they had a much stronger socioeconomic profile. The data make clear how well the white immigrants were doing, and how poorly the African Americans were doing. Eight out of every 10 were working in unskilled—not even semi-skilled jobs. The human capital that African Americans had was perfectly suited for the nature of work in these factories. Their inability to get work in their own neighborhood factories was not a problem of match-up. This was a problem of racial discrimination pure and simple. Diaries, memoirs and the newspapers of the day make this abundantly clear. When you factor in the cost of living and the wages being paid—we had doctoral dissertations done in each of those subjects—what you discover is the material conditions that confronted, black Philadelphians were absolutely the worst. They lived in the worst parts of the city. They had disproportionately the highest levels of female-headed families, and the highest mortality rates both for infants and adults. And here’s something. I don’t know if you think of inner city mortality rates. They might be for children zero years to four years, you might have, maybe, 20 out of 1,000 kids die. In 1880 Philadelphia at the same time, one African American child in four in the same age cohort died in this period of time (250 out of 1,000!), largely of diarrheal diseases which would not get remedied until they filtered the water

18 after 1900 (which is another great story.) It was this medical data that helped us get funding from the National Institute of Health and Human Development.

By comparison, white infant mortality was 125 per 1,000.

The next illustration (Fig. 1.13) takes us to 1900. The kind of data provided by the U.S. Census changed so we in turn had to adjust how we make these comparisons. But what is really striking here is how quickly the new immigrants were able to move into positions within the manufacturing sector, and were able to take advantage of the opportunities. By contrast, if you were an African American, 8 of every 10 were still unskilled, again living in terrible conditions; when you translate wages into a standard of living, you can understand the implications for morbidity and mortality.

By 1930, the nature of the data changed again and we could only compare all white immigrants to native whites and blacks (Fig. 1.14). And once again, you see this 6 of every 10 African Americans were still stuck in these essentially unskilled positions, with very, very low wages. Human capital and opportunity still matched up well in both of these examples.

But that mediating factor of discrimination is what stands in the way of African American progress. And while we had all this quantitative data, from newspapers, and diaries, and manuscript collections, all of the written evidence came together to make the case very clear about what happened to African Americans.

The last of these illustrations (Fig. 1.15) looks at the ecology of

Fig. 1.17 The Post-Industrial City: 2

Fig. 1.16 The Post-Industrial City

opportunity by 1930. The numbers in comparison are a little bit different. Here we were able to ask what percentage of the group was within a mile of at least 5,000 or more industrial jobs. Once again, blacks are perfectly situated to take advantage of these opportunities. But because of racial discrimination, only 13% of African Americans are able to secure jobs—the bootstrap, so to speak, of the era.

Now we are going to talk about the extraordinary changes after the Second World War. If World War I was the watershed for Great Britain, World War II was clearly the watershed in American history for cities in the Northeast and the Midwest (Fig. 1.16). I like to characterize these changes with

19 five broad brush strokes. All of these are happening simultaneously, but the first and the most important is the dramatic transformation of the economy.

We are moving away from manufacturing to information and services. These changes have enormous implications for the human capital match-up, and because of the changes in transportation, especially the automobile which altered housing patterns, created a geographic mismatch of where people are living and where the new jobs are appearing.

The second brush stroke is federal housing policy. Those of you have read any of Doug Massey’s work understand that this is the least known and most racist part of American federal history. Our housing policy was a disaster for most of our years. But after the WWII, for the first time the feds introduced a guaranteed 5% mortgage. Today it sounds high. But when I bought my house in the late 1970s, I was paying 13.5% interest. To buy a house in the 19th and for much of the 20th century you had to have the entire cost already saved. Few if any mortgages were available; when they were they were “ballooning mortgages” – after a substantial down payment, the entire mortgage was due often with five years. But in an effort to push house construction during the Depression, the government proposed 30-year 5% mortgages that were guaranteed by the federal government. That and federal highway bills spurred extraordinary suburbanization. If you go back, and you

“Ghettos, as we think of them today–all black, all segregated – are the product of the post-Second World War city. No group— neither white immigrants, nor earlier blacks– ever lived in such conditions.”

20 look at the 1930s, and see the policies of the Federal Housing Administration, or the Homeowners’ Loan Corporation you will encounter the term “redlining”. Redlining literally comes from the red lines that were drawn on federal maps delineating areas where banks were told not to give mortgages.

The redlined areas were those that had blacks, and for a while Catholics, Italians in particular, and Jews. The ethnic exclusion faded over time, but again not for blacks. If you take those maps of the 1930s, you can literally turn to the present and see exactly where the areas of concentrated poverty are today. It is almost like with those decisions, we created the impoverished zones of the modern American cities.

The third major change is federal transportation policy. In 1956, the Eisenhower administration pushed through a massive infrastructure investment in the form of Interstate Highway System: 56,000 miles of highway—$0.90 on the dollar was subsidized by the federal government. The big 18-wheelers used this extensive network of highways to play the same role that railroads had played in the earlier century, and water had played before.

This facilitated concentrated development along the interstate highways that surrounded a central city like Route 128 in the Boston area.

The fourth broad brush stroke was the introduction of the mechanical cotton harvester. It did the work of 50 men. Overnight—and I mean this almost literally—its deployment in southern cotton fields led to the collapse of labor-based cotton farming. And this set into motion the migration of 5 million African Americans from plantation to ghetto, from the rural south to cities everywhere, particularly in the North.

And the fifth broad brush stroke is suburbanization: the movement of hundreds of thousands of white families from central cities into the communities that surrounded them. Just as large numbers of African Americans began arriving in northern cities, the new housing policies and inexpensive guaranteed mortgages helped the white middle and upper middle classes realize the American dream: the white picket fence, a small lawn, low taxes, low crime, and better schools. At the outset, these migrations were not linked – each was fueled by its unique reason. But over time, real estate agents grew adept at working the system to their advantage and race became a key part of the process. Realtors would come to white homeowners and say “you are about to be inundated by these poor black folks coming from the South, and once that happens, your property values are going to crash.” As white families sold cheap and fled, the real estate agents then sold the properties to slumlords who converted these buildings into multi-unit apartments, and rented them out to the migrants coming in from the South.

And then there was the equally fraught problem of public housing. This played a key role in the evaluation of the modern ghetto. Just like the interstate

21 highway system, the Fed subsidized it at a very high rate. But the suburban communities didn’t want public housing; they didn’t want “those people” in their communities. So the big cities got public housing units, and what they put up is what we’re now in the process of completely tearing down: high rises, which have helped create the hyper-segregation we see in so many parts of our cities through the latter part of the 20th century.

One way to think about the black experience after the Second World War is to recall what it is like when you go for your eye examination.

As you read the letters on the chart, the doctor sequences different lenses to determine which provides the clearest vision. If you want to understand the experience of African Americans in these first two cities—the industrializing and the industrial city, the only lens you need to derive true understanding is that of racial discrimination. But after the Second World War (Fig. 1.17), as racial discrimination diminishes relative to the past—and it does diminish significantly—the African American experience bifurcates, where the better educated are finally able to take advantage of the available opportunities, while those whose human capital matches up poorly, or who are limited through the geographic mismatch, do not do very well at all. African Americans with a decent education were able to find jobs, particularly in the public sector, which after WWII was the least discriminatory part of our economy. African Americans were twice as likely as whites to find government employment and moved successfully into the middle class. The African Americans we used to refer to as the underclass discovered that the cities in which they lived no longer provided abundant jobs that required little in the way of skills – the jobs that functioned as the bootstraps for earlier waves of white immigrants were gone. De-industrialization saw factories move to the anti-union south and to locations overseas. Those of you who are familiar with the work of Bill [William Julius] Wilson – The Declining Significance of Race, or When Work Disappears – are aware of his careful documentation of this process. The point is that even though many African Americans now live in an era of diminished racial discrimination, the jobs that would have matched up with their human capital are gone. Those that exist require much higher levels of education. And since the 1970’s, as new research demonstrates, our big city public schools have been a disaster in educating poor people—particularly low-income minorities.

The geographic mismatch is something I want you to appreciate as well. When middle classes and upper middle classes move to the suburbs, most people understand that firms requiring an educated workforce will locate there. What is often forgotten is that these well-paid workers also need a wide array of services provided by people with limited skills: retail clerks, cosmeticians, fast-food workers, and the like.

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Unfortunately, if you are a poor African American, you match up well with those skills, but you can not fill those jobs for many reasons: you can’t live in the suburbs because of discriminatory housing policy; you can not get to those jobs because public transit to take you out there is very, very limited; and you can not drive to those jobs because the cost of automobiles is beyond the means of most of the people about whom we’re speaking. I think the most interesting set of data that we came upon during the PSHP was revealed in a new measure we created called the Index of Dominance (an Appendix in our book explains how it is calculated). It is a weighted experiential average; it’s unlike the Index of Segregation which measures apartness.

The Dominance Index takes the typical person—in this case, the Irish, the Italian, or the black—and imagines them sitting on the front steps of their home. When they get up and walk into their immediate block or two or census tract, whatever small geographic unit you are using, who are their neighbors? The computer calculates this statistic for each person in the group. Here we see two really striking differences (Fig. 1.18). First, the black versus the immigrant experience; and second, the contemporary black experience versus the experience of African Americans in the earlier periods.

The typical Irish immigrant in 1880 and the typical Italian immigrant in 1930 had very similar experiences in their residential lives. The Irish immigrant lived with 15% other Irish immigrants, 34% Irish stock, 26% foreign born, 50% all foreign stock. If you analyze the Italians’ experience, it is virtually the same number. In striking contrast, the typical black in 1970 lived in a census tract in which 74% of the population was black. What’s more, this dominance measure has risen steadily since 1850, when it was 11%. It was not until 1950 that the typical black lived in a census tract with a black majority.

Ghettos, as we think of them today – all black, all segregated – I want to keep making this point, are the product of the post-Second World War city. No group—neither white immigrants, nor earlier blacks – ever lived in such conditions.

If the hyper concentrations of the well-off were all we were looking at—imagine a whole census tract filled with Episcopalian bankers—we would not worry about them very much. We might quip that a residential concentration of this well-off group would be an example of cultural deprivation. But when the group of people is already marginal to the economic system, this kind of concentration functions as a significant barrier to economic success. With this understanding it becomes easier to appreciate the plight of low-income people who are being left behind. What I find very troubling today is when people tell me, well, why can not poor black people do what poor white people did, and just get out of poverty? One of the huge problems is if you are poor and black, you are three times as likely as a poor

23 white person to live with other poor people, almost all of whom are black.

This is a much more difficult condition from which you have to emerge. At the same three points in time we have been discussing (Fig. 1.18), I want next to address two questions: who did African Americans live with and what was the social structure of their communities? The absence of cheap, concentrated vacant housing near jobs guaranteed the seemingly integrated housing patterns of the mid to late-19th century city—though it is fair to say that blacks usually lived in the back alleys while whites were in the larger houses on the main streets. African Americans never comprised a majority of any residential area, and even though they shared the same urban space, intense racial discrimination prevented them from taking advantage of the networks that their white neighbors enjoyed as a result of residential proximity.

Nonetheless, their social structure was complete, mirroring in many respects what was found in the larger white society.

We had incredibly interesting data from censuses taken by Quakers and the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society in 1838, 1847 and 1855. These door-to-door manuscripts provided church membership, along with all kinds of socioeconomic data. Episcopalians were the wealthiest African Americans; next came black Presbyterians followed by Methodists and Baptists. The churches attended by black Roman Catholics were integrated, and they were generally better off. The point here is that in these 19th century black neighborhoods, proprietors, clergymen, craftsmen and laborers lived side-

Fig. 1.18 Dominance: The Ethnic Composition of the Average Person’s Census Tract

by-side, and their children attended the same schools. Their institutions were highly segregated, but their communities were “complete” within these integrated residential patterns.

Let’s look next at the residential experience of African Americans

24 just before WWII. The best example of this is found Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake’s 1945 study, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, the study of Chicago in the 1930s. They describe the residential experience of African Americans in extraordinary and vivid detail. By this point in time, the successful white populations have moved out of large sections of the inner city. As this available housing became inhabited by African Americans, levels of residential segregation increased sharply. Nonetheless, their communities remain complete. Again, everybody is present—there are role models to maintain middle-class values. We hear a great deal about female-headed black families, but in this period probably 75% to 80% of black families have two-parents. Black families are more likely than white families to have female heads, but two-parent families are certainly the norm. The social structure of African Americans again mirrors what is found in the larger white society. A middle-class lifestyle prevails. As we consider the modern city, we confront a great irony: as African Americans experienced less racial discrimination, conditions for the poorest among them worsened. Just as the waves of white immigrants before them had done, the more successful African Americans were able to leave the inner city and settle in better neighborhoods, but the unskilled and poorly-educated were left behind.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Many inner city wards in Midwestern and Eastern cities lost between a third and a half of their populations. Very few people understand the significance of the above described differential migration (that is, who stayed and who left). How many times do you hear it said that all the anti-poverty programs were wasted, that they did not work.

