American Apartheid

As I read American Apartheid, I was reminded of a mostly black party I once attended in Crown Heights, where I spent several hours nodding along to whatever was said to me…I couldn’t understand the slang, I was only able to pick out bits and pieces of conversation. Apart from not knowing the common slang, I had to pinch myself all night to refrain from correcting every ‘to be’ that wasn’t conjugated.

The financial discrepancies between suburban Connecticut and Crown Heights are visibly apparent. True to the racialization of space, these two locales of my life exemplify the exchange value of white space and use value of black space. Shapiro’s essay illuminated a difference I hadn’t noticed: the crucial differences between wealth and income, differences drawn, for the most part, along the lines of white and black. Worse yet, he words, “holy shit” flew out of my lips when Shapiro revealed the “…45% rate of disparate treatment based on race” in credit card pre-approval.

The use of redlining and other discriminatory practices wasn’t surprising to learn about, after all, how else could the ghetto turn out the way it has? As with the prior week of readings, I was enlightened to the systematic planning, this time of poverty concentration and segregation. As Massey points out, the ghetto is a “permanent feature of black residential life”, rather than a transitional stage as ethnic enclaves had been for other minorities.

...I came away with too many thoughts about the common and accepted use of the term, "minority".