The proof is visual – just look at those neighborhoods; they’re a disaster. So the government programs most have failed. But these conclusions confuse what we call “policies of people” with” policies of place.” Most of the antipoverty programs were policies of people. We invested, for example, in job training. Well, your human capital is mobile, right? So the better-off blacks were able to take what they got out of those programs and move to better neighborhoods in the city or adjacent suburban communities. Many of these suburban areas are highly segregated – think of Prince George’s County, Maryland, which is heavily African American. But even in the suburbs there’s a cost for segregation: identical housing fetches lower prices in highly segregated areas than in white or integrated communities. Let me summarize it this way (Fig. 1.21), staying that with human capital-match-up theme. In the industrializing city, the human capital of the immigrants and African Americans matched up well with the opportunities that were emerging as the industrial process unfolded. I am not suggesting it was easy for the white immigrants.

But the African American experience was fundamentally different because the human capital match-up was completely closed off as the result of severe

25 racial discrimination. The same could be said pretty much for the second city—the industrial city. Here there are higher levels of segregation. But by 1900, transportation—the electrified street cars, for example, that were quite affordable for the masses—enabled highly segregated Italians, Poles, Russian Jews to travel to jobs found elsewhere in the city. Once again, however, if you were African American, these opportunities were largely unavailable given racial discrimination.

We come finally to the post-industrial city. I want to stop just for a second and talk about history can be used to inform public policy. When this article was written—1978-1979—there was a policy debate about whether we should have affirmative action policies. There were two explanations for why blacks were found disproportionately at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. The first is called “bootstraps.” “White immigrants came to America at the same time blacks were in cities, and working hard they prospered.

Clearly blacks did not take advantage of the same opportunities. Therefore, the argument goes, they’re not deserving of any compensatory legislation in the present.” Our research makes clear that the bootstraps interpretation was not just false, but almost criminally misleading. It is dead wrong in every single factual way.

The second explanation – “the last of the immigrants” – had the same policy implication – do nothing—but for very different reasons. People who believed in the “last of the immigrants” thesis said, “We know the black past was uniquely discriminatory. But the present is much less so. Now blacks will indeed repeat the experience of the white immigrants. They are in cities.

All we have to do is sit back and let the assimilation process work for African Americans. It is just a matter of time.” “The last of the immigrants” argument held true for many African Americans. Roughly speaking, two-thirds of them were in poverty in 1940; for a least a generation now the rate has hovered around 25%. Some real progress was made. But the group that we used to call the underclass—there is no one name to describe the people left behind in these communities—was not able to take advantage of the diminished racial discrimination. They are hampered both by the human capital mismatch and by the geographic mismatch (inaccessible suburban jobs).

I want to conclude with the challenge of urban education (Fig. 1.21), an extension of my life-long interest in human capital. As part of my research in 1995 into the labor force competitiveness of metropolitan Philadelphia, I thought I would quickly examine the state of public education. And when I got into it, I was so deeply upset by what I had learned that I have devoted the last 20 years of my career to this subject.

The year 2013 was the first time in American history where the majority of public school students came from low-income families. We know

26 what is happening demographically: the majority of kids being born are now nonwhite. The college graduation rate for low-income families—anybody want to hazard a guess? It’s 8%. I can not think of anything more sobering than that statistic given the world’s highly competitive global economy.

In 2000, I received a grant from the Annenberg Foundation to develop a new framework for school reform. I assembled a team of people at the University of Pennsylvania (Operation Public Education), and in 2008, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided funds to elaborate our reform framework at book-length. It is called A Grand Bargain for Education Reform—New Rewards and Supports for New Accountability that Harvard published (2009). I spent the last five years working with a school district in Houston. The Aldine Independent School District has 70,000 students. Twothirds are Hispanic; one-third is African American. All 76 of its school buildings are Title I eligible—meaning they are all low income. We have been working there to implement our school reform ideas. And even without a teacher’s union obstructing our progress—I am quite liberal on most things, but the role of teachers unions in school reform—it is exceedingly difficult to improve the quality of teaching

Up into the 1990s it was widely believed that low-income minority kids could not achieve at high levels. There was a broad consensus on the Left and Right, but for very different reasons. Conservative arguments emphasized a deficient gene pool, or a destructive culture (one that did not sufficiently value education). Liberals emphasized the environment. How could inner-city kids possibly learn given drugs and crime and poverty, et cetera, et cetera?

So everyone agreed with different explanations that the schools could not be blamed for the high failure rates in urban education. And then what happened? The elite charter schools, for example, the KIPP—Knowledge is Power Program, and the Mastery schools in Philadelphia – demonstrated that low-income kids could indeed achieve at high levels. Mastery takes the same building and the same children, but replaces almost all the adults. And within six months they succeed in changing the school’s culture, and academic gains grow rapidly. I am not making this up. Mastery schools put a lie to the notion that it cannot be done. Amazing. So we know what works, right? The secret is really high-quality instruction, and really high-quality school leadership— great teachers and leaders. Well then let’s just scale that model, and we have solved our problem. It turns out, however, that we can not because there are not enough really good teachers and really good enough school leaders to staff these new schools You give me all the money tomorrow, it still can not happen. Last December, a new federal law – the Every Student Succeeds Act – replaced No Child Left Behind. That is how it was covered in virtually all the popular media. Yet this skipped over eight years of significant reforms

27 promulgated by the Obama administration.

Obama was the first Democratic president to take on the teachers unions, and say for the first time that we are going to evaluate teachers with genuinely sophisticated measures, instead of a mere checklist (you are satisfactory, or unsatisfactory, with no consequence attached to either designation). The reforms proposed the firing of teachers who provide inadequate instruction because poor teaching actually harms children.

Two consecutive years with a bad teacher and students do not make up the academic ground they lost. The reforms also called for performancebased compensation systems, where you can actually pay people based on what they deserve rather than on longevity (years of service) and academic credentials (which have proven not have any impact on student learning). The problem is that battle has just been lost because the bipartisan bill that was signed in Washington gives all the power back to the states, stripping the federal Department of Education of the ability to enforce these reforms. The only accountability left is for the poorest performing 5% of the schools – our “dropout” factories.

And who defeated the Obama reforms? A bizarre bedfellows coalition of the teachers’ unions; the anti-testing folks and the opt-outparents; the local control zealots (“local control must prevail even if it produces lousy results”); and the anti-Obama people (those who oppose everything the President supports). The fate of Common Core standards, which was initially agreed upon by 46 governors, is now being widely abandoned because they are now alleged to be a federal intrusion despite the fact that they were developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers.

I wish I could close on an optimistic note. I can not. I am really down on where the state of public education is. I hope something good will happen.

And maybe with a few minutes of questions we can explore some of those things.

[Question] “What is your read on having big cities, and in breaking up school districts?

Like New York City public schools educate more kids than most states do.”

[Theodore Hershberg] Yes, they have 1.2 million students. Which is nuts. So one big unified school district, versus like what Houston had. There is no evidence that scale here is the answer. When you blow all the smoke away, it is really simple. Really good teaching. Really good teaching is the answer, and really good school leadership. A really good teacher, could overcome even a lousy, principal. The

28 problem is the rest of the teachers can not.

Unless we change, the other thing I did not get a chance to say is in 1972 just under a third of all professional women in America were teachers, because discrimination for women was significant. You could be a nurse, you could be a secretary, you could be a teacher. By 2004 it was about a seventh, and today it is even lower? Why? Because discrimination has diminished for women. They are in every other profession.

You cannot get talented people at the K-12 if you are going to pay them based on years of service and academic credentials, which have no impact on student learning. And that is exactly what was being fought against by the unions. They do not want those performance-based systems, because it goes against their business plan, which is, we get you your salary, and we make sure you can’t get fired. So it is a pretty tough thing. Just keep your eye focused on what provides good teaching and good school leadership.

Thank you.

These ideas are more fully developed in Hershberg, et al, Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the 19th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

29

30

“Historical narratives are

written and controlled by hegemonic groups to write out other people, to create disfranchised populations, and to render those disfranchisement moments natural and legitimate�

31 March 7, 2016

CITYSCAPES OF DENIAL AND CONFRONTATION Stephanie E. Yuhl, Ph.D.

First, I have to say how great it is to be here. I know everyone says that. It is like saying you are just honored to be nominated for something when everybody really wants to win, but for an historian like me, who is not a practitioner in architecture or in spatial design, but who has always had interest in those things, GSD is a terrific venue. So I am very excited, especially to go to class after this talk and to see how people in other disciplines use my work and to learn from that. So, thank you very much for having me.

When George and Susan asked me to come, I thought, well what can I share with you, particularly those of you who have already read my book?

What can we explore together? I thought I would talk to you about some recent public historical interventions in on the commemorative landscape in Charleston, South Carolina. Have any of you ever been to Charleston, South Carolina? A couple, OK, so that is good. We have some people here who have encounter the meta-narrative— not even meta, just the default narrative of the place.

My scholarship is very much in keeping with the ethos and values of the Critical Conservation program -- very much about power, very much about how historical narratives are written and controlled by hegemonic groups to write out other people, to create disfranchised populations, and to render those disfranchisement moments natural and legitimate. And so like you, I am informed by post-colonial studies, by the relationship between colonizer and the colonized, and the ways that power is reproduced and systems of knowledge are created through images, through words, through space, and through the built environment. There is a lot of affinity between what we examine -- how difference is codified and then deployed materially to legitimate hierarchies. When I first went to conduct research in Charleston, I was surprised that nobody had written the book I ended up writing, which I think tells you how strong the hegemonic narrative was.

32

Let me step back for a second and share with one of my favorite quotations from Southern literature , along with this wonderful image of a plantation sort of superimposed upon itself. It is a quotation from William Faulkner. I do not know if any of you have read Absalom, Absalom! It is one of the American greatest novels ever written. It is brilliant but it is very difficult.

Faulkner was a Mississippian. He was an internal critic of Southern culture as much as he was a product of that culture and someone who benefited from, in some ways, reproducing the culture. Faulkner occupies a complicated position in relation to his native land. He wrote about the Antebellum South, in particular, critiquing it as a “make-believe region of swords and magnolias and mockingbirds, which, perhaps, never existed anywhere.” He was fascinated by the fact of Southerners’-- particularly white Southerners’-- fascination with the past. For them, as he famously put it, “the past isn’t even past yet.”

For our purposes today, I want us to consider a compelling line from Absalom, Absalom!: “You cannot know yet whether what you see is what you are looking at or what you are believing.” This speaks to the idea that when one gazes at something, when one experiences an artifact in space and time, one brings their radical subjectivity to that experience. Artifacts, spaces, views do not just exist in a vacuum. They are not value neutral. You bring your own values to them and process them through your personal, historical lens. To me, this is a great and grave warning, particularly when looking at Southern history, particularly when studying post-slave societies. We need to be vigilant and try to figure out what is it that we are actually seeing and whether what we are believing about what we are seeing may, in fact, be a priori of that seeing?

It seems only fair to frame this idea for you today by sharing a little bit of my own history, my own subjectivity, in relation to things Southern. In thinking about our subjectivity, we need to avoid passive voice in our approach to power and space. Passive voice, people! Do not use passive voice! This is particularly true for a Critical Conservation program because what does the passive voice do? What does it deny? It takes you out of it. Your claim just exists, unfettered, and that is nonsense. We all know that, right? This is why I always tell my students, “Yes, you can use the ‘I.’ In fact, you have to use “I.” Your writing is an interpretation. Not to use “I” is a political act, right?

So, I am going to tell you about the “I” that I am right now and how I came to this work. How did I, a native of Los Angeles, California, who grew up on the beaches of Santa Monica, start studying Southern history? I am the youngest of a big family – seven siblings. My father was a physician, but he was also a serious U.S. Civil War buff, which is interesting because his parents were from Hungary and came to the US around 1920, so my dad had no familial connections to the American Civil War. And yet, he was simply

33 fascinated by it -- by this notion of brother against brother. And my father had an amazing library. As a child, a little geeky child already -- the signs were there that I would go this academic route -- I would spend a lot of time with his books. There was one volume in particular, called Divided We Fought that I loved. It was not a great book. It was a Time-Life series book, for those of you old enough to remember those, and in it were a series of images from the American Civil War. One image was of a young man, Edwin Francis Jemison, who caught my my ten year-old eye. He was a Confederate soldier killed at Malvern Hill in Virginia in 1862.

Now there were many daguerreotype reproductions in this book, both from the South and the North. So why did I latch on to this one? I do not know exactly why and that is why I am asking the question -- what are you seeing and what are you believing? What messages had I already, as an elite white girl in the West, with a father who was interested in the battles of the Civil War as a tragic story—what kinds of romanticized notions of the Confederacy had I already, through osmosis, absorbed? I was attracted, as a 10 year-old girl, to this Southern young man, who, by the way, was dead and whose side lost the war and was supporting slavery. I was not interested in an image of a Northern soldier.

My ten year-old self would create a story about this image —I am not joking, I mean, I am absolutely confessing to you here. I would create a narrative where usually I was the damsel in distress and this Confederate soldier was somehow the hero of my romantic story. So, I confess to you today. I come out of my closet as a feminist scholar who absolutely was first attracted to Southern history through this very warped lens of mythical romance.

Fast forward to college, where I dated a young man from Charleston, and we visited the city. As we toured the streets one night, and I read every single plaque on every single, single house in Charleston, and I fell in love with the city -- then with the boy. I eventually broke up with the boy but stuck with the city for my career and my scholarly work. It was a really seductive place for me —and for millions of people every year. There is a lure of the South Carolina Low Country. And that is why today its main industry is “historical” tourism BUT it is a messed-up thing. I came to explore the city by starting on that same messed-up path, but then through reading and thinking and taking courses, I realized something was rotten in Denmark. For my dissertation, I decided to examine the thing called “Historic Charleston.” I turned it around and looked at it from all sides. That is when I realized the problem of historical memory, power, and place that I was interested in pursuing professionally.

Now, let’s turn to some images to unpack this problem further. This is a watercolor by Alice Ravenel Huger Smith. If you have read my book, you

34 will notice it is the image that is on the cover. This is an imagined vignette of life on a Carolina rice plantation of the 1850s, a period that Alice Smith never lived in, but her ancestors did as enslavers and plantation owners. Smith created, in the 1930s, a series of watercolors depicting this lost world. And as you can see, it is an absolutely nostalgic, moonlight and magnolia world of impressionism and soft pastels that embodies Faulkner’s “make-believe region of swords and magnolias and mockingbirds, which, perhaps, never existed anywhere.” Does anybody want to read this image for me? I know some of your names, so I will call on them if nobody volunteers! Javier, yours is the name I know first, but I wouldn’t do that to you. Anybody want to read what they think’s going on in this picture? No? Javier? Gracias.

[Javier Ors Ausin (CC’17)] The faces of the white people are more defined than the faces of the black people.

[Stephanie Yuhl] Absolutely. That is a really important piece. So here we have very clear traits and here we have just sort of blurred, non-specified, non-individuated human beings. Go ahead.

[JOA] The white people just seem to be taller or at a height, and even their posture is different.

[SY] Yes, their placement on the land is different. Their chins are up higher, their backs straight, and they looking down from above. So there is sort of condescension.

[JOA] There is an authority.

[SY] Yes, there’s authority just in their bodily posture and placement. Go ahead.

[JOA] This picture is probably on a Sunday.

[SY] Yes, it is called Sunday Morning at the Great House.

35 [JOA] like afternoon or morning because everybody is dressed up, including the black people.

[SY] Including the black people. Let’s talk a little bit about black people’s clothes in this painting. The average clothing rations for enslaved persons on a plantation were not pink, and yellow, and white -- Smith’s perfectly ridiculous and lovely colors -- clothes of the enslaved were grey and blue woolens, and in no way would have been this kind of PEZ dispenser pastel array. Now what about the interactions of the figures in this painting? What do we see? Go ahead.

[JOA] We see they are friendly. They just seem very pleasant. Even though there is that embedded hierarchy, it is amicable.

[SY] Yes, it is amicable. It is harmonious. And over here, we have not only one generation, but we have the future masters speaking to the future enslaved, right? And we also see an African American nurse here -- an enslaved woman taking care of what we understand to be her white ward, her white charge.

And to the right, on the piazza we have—and you can tell this from the clothing—a white person from the previous generation. So there is this notion of endurance, persistence, hierarchy, continuity, harmony, order.

This is the fantasy. For those of you who have never been to Charleston, this painting reduces the place into an image that tells you a lot about what the city, through its preservation program, successfully put out into the world. And it’s all totally “naturalized,” as seen by the fact that this grouping is assembled underneath the protective embrace of these live oaks that have, of course, been there for generations and will be there for generations after, complete with dripping, evocative Spanish moss.

Go ahead. Do you want to say something else?

[Noor Boushehri (CC’16)] Yes. The two men in the middle are completely fascinating to me, the white man talking to the African American man. I mean, they’re both dressed pretty similar. They seem to be having a negotiation, but the African American man has to take his hat off to talk to the white person. And then the white person seems to have his cane, sort of keeping a distance between them. I mean, it is just to maintain control, I suppose, of their conversation.

36

“History is a tangled web.

It is always about power and it is our primary responsibility to untangle that web through the modes we have at our disposal”

[SY] An excellent reading of that composition. Also I think it is important to state what seems obvious, which is what is actually going on in this painting. It is kind of a receiving line of enslaver and enslaved—it is paying homage, paying tribute, according acknowledgment. This is a moment where “Massah” is bestowing some kind of token largesse, just by his presence and attention.

And we know from the title that it is a Sunday, so this is a highly ritualized, post-church performance of roles, where masks are present, but there is no evidence sense of that masking, right? There is no sense of how enslaved folks masked to survive the brutality of their bondage.

This painting is a baseline of what the dominant artistic aesthetic has been in Charleston for over a century. Alice Smith’s paintings and her style have been reproduced by all sorts of less talented painters for market since that time – there is a big and lucrative market for this perspective on the past.

A friend of mine, who is a Charleston native and archivist, once said to me: “Charleston is just so pink in this painting.” He mused that the city is pink in its public identity because its real historical identity is actually blood red. The foundation of the city is a foundation of violence. It is blood red foundation, but one that tourism, preservation, and artworks like Smith’s have diluted into a “palatable pinkness.” But do not be fooled by the pink. The pink is actually—the source of the pink—is blood underneath. It is violence

37 underneath. Of course we know Charleston has a violent history of racism and it has, sadly, a violent racialized present. Last June, a Confederate symbolwearing white supremacist executed nine congregants at the black AME “Mother Emanuel” church. Just a few months earlier, in a North Charleston Park, a white police officer shot in the back and killed a black man named Walter Scott who had been stopped for a traffic violation. You do not even need to scratch the surface very hard to get at the fact that there is still that “blood red” shaping life in Charleston.

Like the Critical Conservation program, I believe that history is a tangled web. It is always about power and it is our primary responsibility to untangle that web through whatever modes we have at our disposal — for me, it is through words and images; for you, it is with space and design. I also believe in the power of history to shape a citizenry and policies bent towards social justice. I teach at a Jesuit school where we have a ubiquitous language of and commitment to social justice, to the idea of being men and women for and with others, and being in solidarity with the most marginalized. This is a powerful educational philosophy that is relevant to Critical Conservation perspectives.

With that in mind, let’s talk a little bit about some recent interventions in this pastel Charleston landscape and about how African American history—in slavery, emancipation, and today --is being represented in areas of the city that were once sites of hegemonic white power.

Today there is a chink in the heritage armor in Charleston, a glimpse of commemoration partnered with social justice. A Critical Conservation moment has just begun there in some small but important ways.

First, I want to show you an image of Magnolia Gardens, a plantation house on Ashley River Road, across the river from peninsular Charleston, where major rice plantations were established in the 18th century and developed through the 19th century. Doesn’t that photograph of Magnolia look like an Alice Smith painting? Magnolia is known for its elaborate and lush gardens, which were carved out of natural, organic material in the late 19th century complete with Monet-type bridges to entice paying visitors into the “romance” of the space. You know, you cannot fake this, but you can certainly create a market for it, and you can certainly design these Monet-type bridges to entice people into the “romance” of the space. Tourists visit Magnolia Gardens to walk through the winding paths of these beautiful gardens, and tap into—particularly for white folks—all sorts of fantasies such as “are you Scarlett?” “Are you the master?” “Is this your land?” For decades, the sculpted landscape did not prod most visitors to wonder what it was like to be an enslaved person in this space.

But in the past several years, some new questions about African

38 American life at Magnolia have been raised. In 2005, after being asked about what black life was like on the plantation, staff realized that they could turn to a row of former slave cabins on the property that had never been interpreted and make them public. Nothing had ever been done with them. And so with research beginning in 2005 and then the actual opening of the cabins in 2009, the Magnolia Slave Cabin Project came into being. African American laborers lived in the cabins and worked on the plantation even in the postemancipation era as recently as the 1980s. The site supervisors decided not to freeze the interiors of these structures in any one particular historical moment, which is an interesting interpretive choice. One of the cabins was the home to the Leach family for over 100 years. Ancestors of current-day Leaches actually had been enslaved on Magnolia 100 years before— and members of that family were still working on the plantation in the eighties— which tells you something about the meaning of “freedom” and what the possibilities were and are for African Americans in that society.

The Slave Cabin Project designers chose various historical moments to reproduce in the cabin interiors. This illustration is of the 1969 Leach cabin.

There is the example of an 1850s cabin, the era when these structures were built originally, and next is a post-emancipation cabin from the 1870s. Finally, here is a 1920s cabin. They know that the last cabin was altered around the 1920s because they found newspaper insulating the walls from that era from the local Charleston Sunday News, the News and Courier, and the Charleston Post. What I find so fascinating with this project is not only that it allows for change over time, for a multi-dimensional sense of black plantation life. These are sites where you can see the multiple uses and the ongoing history of people in this space, their space. But what is also interesting is that in order to get to the cabins, you have to drive or you have to take a trolley and, most importantly, you have to buy an extra ticket. So for a visitor it becomes a question of “do we really want to know this history?” You have to go out of your way to find these cabins. And when Magnolia is known for its gardens, the average person may not go ahead and buy that extra ticket.

Right down the street, the same family that owned Magnolia, the Drayton family, built Middleton Place, again, on Ashley River Road. And this plantation is known, again, for its beautiful, very refined gardens, such as this feature called the Butterfly Lake. On the Middleton property, there is an 1870s structure known as Eliza’s House, where a formerly enslaved black woman named Eliza, who worked in the big house, had lived for years. 10 or 15 years ago, Middleton started to interpret Eliza’s house. What I find so interesting is how they interpreted the house as a very cozy and folksy domestic space.

Do these interpretations of former slave dwellings actually move us forward? Are they backward moves in our sense of understanding of power,

39 identity, and place? On the one hand, I really applaud some of these changes in landscape. The notion that African American history and particularly, the history of enslavement would be interpreted and put out there for average tourists was largely unheard of when I was living in Charleston doing my research. On the other hand, I do not see these sites necessarily as great leaps forward, but as partial steps on a long conservation path that needs to be more critical.

I believe it matters where you begin the story you are telling about the slave past. If you begin the story of race enslavement in a plantation house, city house, or even slave quarter, you have already fundamentally domesticated it. You have already placed brutal enslavement within a discourse of family and domestic relations, a notion that plays to the master class’ narrative, to an apologist narrative. Remember, antebellum planters would often sign their letters “give my regards to my family, white and black.”

These sites have the power (unintended by their current interpreters) to play into that paternalism myth. On the one hand, these spaces are important because they shine a light on African American agency in everyday life, but on the other hand, they sidestep a big part of the story. Evidence that these interpretations are a form of avoidance is just down the street from both of these sites – the Shadowmoss Plantation development at the corner of Ashley River Road and Rhett Butler Drive. We really do not have to go very far to see the slaveocracy landscape as a figment of Hollywoodesque historical imaginings.

I want us to turn to an important part of the American slavery story and one that the historic preservation world does not usually focus on -- the domestic slave trade. The domestic slave trade, as you can see from this chart, was a massive wave of internal forced migration of human beings from American coastal communities to what is called the New Old South -Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana - for the cultivation of cotton and sugar.

Given the harsh reality of the domestic trade and its absolute centrality in Southern history, what kinds of spaces should be priorities in our conserved historical landscapes? We need to shift our priorities and start to question how to expand the narrative of historic preservation and conservation and historic landscapes. Just adding “black people and stirring”(as with slave cabins) is not enough of a radical re-conceptualization of the story. And since it is easy for the power structures to default to these lovely plantations, these fashionable historic domesticated spaces that serve a status quo preservation, we keep missing or erasing this key reality: that the foundation, the blood foundation of American history—not just Southern history but American history—is the Chattel Principle, the notion that a human being could be bought and sold for a price. If the slave pen, then, is the real

40 point of origin to our history of slavery, where can we find those surviving spaces where blacks were bought and sold, enchained and terrified, in this country, after the international slave trade has been outlawed? Those spaces exist in extant buildings in Southern towns and cities – structures that look innocuous today but that were actually slave auction houses, buildings that served as the brokerage houses for the selling of human beings.

Nineteenth-century abolitionists knew this. The domestic trade was a story that they told and retold as proof of the evils of the institution.

Abolitionists used the slave pens and the broker’s houses as leverage to force Americans in the 1830s and 1840s to recognize what slavery was at its core. Sadly, this is a move that the preservation community has not followed.

Almost 200 years ago, literate, cultivated folks knew this but much of the current preservation community, comfortable in its nostalgia and its market concerns, has not followed their lead. Instead, preservationists default to these other “pleasing and palatable” kinds of spaces. Now it is not surprising that communities that bank on their past through heritage tourism do not spend a lot of time talking about the slave trade. It is ugly stuff and perhaps “unprofitable” economically. But I would argue that it is irresponsible and dangerous not to highlight it given our present racial and political crises.

Let’s look at a couple examples of some communities that have done small things to at least acknowledge and recognize (but still fall short of reconceiving) the historic landscape of the domestic slave trade.

In Fredericksburg, Virginia, a slave auction block from pre-Civil War days has been preserved and labeled on a street corner. In Alexandria, Virginia, the contemporary offices of the Virginia Urban League are housed in the former building of Franklin and Armfield, one of the biggest domestic slave traders in the country. Located is right across the river from the nation’s capital in Washington, DC. In Natchez—which was a great entrepot of the Old New South’s human traffic and new agricultural products—a grass roots organization, led mostly by local African Americans, fought to erect interpretive panels at a site called “Forks of the Road,” an old native trading trail that served as the entry and selling point into the bustling domestic slave market. In Savannah, you can find a marker for one of the largest slave sales in Georgia history—436 men and women that were sold at the racetrack by plantation owner/enslaver Pierce Butler to make up for his gambling debts.

So some spaces are marked, but I contend, these kinds of interventions have limited impact on the larger narrative because you can just fly right by them.

They’re plaques and they’re posters and you fly right by them. Or if you live in those spaces, you do not even see the markers anymore. If you occupy a position of privilege, you do not even see the hegemonic historical narrative. It is the air you breathe. It is the water you swim in. You become so acculturated

41 to it and you can just fly right by it. But we know that there are many more structures and sites in today’s Southern cities and towns that were auction houses but are unclaimed/uninterpreted and pass as unproblematic parts of the urban fabric.

There are some interesting new projects that push back against this impulse. Some of you might be interested in this project that maps the domestic slave trade in 1853, Richmond, led by my friend Maurie McInnis, who is at the University of Virginia and will soon be heading to UT, Austin.

She is an art historian who wrote a book on nineteenth century British artist, Eyre Crowe, who visited the US with Thackeray and produced numerous paintings of slaves waiting for sale. Maurie and her UVA students have done a digital remapping of Richmond to excavate the spaces that were brokerages, highlighting for the contemporary public the city’s historic commerce in the selling of human beings. For the most part, we ignore this history.

The slave trade that we know or the trade that we see or the trade that we believe is the Trans-Atlantic trade and the Middle Passage. Let me ask you a question. Why do you think, in American schools and American culture, we spend more time on the Transatlantic trade than we do on the domestic trade? As I always say to my undergraduates, who benefits from that story? Who is served by that silence? The international trade of enslaved Africans to the US actually ended with changes to the US Constitution in 1808 (although smuggling persisted). I think it is easier for the nation to talk about a story that has an early ending, as opposed to the domestic slave trade, which expands throughout the first half of the 19th century. How do we tend to construe the Middle Passage and the international slave trade versus our domestic slave trade? Go ahead.

[Student] It was probably done by foreigners, not Americans.

[SY] Yes, we can choose to think that and fool ourselves somehow that the slave trade was done to us by foreigners (instead of by us). There is that passive voice again! American slavery, then, is just an inheritance, something that we are not to blame for. This allows us to reframe the narrative so that we all, black and white, become the victims of colonialism. Do you see that kind of twist? White Americans become the victims, through international trade, of our own American colonization by Britain, right? This is much easier to embrace and get our heads around than what the domestic slave trade insists upon, which is the active maintenance and growth of the chattel principle by Americans—North, South, what little West there was, by white Americans.

42 [Student] It was intentional breeding. Intentional breeding.

[SY] Exactly-- reproduction was a key tactic to keep the plantation and markets going for profit, not for paternalism—not at all as Alice Smith’s fantasy family model would ask you to believe.

The stories we tell and where we start those stories matter. For instance, if we start the story only with the international slave trade -- which has received a lot of scholarly attention, and rightly so, as a part of global history -- but we do not spend enough time talking about and interpreting spaces related to the American domestic slave trade, then I think that we are really doing ourselves a political disservice. This is where we can learn from Charleston’s story of conserving sites related to the slave trade.

Back in 1999, the Park Service put up a plaque about the international slave trade on Sullivan’s Island, a barrier island just outside of Charleston, which has been called by one scholar the Ellis Island of African America. And this was a big deal in 1999. But again, it was aimed at the international trade. As you read this plaque, your back is to the city. And in that city, after 1808, the slave trade, without the benefit of imported slaves, was still going strong and actually growing because of the actions of white Americans, North and South. And white planters, white enslavers—and I prefer the term “enslavers” to “planter” or “master” or even “slave holders.” “Holder” is somehow such a nice gentle word, and “owner” implies relationship—but the active term enslavers better tells the story in my view.

In Charleston, the enslavers did their damnedest in their rhetoric and in their publications to distance themselves from the slave pens. The enslavers knew, at their core, that this was a terrible evil. They tried to make the traders the singular bad guys. But in fact, the enslaving plantation class worked in very, very close company with their trader business partners. So on Sullivan’s Island, reading the plaque, your back is literally to a whole other side of the slave trade story that needs to be told.

[Student] Well, the Historic New Orleans Collection in New Orleans had a whole exhibition about just this issue, I think last year?

[SY] But that was just last year. Walter Johnson’s book Soul by Soul on the slave markets was published 17 years ago—New Orleans managed to get around to its role just last year.

43 [Student] Some people are sort of catching on.

[SY] True – but I wore my watch for today’s lecture. I mean, it is 2016 already, right? It is an obscenity when the scholarship is there and there is so little recognition on the landscape. And New Orleans in particular, is egregious, because New Orleans was the main crossroads for this activity and still there was nothing for too long. Walter did a tour of slave-related sites at the Southern Historical Association a couple of years ago, but nothing’s officially marked. It’s just appalling.

Do you want to say something real quick?

[Student] There is another book that is also relatively new, Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told—Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, where he goes through this in ways that are incredibly important and he uses body parts to talk about it in ways that let you get into the bloodiness of it all.

[SY] Into the bloodiness of it all. Well said, and a great book that underscores slavery’s capitalist nature. So let’s get into the bloodiness of it all in Charleston and the fact of body parts, the partitioning of human beings, into profitable pieces. This brings us to the Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston. Has anybody been? Have you been recently, since it has been open?

“ If you are American, if you are a person who lives in this country, you cannot parse out slavery from your story.”

44 [Student] I am from South Carolina.

[SY] The Slave Mart Museum is an interesting story. It is a really important intervention in the conservation of Charleston’s historic landscape. It is a corrective. This image shows a German fire house, a fraternal organization from the nineteenth century. The structure next to it is Ryan’s Mart, an auction house where slaves were sold, and the site that became known as the Old Slave Mart Museum. While I was in Charleston doing research on the Slave Mart Museum, my friend, Harlan Greene -- he is an archivist and if you ever want to do research down there, he is the man to speak to – Harlan says to me, “Well, Stephanie, the Ryan’s Mart barracoon [which is the Portugese word for jail and the place where enslaved people were held before sale] is right there in Verner’s work, Charleston Rooftops.” I was shocked. I had looked at this image by artist Elizabeth Verner dozens of times before, I was not seeing its full truth. I, who see—or I think I see—did not see, right? I did not see the barracoon. I saw only what the artist wanted me to see, wanted me to believe, about Charleston. And that is why I started today’s conversation with that Faulkner quotation. What am I seeing and what am I believing? What am I actually looking at? This is Verner’s lithograph from 1935 when the barracoon, which was part of the Ryan Mart auction complex, was still standing.

This is an image of the barracoon in 1907when it was turned into a tenement house. This is the space where enslaved human beings would be prepped for sale, part by part. Here it was, right there in that image all that time and I never saw it. It was hidden right there in plain sight. This is what it looks like now. The space is a parking lot. The barracoon was torn down in 1950s, but there’s St. Philip’s Church from Verner’s image. This where the Ryan Mart morgue would have been, the kitchen, and then the barracoon would have been right here. Ryan’s Mart was located at No. 6 Chalmer’s Street, right in what is now Charleston’s historic district. Nearby is the site of St. Michael’s Church, the courthouse, the post office, and city hall—church law, state law, federal law, and city law. These “four corners” are the heart, the official and historic heart of the city, and the heart of the historic zoning ordinance. And just one block away, a stone’s throw, literally, is where Ryan’s Mart was located. These slave pens were central to the antebellum life of the city and as historic sites they are central to shaping a radical counter narrative of Charleston. Sites like these slave brokerage houses are where we should start the preservation story of American slavery, especially after 1808.

Here is one of Eyre Crowe’s drawings from the 1850’s showing an open air slave sale, and the breakup of a slave family, on the streets of

45 Charleston. As I mentioned before, Crowe was a British artist who published all sorts of anti-slavery images. Because public street sales raised criticism about slavery, Charleston’s officials moved the sale of slaves off the streets and into into city-owned space, the city’s infamous workhouse, in 1839, making it invisible to the public. And then in a true capitalist American move, all sorts of men said, “Hey, we want a piece of the profitable slave trade pie too. Why is the city the only one benefiting from slave sales?” By the late 1840s street sales were allowed to be public again, but still, they presented a public relations nightmare for pro-slavery factions. And so the city changed the ordinance again in 1856, outlawing street sale and allowing for slave sales in private brokerage houses. Ryan’s Mart on Chalmers Street opened on that same day, July 1, 1856, and a twenty year-old woman named Lucinda was the first enslaved person sold there.

After the Civil War and the end of slavery, Ryan’s Mart fell into disrepair. It became a tenement house for many years and then an auto repair shop. In the mid-1930s, a woman from Ohio named Miriam Wilson bought the property because she was convinced that the building was a place where slaves had been sold. Wilson fought with a lot of people in Charleston about the history of the site because white Charlestonians did not want to believe that slaves were sold there. They wanted to gloss over the truth of Charlestonians as slave traders. But let’s not pretend that Wilson was a progressive in any way, shape, or form. She was a tour guide who bought the property and started what she called the Old Slave Mart Museum, hoping to make her living off of the history of the slave trade. The “museum” was an absolute abomination of slave-made artifacts, some fake, some real, and it presented a narrative of black history that echoed the gradualism line of Booker T. Washington -- “be patient -- your time will come, black people.”

You need to earn this. So even though on the surface it seems like the 1930s Slave Mart is a radical intervention, in fact, Wilson used the site to reinscribe key parts of Charleston’s hegemonic narrative, namely white supremacy. For example, here is a broadside poster announcing a slave sale order scheduled at Ryan’s Mart. I share this with you because Miriam Wilson produced a copy of this slave sale notice as a souvenir postcard for purchase, re-commodifying of black bodies in the twentieth-century.

After Miriam Wilson’s death, two women, the Wragg sisters, inherited the property and continued to run it as the Old Slave Mart Museum.

The sisters were the descendants of Charleston elite enslavers, and one, Judith Wragg Chase, considered herself a serious Africanist. They believed their collection of art and artifacts (the core of which they inherited from Miriam Wilson) was worth a lot more than it actually was. The place fell on hard financial times. In January 1988, the City of Charleston, after much

46 haggling back and forth with the Wragg sisters, purchased the property.

Many people/activists in Charleston were hopeful about this acquisition, thinking they were now going to finally get this museum done and done well. Instead, for 20 years, the building remained empty—20 years!

There are many possible explanations for this incredible delay. There is Hurricane Hugo that put demands on local budgets; there were years of poor leadership and internal debate about what the museum final exhibit should look like and cover topically. Interestingly, playing into my thesis that where you start the story matters, there was a lot of disagreement around what story Charleston would tell through this structure. At first, the city wanted to showcase all of black history-- from the forced arrival of the first Africans in the New World through the modern Civil Rights era in this small building.

Fortunately that did not happen. In 2002, the city hired a young graduate student named Nichole Green, who insisted: “You are not telling the whole story of American history here. I am from McClellanville, South Carolina. I am an African American woman. I call myself a ‘Gullah girl.’ I am a local. I am telling you, people were sold here. There is only one story you can tell in this space – the domestic slave trade. The building itself is the story. The building is the thing.”

In October 2007, under city auspices, the Slave Mart Museum finally opened. The space is vital because it insists upon a certain reading of American history. The exhibit copy tells the visitor that slave traders came to this place—this building where you are standing—to buy and sell African Americans. “Places like this were the focus of an interstate trade that brought wealth to Charleston, the state, and the region. The lives of enslaved blacks, traders, and owners who passed through here were as different as they were entwined and this museum was created to share their stories.” Everywhere you turn, the site is about broadening an understanding of the slave trade, declaring slaves were sold here, human beings were sold here, and that these spaces, this city, was a big part of that process.

The museum is a conservation model, on the one hand, but it is a critical intervention that is radical and right in the historic district. The Old Slave Mart Museum still doesn’t get the same numbers of visitors that more traditional heritage sites do, planter estates like the Nathaniel Russell house or the Calhoun Mansion – or Magnolia Gardens and Middleton -- but visitors are increasing every year. The Museum makes me think about all the other hidden histories that I have failed to see, even as I looked. Did I not see it because I didn’t know about it? Did I not see it because I did not want to see it? Have I not been trained to see it? I think that is what the Critical Conservation program is trying do for all of you -- to give you eyes to see what you were looking at, not merely to believe what it is you are seeing. So I think I will end

47 there so we can have some conversation. Thank you so much.

[Student] What are your opinions on the International African American Museum?

Did you hear who just got named director yesterday? The man who was named director is a descendant of Robert Smalls, who was an enslaved African American who stole a Confederate munition ship in 1862 and rode it up the river and got his family and friends then escaped and then came back as a member of the Union Navy and then became a member of the US House of Representatives for South Carolina.

[SY] I am conflicted about that International African American Museum proposed for Charleston, to tell you the truth. I am so frustrated that the National African American Museum at the mall has taken so long -- that we have a Holocaust Museum, powerful though it is, before we have African American History Museum. I think that too is about what national narratives we tell ourselves. The narrative of the Holocaust, for the American State, is one that serves the American State’s interests. It is not really our national narrative.

This is not the place where it happened. We get to be the liberators in that story, right? And it very much feeds into US positions on Arab-Israeli politics.

The fact that we have had the Holocaust for decades before we had a museum that is more about our central historical narrative of race slavery and oppression, I think, is really shocking. This International Museum in Charleston has been in the works forever. I am not sure it will ever happen. What do you think?

[Student] I mean, I thought it was a little bit problematic. I mean, I was brought on the project because it is like, oh, “you happen to be the one black person in the office.” Come and look at it. And so I was a little bit concerned about the sort of critical lens of it identifying towards a certain community. I do not know, it feels a little bit like a Band-Aid, honestly.

[SY] Yes, I think that is a really great metaphor. It is a Band-Aid. Charleston has a really strong and deep history of freed blacks and a kind of color hierarchy within the black community in Charleston, which itself has internalized different ideas about whiteness and blackness. So I wonder about whose stories will get to be told and? But in this case, it is international and it is African American and that is a really big—that is a big pie to interpret well.

48 [Student] Is it not telling that they had to do the Native American Indian [museum] first?

[SY] Sure. And then they got around to a museum about African Americans. Even then, the Native American museum is largely an anthropological collection of baskets. I mean, talk about reducing human stories of oppression and resistance, of forced dislocation, to their beautiful objects.

[George Thomas] Tell us how you feel.

[SY] Yes, sorry. But I will tell you how I feel! And listen, I do not think it is easyly to tell these stories. I can share really quickly with you that we at Holy Cross are dealing with the legacies of slavery too. At Holy Cross, we have a building named after Thomas Mulledy, who was the first president of Holy Cross and who earlier happened to be president at Georgetown University when the Jesuits sold their 272 enslaved persons from their plantations in 1838.

Mulledy used that money to help fund some of the buildings at Georgetown University. And then in the 1960s they are building these new dorms at Holy Cross, and they chose to name them after a series of presidents. They name one after Mulledy. And so the question is, Mulledy’s slave sale Holy Cross’s history? It is the same religious order, and the fact is you cannot—here is what I want to end with—you cannot, if you are an American citizen, if you are a person who lives in this country, you cannot parse out slavery from your story.

You just cannot. And there is no such thing as “my family was isolated from this because we were in Boston.” It does not matter. Slavery was a national pathology, and it is a national story. And so the question now is, what do we now do with this building that is named after this person? It is an interesting question that more and more communities and institutions are going have to deal with. And I think it is good for us because talking about the past is also always talking about the present and the questions and values of the present.

[Student] I think it is interesting, because I am a member of the Toni Morrison Society.

And we have what we call the bench. The bench. It is right there on Sullivan’s Island.

[Student] Yes, I was there when we put that down, and can I read the quote?

49 [SY] Yes, I have it in my paper, too, which I did not read, but please, go ahead.

[Student] She [Morrison] is like “there is no place”—in her book, she says “there is no place—where you or I can go to think about or not think about to summon the presences of or recollect the absences of slaves. There is no suitable memorial, or plaque, or wreath, or wall, or park, or skyscraper lobby. There is no 300 foot tower. There is no small bench by the road. There is not even a tree scored, an initial that I can visit or you can visit in Charleston or Savannah or New York or Providence, or better still, on the banks of the Mississippi. And because such a place doesn’t exist, the book Beloved had to.”

[SY] And so her whole idea about the bench by the road is that you will sit there and think about and summon this history back up. Yes, you can sit and reflect upon the past in the historic space, just a few yards from the Pest House where imported enslaved Africans were quarantined before entry into Charleston or to ports beyond.

[Student] Yes. And so it is just very interesting. I am not in the School of Architecture. I am an Americanist. But it is interesting to think about how architects do shape space to allow for these stories to be told. How do you build that building in Manhattan and still acknowledge all those grave sites that you are building on top of?

[SY] How do you make that clear? And make it a part of American history in such a way that you can not just walk by it. How do you create these spaces that engage, right? Spaces are both past-looking and future-looking and not, as in Charleston, frozen in time. When I was living down there, there was a debate about a gay bar that had a mural as part of its entrance wall. The Board of Architectural Review wanted to close the bar down, claiming it did not meet their signage requirements. And yet, there were all these other signs all over the place for Subway sandwiches. I think the Board was not happy because it was a gay bar. And so we have to question the ways in which these zoning laws are deployed to target certain kinds of populations that don not fit with that frozen, larger narrative. You had your hand up in the back, and then you.

50 [Student] Yes, just to continue on the point of freezing, I’m wondering what your thoughts are about what responsibility history or conservation, preservation, architecture might have to make the connections not only between the past and slavery, but also continuing into—I am thinking specifically of in the north—there are places where we could memorialize slavery because it did not exist here.

[SY] But it did exist here for a long time. And then after it did not, Northerners still profited from the Slave South through ship building, textiles, etc. It serves people living in these spaces to be righteous and say, we are the cradle of Abolition, which is only a partial truth. It creates a false sectionalism.

[Student] I am thinking, can we put a plaque on the Aetna Insurance headquarters in Hartford, saying that this company issued insurance policies— For slave ships and the like, yes.

[SY] Yes, but I would say it is the same thing with this problem of this building at Holy Cross, right? You can place a plaque on it, even though the writing of that plaque would be complicated. You can create a plaque, but ultimately, that is not very satisfying, because then there is the sense that you have dealt with it, when what you are also talking about are the ongoing legacies of racism.

You are talking about the present. You can not just allow people

to recognize a flawed past and then congratulate themselves, for that act of recognition, if in fact those policies and those politics are still shaping power relations—in this instance, to whom do they issue insurances? Whom do they hire? Or for Holy Cross and Harvard and other institutions, what is the health of a faculty-of-color initiative? What kinds of scholarships are available and for whom? That is why I was saying these are important critical conservation interventions, and they might be really meaningful for some people, but there are just pieces of the larger problem. It is really a policy-level social justice issue. Policy is where a lot of the power resides.

Is it conservation’s responsibility to be involved in this work? I would

argue yes. Back in 1961, there were sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee that spread to the whole country. Reporters interviewing Adam Clayton Powell, Harlem’s Representative to Congress, asked, “Are you telling us that black people should stay out of Woolworth’s?” And Clayton Powell responded, “I am telling

51 you that all Americans who care about justice should stay out of Woolworth’s.”

Because it is not a black story. It is a human story. It is a national story. Instead of compartmentalizing whose responsibility this is, if you’re going to have a social justice view of the world, you conclude it is everybody’s responsibility to do right by the landscape.

[Susan Snyder] One other question. Tell them about how you were described as dangerous.

[SY] Oh, this is funny. My book came out and I was really excited so I went to the Preservation Society of Charleston where they have got a great bookshop. I was a new author and I wanted to see my book on the shelf. And I am looking.

And I am looking and I am perplexed because my book is not on a front table with other related preservation-themed books. My last name begins with a “Y’ so I think, oh they must have placed it at the end of the shelves. And I am looking. It is nowhere to be seen. Every other book about Charleston is in that bookshop but mine. What a disappointment, but not surprising, given my book’s critical take on Charleston preservation.

Then one day a guy named Dan Conover, who was reporter at the

Charleston News and Courier, was looking for a book to read on vacation.

The newspaper had a table of books sent for review by publishers. So he goes down, and there is this big table, like the remainders table. And he sees my book, and he goes, oh, can I have this? And he reads it, and he thinks, how is it possible that this book did not get reviewed by the Charleston newspaper, but instead, it got put right away without a review in the remainders pile for somebody to take.

So the wonderful Dan Conover wrote the review of my book, the

book the newspaper wanted to throw away, and the first line is “Stephanie Yuhl is a dangerous woman,” which I think is just great. A friend of mine made an apron out of it as a joke for me: “A dangerous woman.” Dan was so furious that my book ended up on that table because somebody just decided, no, this is not for our reading public. We can suppress these kinds of stories. You can write the critical stuff and you can design and build the critical stuff, but if people do not see it, read it, visit it, then what?

[Euneika Rogers-Sipp, Loeb Fellow] I had a question, and I have several more now. So I have worked in the Black Belt South. I started this deeper work around agricultural land with African-

52 American families that have inherited their lands in slavery. So this is an incredibly important story for obviously South Carolina, but the South in general.

I wanted you to speak a little bit more about this city of Charleston

and the state of South Carolina and, for example, Montgomery and Alabama and Mississippi. Just how this narrative that you have developed around power and place relates to the Union. And also just more personally, maybe, about your relationship with African-American families in and around the South Carolina area?

[SY] Charleston was a good case study for me of questions I wanted to ask about memory and power and the landscape and material culture. I lived there for about twenty months total. I was married there. I spent a lot of time there, and I go back often.

What I had hoped to find in my research was—and I say this in the

introduction of the book— was a story about contested narratives. I had hoped to find in the historical documents African Americans pushing back against these elite white efforts to render in amber a kind of limited narrative of the space. And what I found instead was black folks who were fighting for really basic civil rights. They were fighting for black teachers in the schools.

They were fighting for better health care. They were fighting for all sorts of ways to survive and thrive, so that what seemed to be these dilettante efforts of these white ladies down on the Battery in Charleston did not really enter their purview. African Americans were fighting for survival and citizenship. The NAACP had just come in to Charleston after WWI. Of course, what I find ironic is that this seemingly dilettante, therapeutic white use of culture ultimately became the public image and economic engine of the city. So it actually had a really long, extended arm of power.

When I was there, I looked everywhere I could for dissenting black

voices. I interviewed a lot of older African Americans in Charleston, folks who had been alive in the 20s and 30s. I conducted oral histories and found that they were really dealing with much more visceral concerns. These kinds of questions should be asked and need to be asked about any city. But I would love to hear more about your work in the Black Belt and learn about what you are doing on the ground.

[George Thomas] You will.

53 [SY] Good, I want to hear. Thank you all for coming. This is such a nice environment, and I appreciate you being here. I am looking forward to class.

Thank you so much.

This lecture represents ideas fully developed in Stephanie Yuhl, A Golden Haze of Memory: The Making of Historic Charleston (University of North Carolina Press, 2005) and her more recent article “Hidden in Plain Sight: Centering the Domestic Slave Trade in American Public History� The Journal of Southern History, 79:3 (August 2013) pp. 593 ff.

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“An Exclusionary Amenity is a costly collective resource that polarizes people. It is a resource that, at least in part, is produced by a community�

55 April 5, 2016

EXCLUSIONARY AMENITIES AND EXCLUSIONARY VIBES Lior J. Strahilevitz, J.D.

I want to ask you to imagine, for a moment, that you are Donald Trump. I know that is awkward, but bear with me (Fig. 3.1). There will be a point to all of this. So suppose you are Donald Trump, and suppose you are running for president of the United States, and in order to be elected, or to get your party’s nomination, it is much better that your rallies, your political gatherings, look like this (Fig. 3.2). Adoring fans cheering for you, thinking that you can do no wrong. That is what Donald Trump wants to see, as opposed to something like this (Fig. 3.3).

This is another Donald Trump rally in my hometown of Chicago,

where lots of people who are very much opposed to Trump-- thousands of them, in fact-- showed up and successfully prevented him from speaking, because they were so boisterous and the police were so concerned that violence might break out between the Trump supporters and the Trump opponents. So how do you, as Donald Trump and the Trump campaign, create an environment where the people who show up at your rallies are overwhelmingly supportive of you and your ideas? And relatedly, how do you keep out people like these Trump opponents, when after all, your rally, your event, is going to be open to any member of the public? Well, you have already seen, if you have been watching the news, some of the tactics that the Trump campaign is using to make sure their rallies look like this and not so much like this. And the most obvious one that is in the news a lot is trespass law. Someone will show up at a rally for Donald Trump, very much opposed to his policies. They will shout anti-Trump slogans. They will accuse him of being a racist. And people from security, people from the Trump campaign, will rely on trespass law (Fig. 3.4), the formal property right to exclude someone who is being disruptive in some way. And that is how they create homogeneity in the audience. That is part of it, anyway.

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In some instances, it is not just campaign security. This gentleman

over here is Corey Lewandowski (Fig. 3.5). He is Donald Trump’s actual campaign manager, who ordinarily wouldn’t be the sort of person who would sully himself with excluding this particular protester, but Corey is a rather aggressive individual by the lights of campaign managers, and so even he is getting in on the act and enforcing trespass law at a Trump rally. And once all of the protesters are kicked out, order is restored, and Trump can go on with his speech. But of course, when we reflect on these events, we realize that from the perspective of Donald Trump’s campaign, the right moment to exclude Trump’s opponents is not after the rally has begun and people have started shouting. The right moment to start excluding your opponents is before Trump has gone on stage. So, is there any way for his campaign to do that? Well, there are ways, and the campaign has been exploring some of these strategies as well. One such strategy is to make it clear from the outset what the atmosphere will be like for people who show up to protest against Trump. This is a Trump supporter throwing, very violently, an elbow in the face of someone who is being escorted out of a Trump rally for protesting against Trump. This is another side by side comparison of someone. The person wearing the American flag uniform is showing up, and protesting against Trump (Fig. 3.6), and the person in the white shirt is punching him in the face (Fig. 3.7).

Now, with the exception of this rally in Chicago that I described,

where thousands of people who are opposed to Trump showed up, mostly students at the University of Illinois and Chicago, anyone who shows up to protest against Trump at a Trump rally is likely to be very heavily outnumbered. There might be 10 of you, and thousands upon thousands of Trump supporters. And so the result is that when a protester shows up at one of these rallies and does express dissent, then before they are escorted out, they are likely to be yelled at, mocked, maybe even subjected to physical abuse. And so this is the typical environment that an anti-Trump protester walks into. The man on the left is a Trump protester surrounded by pro-Trump partisans, and the man on the right has gone so far as to physically assault the anti-Trump protester (Fig. 3.8). So the idea here is that, by creating a space in which being opposed to Trump subjects you to verbal harassment— potentially physical assault—the campaign is creating a focal point that is going to be acting like a magnet for people who are in favor of Trump and repelling people who are opposed to Trump. To be sure, there is a certain kind of activist who relishes expressing the unpopular anti-Trump view at a proTrump rally. There will be some of those people; they will be very loud. But to most people who are opposed to Trump, the idea of being shouted at by

The atmosphere for protesters Fig. 3.4 Trespass law.

Not these rallies …

The atmosphere for protesters

The atmosphere for protesters

Fig. 3.6 The atmosphere for protesters.

Fig. 3.3 Not these rallies.

Fig. 3.2 You want these rallies.

Fig. 3.1 A tought experiment.

A thought experiment …

Fig. 3.8 The atmosphere for protesters.

Fig. 3.5 Corey Lewandowski pitches in.

Corey Lewandowski pitches in

Fig. 3.7 The atmosphere for protesters.

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You want these rallies …

Trespass law

Quality time with the candidate

Fig. 3.9 Quality time with the candidate

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thousands of angry people—potentially even assaulted—is going to do enough to keep us all away.

There is another, perhaps subtler, strategy that the campaigns

necessarily employing in order to encourage uniformly pro-Trump sentiment.

So if you decide to spend your time at one of these Trump rallies, you are not only going to be surrounded by people like this, but you are also going to have to spend a fair bit of time listening to Donald Trump speak (Fig. 3.9).

And for most Trump supporters, this is going to be somewhere between entertaining and religious—here are some Trump supporters (Fig. 3.10). But for many Trump opponents, actually having to listen to Donald Trump is really annoying. So I haven not tested this empirically, but my hypothesis is that when Trump opponents show up at one of his rallies, they tend to start shouting immediately. Because if they are to be ejected, you would rather that happen at the beginning so you don not actually have to listen to him for 45 minutes or an hour. Indeed, with the Chicago rally which I have told you about, where Trump’s speech was actually canceled, the cancellation occurred before Donald Trump even began speaking. And so, when it was announced that the rally was going to be canceled—here are Trump opponents cheering at the University of Illinois-Chicago—some of them are cheering because they felt like they don’t have to listen to Donald Trump (Fig. 3.11).

So when we thought about how the Trump campaign might create

crowds that are homogeneously enthusiastic about the candidate, we have actually stumbled upon the three core strategies for promoting homogeneity, the three core strategies for exclusion. And those strategies are going to be

Fig. 3.11 Cancellation of Chicago Rally.

Exclusionary Vibes

Three Strategies Bouncer’s Exclusion (Trespass-based exclusion) Exclusionary Vibes (Non-Trespass-based exclusion) – Language creates focal point for sorting Exclusionary Amenities (Non-Trespassbased exclusion) – Costly, polarizing collective amenity; willingness to pay is proxy for desired / undesired type

Trump Can Assemble Adoring Crowds in Cities and States He Lost Badly Fig. 3.16 Everybody Loves Trump?

Everybody Loves Trump?

Fig. 3.15 Three Strategies.

Fig. 3.14 Exclusionary Amenity?

Exclusionary Amenity?

Fig. 3.13 Exclusionary Vibes.

Fig. 3.12 Bouncer’s Exclusion.

Bouncer’s Exclusion

Cancellation of Chicago Rally Announced

Fig. 3.17 Trump can Assemble Adoring Crowds.

Trump supporters love the guy

Fig. 3.10 Trump supporters love the guy.

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60 used regardless of whether the community we’re trying to create is a fleeting community—people gathered at a Donald Trump rally for 90 minutes—or a more permanent community, along the lines of what you would encounter in a workplace, a condominium building, or a neighborhood.

Now, I am going to call the first of these strategies “Bouncer’s

Exclusion” (Fig. 3.12). Bouncers are something you may have encountered at a nightclub. That is the person who stands at the front door, telling you that you can or cannot come in to the trendy bar, let’s say. And these are people lined up behind a velvet rope, typically, waiting to get in, and in order to get in, you need the bouncer’s approval. The Trump security people are acting as a kind of bouncer. When someone is disruptive, when someone expresses opposition to Trump, they are the person who is physically enforcing trespass law and excluding the anti-Trump partisans from the gathering. Now if we think carefully, though, we will recall that there are some other strategies that arose in the Trump context that do not really have anything to do with trespass law and formal property rights to exclude. So when the Trump campaign is creating an environment that is hospitable, welcoming to proTrump partisans and inhospitable to Trump opponents, they are keeping Trump opponents away, not using trespass law but rather a different strategy.

Rather than hiring a nightclub bouncer or security personnel to physically exclude people they do not want to have there, what the Trump campaign is doing is it is creating a focal point where people who love Trump are going to be drawn to the building, and people who dislike Trump are going to exclude themselves. And I refer to these sorts of self-exclusion, these instances where someone decides not to try to enter community, as “Exclusionary Vibes.”

This is a famous picture because, depending on who you believe, we have either got people in this row affirming that they will vote for Donald Trump or engaged in a salute that was made famous during the run-up to the Second World War (Fig. 3.13). In any event, an Exclusionary Vibe makes someone think about attending a rally like this, and if they are opposed to Trump, saying, I do not want to go into that room. I do not want to be with those people.

Finally, remember that if you want to attend the rally for any length

of time, you are going to have to listen to Donald Trump. Some people think that is a feature, not a bug. They get a lot of enjoyment out of hearing Donald Trump say that we will build a wall along our border with Mexico and get Mexico to pay for it. There are not any Trump supporters who are going to be repelled by hearing their candidate speak. If they were repelled, they would be supporting some other candidate. But at least a large number of Trump opponents are going to regard his speeches as nails on a chalkboard, something that is really offensive and that they do not want to hear. Seen

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“ The accumulation of advertisements over the years sends a powerful signal about who is welcome and who is unwelcome in a community.” in this light, the Trump speech might be regarded as an “Exclusionary Amenity”(Fig. 3.14). You have to listen to Trump in order to go to the rally and express dissent. Now, an Exclusionary Amenity, as some of you may have encountered in the readings, is a costly collective resource that polarizes people. It is a resource that has provided, at least in part, not only because of its inherent value to people. It is a resource that at least in part is procured by a community because it has this tendency to polarize. The people who want to hear Trump, the people who do not want to hear Trump. And I will give you some other examples of Exclusionary Amenities in a minute, when we move into the land use context. So really, then, when we understand how exclusion works, we should recognize that three strategies are being employed, sometimes only one of them, sometimes all three in conjunction with one another (Fig. 3.15). Now, an important point to take away now, is that these three mechanisms of creating homogeneity are substitutes for one another.

Sometimes the law will make one strategy illegal, and people will go to the other two strategies. Sometimes there’ll be an economic shift or a political shift that’s going to cause the entity that controls the resource—a real estate developer, the Trump campaign—to substitute, to shift from one of these strategies to another.

Now, exclusion is neither bad nor good, inherently. There are

things about exclusion that are extremely important. There are things about exclusion that are extremely troublesome. We might think that even if we are violently opposed to Donald Trump’s policies, it can be a good thing for him to

62 be able to gather his supporters so that he can address them. There is some value in association, even if you think the sentiment that is being expressed in those associations is ugly (Fig. 3.16-17).

Similarly, few people are going to begrudge a university’s efforts to

exclude students who are not smart and industrious and creative. That is what an admissions department at any university is designed to do. And making it easy for brilliant people to find other brilliant people, which is what happens at Harvard University and other great universities, has a lot of value, ensuring that the people in a room for a conversation are extremely talented (Fig. 3.18). Similarly, if you go to the hospital you really want that hospital to have excluded bad doctors, to have gathered a whole bunch of good doctors. If you go to the ballet, you want them to have excluded mediocre dancers as well.

So, so long as the criteria for exclusion reflect genuine talent and skill, then exclusion is generally—although not always—going to be a good thing. On the other hand, where exclusion results in the elimination of poor people, racial minorities, religious minorities, from a community, then that is when it is going to be most troubling because the exclusion of people deprives them, and really everybody, of opportunities to interact with diverse people and diverse ideas and might result in the elimination of marginalized populations from

Exclusion is an Alternative to Governance Fig. 3.18 Exclusion can be Good.

Exclusion can be Good

Example of governance include zoning ordinances, environmental regulations, nuisance law, covenants, multiparty contractual arrangements concerning the use of land Henry Smith says think of exclusion as a delegation to the landowner to make the kinds of governance decisions that are otherwise made by the state The critical choice for a real estate developer is between controlling what his residents do and who his residents are

Fig. 3.21 Shelley v. Kraemer.

Shelley v. Kraemer Fig. 3.20 Mulligan v. Panther Valley.

Mulligan v. Panther Valley Property Owners Association

Governance = Rules and Regulations associated with mediating conflicts over resources.

Fig. 3.19 Exclusion is an Alternative to Governance.

the rooms where business is done, where important social ties are going to

63 be forged. Moreover, when you exclude particular groups, you are necessarily excluding particular ideas, and so communities that have to make collective decisions might go astray.

Perhaps, then, as a rule of thumb in trying to decide whether

exclusion is good or bad, we might start with the proposition that the more fleeting, the more temporary, a communal gathering, the better exclusion tends to be. And the more permanent the community that’s getting created—a workplace, a neighborhood—the more problematic it becomes. I am speaking at a great global design school, so now I want to shift to land use examples away from American politics as I explain how some of the different exclusionary strategies are often employed. Now, in these land use settings, there is another particularly important aspect of exclusion, and here I am going to draw on work that has done by a scholar at Harvard’s Law School, Henry Smith.

Henry Smith has introduced a really important dichotomy between

what he calls exclusion and governance (Fig. 3.19). What is governance? Think of governance as rule-making by a private entity or a public entity. Zoning restrictions would be a form of governance. Covenants imposed on all the owners of land would be a form of governance. Nuisance law. Environmental regulations. Multiparty contractual arrangements. What Smith points out is that exclusion and governance are really two different ways of controlling behavior and encouraging socially productive behavior in a residential community. So, think about a land owner or real estate developer who wants to create pro-social behavior by the residents who are going to move into her new development. Well, she has got two strategies. She can create a whole bunch of rules that are designed to get the residents to act in pro-social ways, or she can try to exclude people who are predisposed to act in antisocial ways. The critical choice, then, for a real estate developer is between controlling what his residents—or her residents—do, and controlling who his or her residents are. Now, the more effective the real estate developer’s selection mechanism, the less need there will be for governance. And governance is extremely costly. It takes effort to come up with the rules, to tweak the rules, to enforce the rules. If you can do a perfect job of ensuring that only the right kinds of people come into your community, then you can dispense with the need to restrict their behavior through governance.

During the last decade or so, American society has focused great

attention on the problems surrounding people who have committed sex crimes and sex-related crimes. These concerns have prompted the enactment of laws, at both the state and federal level in the United States, which require that if you have committed a sex crime and you have served your sentence—

64 you have been released—you are required to notify law enforcement of where you live, and when you move, you are required to inform them of that as well.

Now, in the wake of these laws, private associations in the United States, homeowners’ associations, have used private covenants, restrictions on land ownership, that prohibit anyone from selling a home to a sex offender— prohibit someone from selling a home to someone who has a criminal record for having committed a sex crime. And in a famous American case called Mulligan v. Panther Valley Property Owners Association, this community, Panther Valley, enacted such a rule, and someone who wanted to sell her home to a sex offender sued after she was prevented by the community from doing so (Fig. 3.20). Now the courts in this case, Mulligan v Panther Valley, had a hard decision to make, because on the one hand, we like to let people sell homes to whomever they want. On the other hand, the court was somewhat sympathetic with the community’s desire to insure that people who had committed these very serious crimes were not allowed to live in the community, thereby posing a threat to the other residents.

“Orlando is a major city, and the population for Orlando is 41% white. The population of The Villages is 97% white. Only about one in every 200 Villages residents is African American, compared to Orlando, which is 28% African Americans.”

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So, what did the court say? Well, the court said the restriction on

sex offenders living in Panther Valley was not unlawful. They said, if it were the case that every private association made it impossible for someone with this kind of criminal record to live in their community, that would be unlawful.

But so long as only a few residential communities are imposing these sorts of policies, there are still places that sex offenders can live, and communities that are concerned about sex offenders still have this opportunity to use the exclusion mechanism to try to promote safety and discourage certain types of crimes. Now again, this is a very controversial practice, but imagine how difficult it would be for a residential community, a private community that was particularly concerned about these kinds of crimes, from using governance as opposed to exclusion to further its objectives. The kinds of governance mechanisms that you would have to do if you are concerned about sex crimes being committed in your community are going to be very invasive.

You could hire lots of police to go into private homes and make

sure that there are not sex crimes being committed. You could install video surveillance cameras everywhere. You could arm the population. That would be a very American strategy—give any potential victim a gun; let them shoot the sex offender. But none of these seem like particularly appealing ways of dealing with the problem. And whatever we think of the exclusion mechanism, it seems perhaps a sunnier alternative to some of those extremely invasive governance regimes that are designed to reduce the incidence of sex offenses in the community. Now, the basic idea here is that sometimes, exclusion really is the most effective way of furthering a particular objective that a real estate developer or a community has, and the idea here should not be surprising. So we have long understood that, if you have got a business to protect, and you want to make sure no one is stealing from it, the best solution is not hire a watchman and watch their every move. The best solution is typically going to be to hire an honest watchman. Use exclusion rather than governance.

So let’s generalize more broadly. Anytime a real estate developer

decides to create a new residential community, that developer is going to spend a lot of time thinking about the types of residents he would like to attract given prevailing market conditions and the nature of the property in question. Once she has made that determination, she’s likely to create a marketing strategy that attracts the desired type of people, and simultaneously one that repels the sorts of people who the developer would prefer to have live elsewhere.

Today’s modern media outlets enable a great deal of tailoring

of messages. You do not have to broadcast to everyone. You can find the particular consumers that you want to have living in your community,

66 and advertise only to them, without having, necessarily, spill over. So the choice about whether you advertise your real estate developer locally or nationally, whether you advertise in English language or non-English language publications, these are going to have huge impacts on which buyers show up to seed your new community. Now the law of exclusionary vibes is basically the law of advertising. And what we see real estate developers do is make strategic choices about how to advertise their communities so as to attract a particular kind of buyer. Here, there are some interesting American legal cases as well. The most famous case dealing with this is a case out of the New York suburbs, called Reagan v. New York Times, where the New York Times, the newspaper was successfully sued, because it turned out that in suburban New York, whenever they were showing advertisements for subdivisions and homes, the people, the residents featured in those advertisements, invariably had white skin. And the result of years and years of seeing advertisements with white people living in the suburbs was that minorities who saw these advertisements got exposed to this idea of, maybe I should not look in the suburbs. All the people living there do not look like me. And what the court recognized is that the accumulation of advertisements over the years can send a very powerful signal about who is welcome and who is unwelcome in a

Fig. 3.23 Ave Maria Township.

Ave Maria Township

Mandatory Membership Residential Golf Communities Fig. 3.24 Architectural Exclusion, Sarah Schindler.

Architectural Exclusion

Fig. 3.25 Mandatory Membership.

The Mrs. Murphy Exception and FHA Limits on Exclusionary Ads

Fig. 3.22 The Mrs. Murphy Exception and FHA.

particular community.

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There is really interesting research, including some recent research

that suggests that particularly white Americans care a great deal about the race of their neighbors, even when you control for factors like the quality of the public schools, the crime rates, and whether property values are increasing. So if you ask white Americans whether they are willing to live in a neighborhood that has low crime, very good public schools, increasing property values, and an 80% African American population, many white Americans will say no. When you ask them about living in that community with OK schools, OK property values, medium levels of crime, and an overwhelmingly white population, many Caucasian Americans will say yes.

Race does matter a lot, especially for Caucasian Americans, to explain how comfortable they are going to be living in a particular community. And racial segregation is an extraordinarily pernicious phenomenon in the United States, one that polarizes political debate, lowers test scores in public schools, induces people to adhere to negative, rigid stereotypes about other groups, and undermines meritocratic ideals. This residential racial segregation, since 1948, at least, when the United States Supreme Court decided a case called Shelley v. Kramer—and the house in the middle of this image is the famous American house where the US Supreme Court decided you could not impose

“This is my favorite Exclusionary Vibe in The Villages. It is the intersection of streets named Nordic and Cosmos, which does basically describe the population there.”

68 a covenant and enforce a covenant that said, black people cannot buy this house. That has been unlawful in the United States at least since 1948 (Fig. 3.21).

But what has been slipped through the cracks, the sorts of actions

that are more likely to be lawful—at least under American anti-discrimination law—are Exclusionary Vibes. So in some respects, any discrimination law has caught on to this possibility, that exclusionary vibes might be used to promote the racial homogeneity a neighborhood.So here is an interesting feature of American law. A big landlord, the kind of landlords who are renting to you, if you are renting, they cannot discriminate on the basis of race. But let’s suppose there is an American landlord who has a small house and rents out two bedrooms to students. That landlord, under American housing law, is actually permitted to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, etcetera. It is called the “Mrs. Murphy exception” in anti-discrimination law, and it is designed to permit someone who is going to live in the same building with her tenants to have a greater say in what those tenants are like (Fig. 3.22). It is a strange provision in American law. Now, if Mrs. Murphy tries to run an advertisement like this one that I show here, in the newspaper, that is unlawful. So American anti-discrimination law says, to a small-time landlord, you can actually racially discriminate. But you can not broadcast your racial discrimination, perhaps out of fear that people will read this advertisement— black tenants or Hispanic tenants in particular—and think, maybe this neighborhood is off-limits. Maybe racial discrimination is lawful more generally.

And so these kinds of things are illegal, even though the Mrs. Murphy landlord is permitted to discriminate.

Now, there is also going to be some instances in which Exclusionary

Vibes—although this one is likely to be very powerful—are not going to be powerful enough. Remember that at the University of Illinois at Chicago, thousands of organized anti-Trump protesters showed up to try to protest together and provided safety in numbers for their group at one of his rallies.

And Exclusionary Vibes ultimately—if thousands of people ignore the signal and show up in an organized way—they are going to fail. And that could be part of where Exclusionary Amenities come in. Exclusionary Vibes rely only on language. Exclusionary Amenities are going to bundle language with something that is costly and polarizing, and they may, under certain circumstances, therefore, be a more powerful form of exclusion.

There are many real world examples of Exclusionary Amenities

in land use. I will show you one of them. This is a view of a place called Ave Maria Township in Florida (Fig. 3.23). There will be lots of Florida pictures in the last half of the talk. Ave Maria University, as some of you may know, is a

Extensive Use of Theming

They’ve Gone to a Lot of Trouble

Fig. 3.29 The Villages Downtowns.

97% non-Latino white 0.6% African American 1.5% Latino 0.7% Asian American

The Villages Downtowns

Lots of Ghost Signs Fig. 3.31 Lots of Ghost Signs.

The Villages

41% non-Latino white 28% African American 25% Latino 4% Asian American

Fig. 3.30 Extensive Use of Theming.

Orlando

Fig. 3.32 The’ve Gone to a Lot of Trouble.

The Villages vs. Orlando, FL

Fig. 3.28 The Villages vs. Orlando, FL.

Fig. 3.26 The Villages, Florida.

The Villages Age Distribution

They’ve Gone to a Lot of Trouble

Fig. 3.33 The’ve Gone to a Lot of Trouble.

The Villages, Florida

Fig. 3.27 The Villages Age Distribution

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70 very conservative, Catholic institution. And what the real estate developers did is they built the university first, with the idea that there would be a residential neighborhood around it. The University got a fantastic deal. Free land, essentially. And nothing is really free, so it is going to be the people who are buying the homes that are filling in with green space that are ultimately paying for the free land that has been converted to a university. Now to be a non-Catholic, that is not a very appealing deal. Why should I go and sign up to live in a community where I am essentially subsidizing a very conservative, Catholic institution? But to someone who is a conservative Catholic, you might take advantage of the programming, the library, the resources, the services provided at the University, and you might really like the idea of living in a place that is a big magnet for people who have the same religious faith as you. By the same token, communities that are scattered around the country often forgo investments in transportation hubs or soccer fields or basketball courts that their residents would like to use because of a fear that such inclusionary amenities might attract the wrong kinds of people. So here is Sarah Schindler’s work, and we are delighted to have Sarah in the room (Fig. 3.24). It is so wonderful, because I think it illustrates better than anything else precisely how this architectural exclusion strategy can promote residential segregation.

And in my book, Information Exclusion, I talked about ways in

which golf courses might have the same phenomenon, at least in the 1990s and 2000s in the United States, at a time when golf was the most racially polarized mass participation sport in the United States. White people loved golf. African American people largely did not play it. And what you would do, as a residential developer, is embed a golf course in the middle of your real estate development, and require everyone who owns a house in this development to pay for the upkeep of the golf course, regardless of whether they ever played on it or not (Fig. 3.25). Well, that was a community that was going to become a magnet for Caucasian residents, and likely to repel African American residents along the way.

Now, of course, it is an expensive proposition to build a golf course

or a religious institution at the center of a residential development, so why would somebody go to all the trouble? They would go to all the trouble because what people are buying would not necessarily be golf or access to a library. What people are buying is a certain type of homogeneity along racial or religious grounds. And the Exclusionary Amenity is going to function as a kind of tax, a tax that falls most heavily on the people who the developer is trying to exclude. So, to see how some real professionals use a panoply of exclusionary strategies to create a jaw dropping level of homogeneity, let me

Elaborate Narratives

Elaborate Narratives Elaborate Narratives

Elaborate Narratives

Fig. 3.37 Elaborate Narratives 3.

Elaborate Narratives

Fig. 3.39 Elaborate Narratives 5.

Fig. 3.34 Fake History in Spanish Springs.

Fig. 3.35 Elaborate Narratives 1.

Elaborate Narratives

Fig. 3.41 Elaborate Narratives 7.

Fig. 3.36 Elaborate Narratives 2.

Elaborate Narratives

Fig. 3.38 Elaborate Narratives 4.

Fake History in Spanish Springs

Fig. 3.40 Elaborate Narratives 6.

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72 talk about The Villages. So, there are lots of architects here in the room. In the United States, where are the opportunities for architects? They’re in places like The Villages.

The Villages is a community about an hour outside of Orlando,

Florida, that is the fastest-growing community in the United States, and it has been the fastest-growing community in the United States for each of the last three years (Fig. 3. 26). So to give you a sense of the kind of growth in The Villages has been experiencing, between 2010 and 2014, the population of The Villages grew from 51,000 to 114,000, more than doubling in size over the course of four years. And it continued to grow another 4.3% last year. The Villages also has the distinction of being the world’s largest age-restricted community. Barring a special exception, you have to be 55 years or older to live in The Villages. This is a graph of the age distribution from The Villages, which looks totally unlike the age distribution for almost any community you will encounter elsewhere in the world (Fig. 3.27). There are a few people who you will see in their 30s or 40s. These might be doctors or real estate agents who have a special permission to live in The Villages, or maybe the spouse of someone who is 55 or older. But the median age for someone in The Village is

Fig. 3.43 Lake Sumter.

Lake Sumter, with Historic Boat Tour, Shipwrecks, Fake Lighthouse, etc.

Fake Fights Over Fake History

Fig. 3.45 Fake Fights Over Fake History.

Paddock Square, Brownwood

Fig. 3.44 Paddock Square, Brownwood.

Sales Centers Feature Fake History Prominently

Fig. 3.42 Sales Centers Feature Fake.

about 70, 72. That’s what the age distribution looks like.

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So The Villages is using bouncer’s exclusion. They are saying, if you

are not 55, you can not live here. And so it is fairly obvious that that is going to really skew the demographics in a particular way. What is harder to figure out is not why The Villages is so old, but rather, why The Villages is so white.

The closest major city to The Villages, as I showed you, is Orlando, Florida.

Orlando is a major city, and the population for Orlando is 41% white. The population of The Villages is 97% white. This differentiation is extraordinary.

Only about one in every 200 Villages residents is African American, compared to Orlando, which is 28% African Americans (Fig. 3.28).

So how did The Villages do that? Well, it is the case in the United

States that older parts of the American population tend to be whiter than younger parts of the population. People under 40 are more likely to be Hispanic or Asian American or African American than people over 40. So that’s part of it, but it is only a small part of what is going on here. Because after all, there is lots of elderly people who are Latino or Asian American or African American, and many of in Florida. There are some other super homogeneous, racially homogeneous, communities in the United States. My research in census data finds that The Villages is tied for the second-whitest metro area in the United States. Plantation, Florida is 98% white, and Mentor,

Fig. 3.47 The Village’s Diversity.

Fig. 3.46 Golf Carts in the Villages.

Why Hasn’t Anyone hit .400 in Major League Baseball Since 1941?

Information Asymmetries

Fig. 3.49 Asymetric Information.

More Exclusionary Vibes in The Villages?

The Villages’ Diversity

Fig. 3.48 Exclusionary Vibes in The Villages.

Some of the Golf Carts are Really Impressive

74 Ohio is also 97% white. But a community like Mentor, Ohio, is a much older community. It has been overwhelmingly white forever, and it has a historical legacy that can be self-perpetuating.

The Villages is brand new. It did not start as a serious real estate

development until the 1990s. And so the real estate developers were really drawing on a blank slate. They did not have any preexisting population to work with, and at the time their community started out, the sorts of racially restrictive covenants, overt discrimination, were all illegal and those laws were being enforced to a reasonable degree. And so, other than using this age restriction, it is not enforcing the bouncer’s right. What gives? Well, as you can guess, there are lots of Exclusionary Vibes and lots of Exclusionary Amenities at The Villages. So let’s start with Exclusionary Vibes. The Villages has three different downtowns—Spanish Springs, which is in the upper left of the slide. It is uniformly done in a Mediterranean style; Lake Sumter Landing, which is in the upper-right quadrant, is all done in the style of a Florida beach town; and Brownwood, which is the newest of the downtowns, is made up to look like sort of an old Western cattle town (Fig. 3.29). And every building in every downtown is consistent with the overarching theme. This is a building in Brownwood. It looks like Disney World or Disneyland, right? There is lots of fake theming. This is designed to look like an old tobacco or a saddle-selling shop with a Country-Western “wanted” picture (Fig. 3.30).

Now maybe these architectural styles are polarizing, but there are

certainly communities with similar architectural styles that are not as racially homogeneous as The Villages. But there is something really interesting and different about The Villages. The developers have gone to a lot of trouble to evoke a certain mood. This is a fake, faded sign for an old movie (Fig. 3.31).

They brought in old railroad cars and built fake tracks (Fig. 3.32). They have built entire houses—this is a totally empty facade —that they have gone to great expense to construct a narrative with a lengthy description on a plaque about the fake history of this house (Fig. 3.33). They have built signs that say, “Established 1792” in Spanish Springs, which was established in 1991 (Fig. 3.34). You see this all over The Villages. The three downtowns, in short, are filled with fake history. There is going to be all kinds of plaques that tell the story, phony stories, of people who used to live at particular houses, people who used to be the proprietors of particular villages, of particular businesses.

Fake Civil War veterans’ homes, fake homes, fake schools of dance, and they are integrating this phony history into the commercial life of The Villages. So almost every major business in The Villages has a plaque telling a phony story right out front (Fig. 3.35-41)

These are the sales centers, which are always the most prominent

75 and beautiful buildings in The Villages, and each of the sale centers has a plaque out in front—you can not see it in this picture because the light is a little bit dark—but there is a big plaque right here that describes the fake history of this particular building, which is one of the main sale centers (Fig. 3.42). In Lake Sumter Landing, there is a huge, man-made lake, where they have sunk ships, old ships. It is all fake. They have built that fake lighthouse which serves no navigational purpose whatsoever (Fig. 3.43). They have got this elaborate narrative about the history of The Villages. None of it is real.

And this is my favorite example of fake history. This is Paddock Square, which is the main gathering point in Brownwood, one of the downtowns, where, I hope you can read this, “the central plaza of Brownwood is now known as Paddock Square (Fig. 3.44). Once slated for demolition, its historic value was championed by a group of visionary citizens in the 1950s. Today, it contains remnants of the earliest roots of the town, from its days as a cow camp used by the legendary Cracker “KO” Atlas. Cracker is a Florida cowboy. And so on and so forth. So they are not only concocting fake history, they are concocting fake historic preservation in a downtown that opened three years ago! (Fig.

Donald Trump is Trying to Reduce the Information Asymmetry

Where the person controlling access to the resource can easily and lawfully determine the attributes and intentions of those seeking access, trespass-based exclusion (bouncer’s exclusion) will be employed

Fig. 3.52 Today’s Thesis.

Today’s Thesis Where potential users of a collective resource possess private information about their attributes and intentions, and it is costly for the person who controls access to the resource to obtain this information, the person controlling access to the resource is likely to employ a non-trespass based exclusion strategy, like exclusionary vibes or exclusionary amenities

Fig. 3.51 The Giants knew what pitches were coming.

The Giants Won Because The Giants Knew What Pitches Were Coming

Fig. 3.53 Donald Trump Campaign.

The Shot Heard ‘Round the World

Fig. 3.50 The Shot Heard ‘Round the World.

3.45).

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This is not totally relevant, but people in The Villages get around via

golf carts, and a lot of the golf carts are also historical. So this is a golf cart done up to look like an old Rolls Royce (Fig. 3.46). Everyone goes around The Villages in these, rather than cars. Now, if we look at all of the plaques, we can find precisely one out of the 56 fake history plaques that refers to a family that is not of Anglo-European origin (Fig. 3. 47). And that is the Sanchez family, and there are two plaques describing the Sanchez family and some of the stereotypically Latino behaviors that the Sanchez family has engaged in.

And that is it. So if we add up the history, 50 fake families, precisely one of them—2%—winds up being non-Anglo American. And well, gee, this is really interesting. 2% of the plaques, 3% of the population. I don’t think this evidence is strong enough to suggest a causal plan. There are clearly other things that are going on, but the historical narrative does seem to match the reality on the ground in terms of who shows up at The Villages. This is my favorite Exclusionary Vibe in The Villages. It is the intersection of streets named Nordic and Cosmos, which does basically describe the population there (Fig. 3.48).

OK. So that is the Exclusionary Vibe. It is used, I think, very

effectively and extensively in The Villages. There are also lots and lots of Exclusionary Amenities. So at last count, in The Villages, there were 32 executive golf courses. One of The Villages’ big sales pitches is free golf for life. You can play golf on any of these courses without paying a greens fee.

Now, of course, the golf is not really free. If you live in The Villages, through your monthly assessments, you are paying for the golf courses, regardless of whether you use them or not, and these assessments are getting higher and higher. I think I am done for the moment trashing The Villages. Here is what is a little bit interesting about it. If you actually survey Villages residents about their quality of life, they are extremely happy living there, and compared to other seniors, they are extremely healthy. So a really trustworthy survey of a large swath of The Villages population asked them whether they were happy living in The Villages, how would they rank their satisfaction with life in The Villages on a scale of zero to 10, and 90.8% of them gave it either an eight or a nine or a 10. Remember these are old people and white people. They are not known for being happy, and yet they love their life in The Villages, and seen extremely satisfied with their position. Now that I have spent a long time articulating this typology of exclusion and telling you about the three different exclusionary strategies, I want to suggest what some of the factors are— indeed, what the most important factor is—that might explain why someone controlling a resource—a real estate developer, a candidate for public office— might employ one of these strategies or the other. What makes them choose

77 Bouncer’s Exclusion, Exclusionary Vibes, or Exclusionary Amenities?

Let me start off with a question. I love America baseball. It is true, as

George suggested. In Boston, the greatest baseball player in Red Sox history is a man by the name of Ted Williams, and Ted Williams is known for being the last American baseball player who got a base hit 40% of the time. This has not been done since he did it in 1941. Well, why is it so hard for a baseball player— you can think of cricket if you’re coming from these cultures—why is it so hard for a baseball player to get a base hit? Because of asymmetric information (Fig. 3.49). There is a pitcher who is throwing the ball, and that pitcher can make the ball go straight, can make the ball drift to the left, drift to the right, dive down suddenly. The pitcher knows exactly what the ball’s going to do, and the hitter has to guess, and they have to guess quite quickly. Now, that is the fundamental rule of baseball, that the pitcher knows what is happening to the ball and that the batter does not, and that is why it is so hard for the batter to hit the ball. We can see the importance of information asymmetries in baseball by what happens when that information asymmetry goes away. So famously—you will get a little bit of baseball history in this lecture—in 1951, someone hit the most famous home run in the history of American baseball.

A home run is when the batter hits the ball entirely out of the

playing field and into the stands. It was the so-called “shot heard around the world” (Fig. 3.50). It probably was not, but Americans like to think that everyone in the world pays attention to baseball. In any event, this famous home run was hit, and everyone thought it was the greatest thing ever. It capped an instance where the New York Giants, after trailing by 13 and 1/2 games, on the last day of the season, managed to defeat their arch rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers, on this fantastic home run. And in 2001, the Wall Street Journal broke a scandalous story which was that the New York Giants were cheating. The reason they were able to win games at a pace that nobody had won in baseball history was they had figured out what pitches were coming towards them (Fig. 3.51). They knew, by cheating, whether a pitch was going to be a curve ball, or a change up, or a fastball. And with that knowledge, they were able to eliminate the asymmetry of information that always gives the advantage to the defensive team and to the pitcher over the hitter. So it turns out that information asymmetries can make a huge difference, and think of any other sport or think of cards. The person who is cheating at cards, who knows what is coming out of the deck has a huge advantage over someone who does not.

So I want to take that idea of information asymmetry or information

advantage, and suggest that it is that information asymmetry, or the absence of it, that explain why we might see the controller of a resource employ one

78 strategy or another. So here is my thesis for the day (Fig. 3.52). Let’s say that you control a resource, and you know everything there is to know about the people who would like to use that resource. Well, if they have no information advantage over you, then you are likely to employ the Bouncer’s Exclusion.

You will say to people, OK, you can come in, you can come in, you can not come in, right? Because you know everything that is relevant about them. But now, let’s say you do not have that information. Let’s say there is some people who are Trump supporters and some people who are Trump opponents, and you can not tell just by looking at them which group they fall into. Well, now there is an information asymmetry, and now if you want to promote homogeneity, you are going to have to shift away from those strategies where you are telling certain people that they can or cannot come in. Instead, you are going to have to make the people who you would like to exclude, exclude themselves. And that means you are going to be relying on a strategy that does not have anything to do with trespass law, a strategy like Exclusionary Vibes or Exclusionary Amenities (Fig. 3.53). OK, so I will end with a little bit more Donald Trump.

I was with my family on vacation in Wisconsin, which is having a big

election today, a couple of weeks ago, and we saw a terrible advertisement on television. It was an advertisement from the Great America PAC, which is an organization that is trying to get Donald Trump elected president. And it showed bad graphics like this, and also said something along the lines of the following—If you think Donald Trump is the greatest candidate because he’s going to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, call this number and press one. If you think Donald Trump is the greatest candidate because he is going to negotiate better trade deals for America, call this number and press two.

And so on and so forth. They are broadcasting a terrible commercial that people like me just thought was awful, and people who supported Donald Trump probably thought was great and they said “Oh yeah, I will call the Trump campaign and tell them who I am and why I support their candidate”.

So, what is Donald Trump doing here, and why is he running such a bad commercial? Well, the Trump campaign is a campaign unlike one that we have seen in American politics. Usually, if you are a candidate who has a chance of earning the nomination of a major party, you know who the regular voters are.

You know who is going to support you, you know who is not going to support you. You have lists of people who voted in previous elections, and you can go to them and make sure they turn out.

The Trump candidacy is running an insurgent campaign. They are

getting people who do not usually support any candidate at all, they are bringing them into the population, and he is running as a populist. He does not

79 have an infrastructure. He does not have a reliable list of who is supporting him and who is opposing him. So they have to run advertisements like this, getting their voters to identify themselves. And then once they have compiled such a list, then it is no longer so difficult to exclude anti-Trump voters from their rallies and to include pro-Trump voters in their rallies. In other words, to solve the problem that we started with at the outset of, how do you make sure that your crowd for a rally is packed with supporters and devoid of protesters.

Thank you.

Professor Strahilevitz has explored these topics in “Exclusionary Amenities in Residential Communities,” 92 Virginia Law Review 437 (2003); “The Right to Destroy,” 114 Yale Law Journal 781 (2005) and Information and Exclusion (Yale University Press, 2011)

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81 April 26, 2016

THE COSMOPOLITAN CANOPY:

RACE AND CIVILITY IN EVERYDAY LIFE

Fig. 4.1 The “cosmopolitan canopy” in Rittenhouse Square.

Photo courtesy of Elijah Anderson

Elijah Anderson, Ph.D.

Professor Anderson’s recent ethnographic work, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life, published by WW Norton in March 2012, and his article “The White Space” published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 2015, Vol. 1(1) 10–21 formed the basis for his talk to conclude the colloquia.

This talk was not transcribed and is not included in this booklet.

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Editors: Susan Nigra Snyder George E. Thomas Javier Ors-Ausin Contributors: Theodore Hershberg Stephanie E. Yuhl Lior J. Strahilevitz Elijah Anderson Project Manager: John J. Aslanian

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Copyright Š 2016, All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reprinted, reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means without prior written permission from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

This publication was funded by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design Office of Student Services and the Master in Design program in Critical Conservation.

The editors have attempted to acknowledge all sources of images used in this publication and apologize for any errors or omissions.

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designed by Javier Ors-Ausin MDes Critical Conservation ‘17

C CC CCC CC Gund Hall, 48 Quincy Street Cambridge, MA 02138 www.gsd.harvard.edu