ABSTRACT

BLACK LIVES AND SPATIAL MATTERS:

Race-making and Resistance in Suburban St. Louis

By

Jodi Sheldon Rios

Doctor of Philosophy in Interdisciplinary Studies

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Stephen Small, Chair

On August 9, 2014, the spectacle of an unarmed Black teenager lying facedown on the hot pavement for four and a half hours epitomized for Black residents of North St. Louis County the experience of de-humanization they had long endured. With the same power of a public lynching, the spectral terror publically inflicted on Michael Brown’s body bore witness to the limits of the liberal state to deliver ‘freedom for all.’ The events of August 9 also reinforced a centuries-honed logic of differentiated rights that relies on the production of racialized space and bodies through physical, political, and economic violence.

The draconian practices and acute experiences of racialized space in North St. Louis County were operating long before Michael Brown’s body lay on the pavement. However, the events that sparked ongoing protests and global debates following Brown’s death illustrate why it is critical to study places like North St. Louis County, which is an extreme example of how both racist and liberatory projects operate in and through space. Here, subjugation and liberation are produced at the intersection of stigmatized Black space and the ‘white spatial imaginary’ of suburban normativity. These practices provide important insight into how black subjects are maintained as well as how blackness repudiates the claims of liberal humanism. While relationships between the ‘work of space’ and historical modalities of race-making are clearly operating in North St. Louis County, a radical form of resistance with the potential to challenge anti-Black paradigms was also birthed in this area.

This project asks: What work does race do to produce differentiated sub/urban citizens, and with what effect? The transdisciplinary approach used for this research is a project-based methodology that operates outside of traditional disciplinary norms to research intimately interconnected phenomena. Multiple qualitative and quantitative methods and analytics for the collection, analysis, and synthesis of data were used over a ten-year period. The research design expanded to adopt additional methods based on findings throughout the process. The combined dataset includes research carried out while I was a faculty member at Washington University, including eighteen in-depth interviews with residents and leaders of North St. Louis County prior to 2010 and twenty-five interviews with residents of the city of Pagedale between 2005 and 2010. The data were also derived from more recent research, including 105 intercept interviews with residents of North St. Louis County between 2014 and 2015 and thirty-nine interviews with core members of the Ferguson Protest Movement. Participant observation was used at more than fifty meetings and events between 2003 and 2015 and throughout extensive time spent in this area. Historical data were collected from over forty archives, and a large amount of statistical and legal data were collected from public records, including an extensive data request from twenty-five municipal courts through the use of the Missouri Sunshine Law.

Spanning twelve years, this research investigates the degree to which race, municipal autonomy, and regional contestations over power, resources, and space, are intimately intertwined through formal policies and informal practices in North St. Louis County, often with devastating consequences. This work also considers how multiple forms of state violence are normalized for the purpose of legitimizing municipal governments, perpetuating hierarchies of power, and policing Black bodies for profit. North St. Louis County provides important evidence regarding how discursive space and lived experience are deeply interdependent and how definitions and expectations of space determine the opportunities and limitations of residents in metropolitan areas. While the evidence documented in this work reveals the dire circumstances Black residents of North St. Louis County live with every day, the dynamics of place and people converged on August 9, 2014, to spark a social movement that is uniquely connected to the particular history and experience of Black residents in this area. Leading the way were Black women and queer of color protesters who claimed the street and their bodies as locations of struggle. These protesters contribute to a new iteration of the fight for human liberation in fundamental ways that have not been fully recognized in the national discourse concerning social movements (like Black Lives Matter). As such, North St. Louis County can be viewed as both a location of devastating oppression and as an example of extreme practices of freedom.

The primary concern in this dissertation is the question of how racially marginalized societies practicing autonomous governance negotiate conflicts with sovereign states over resource extraction and its consequences. Specifically, this research provides a description, interpretation, and analysis of contemporary social organization and governance of the Maroon polity of Accompong as it brings to bear a distinct history of resistance onto the terrain of political conflict and negotiations with the Jamaican state. The Ndyuka Maroon polities of the Moengo region of Suriname are used as a comparative example where, like Jamaica, the activities of the aluminum industry are the fulcrum of an environmental and political crisis threatening Maroon territorial and cultural integrity. Standing as the first comparison of these two Maroon societies in the contemporary period, this research reveals that Accompong has developed political strategies of separatism and sovereignty while seeking stability with the Jamaican state, whereas the Ndyuka have eschewed separatism in favor of state entryism. These divergent strategies are responses to the differential tolerances of each national state toward Maroon autonomy given political economic calculations based on the valuation of Maroon land for its resource wealth. Yet, in both Maroon communities, a practice of environmental preservationism grounded in distinct collective memories of resistance to enslavement has guided their responses to the crisis. Ultimately, 21st century Maroon political action suggests the need for plurinational and decentralized approaches to national state formation. This research uses systematic empirical data, articulated through an engagement with key theories in both African Diaspora Studies and Environmental Studies, to create a generative conversation between the two fields. This research contributes to a greater understanding of environmental politics, ethnic multiplicity in the African diaspora, the politics of autonomy, diaspora theory, Caribbean colonial history, socio-economic development in developing countries, and the lateral possibilities of freedom and social transformation.

This dissertation is a critical examination of both the history of the Dismal Swamp maroon communities (independent and resistant communities of individuals some would label “runaway slaves”) and of the politics of race and representation of enslaved resistance in public historical narratives and in local Black collective memory. Principally, this is a critical exploration of the legacies of slavery and enslaved resistance evidenced by Black people’s resilience in and around the swamp across time – from maroon resilience through the physical swamp muck and mire, an appealing alternative to bondage, to the present-day resilience of Black community memory of enslaved people’s historical agency, in spite of the metaphysical muck and mire, or the entanglement of race and power that too often silences the narrative of Black resistance.

Once recently an extremely understudied and under-researched topic, my research on the history and legacy of U.S. marronage advances the fields of slavery, public history, and collective memory by: (1) connecting the activities of the Dismal Swamp maroons to a hemispheric Black tradition not merely of flight, but organized violence against slaveholding societies as freedom and self-defense; (2) comprehensively clarifying the specificity of U.S. marronage through a reconceptualization of the phenomenon that fundamentally includes all slaveholding contexts; (3) emphasizing the erasure and marginalization of enslaved resistance, and marronage in particular, in public historical representation, distinct from previous studies in the fields of public history and collective memory that focus on representational silences surrounding the Civil War or plantation slavery more broadly; and (4) by utilizing the voices of descendants of the enslaved as central to the recovering and uncovering of the historical legacy of the Dismal Swamp maroons.

This interdisciplinary project benefits from the use of mixed methods and the methodology of restorative and transformative history. This is the labor of reconstructing and reconnecting with the past toward social change. Racialized and oppressed peoples’ knowledge about the swamp, about history, and their generational memory are key sources in this project. I place them in conversation with written historical archives, with the archaeological record, and with the ethnography of race and representation in the present cultural landscape of the Dismal Swamp. My methodology approaches the swamp as a living archive from which ongoing freedom struggles and racial oppression can be can be read and can be learned from, across time.

The first part of the dissertation focuses on U.S. marronage, its relationship to the maroons of Latin America and the Caribbean, and the activities of maroon communities in the Great Dismal Swamp, a huge morass of swampland straddling the Virginia/North Carolina eastern seaboard. The swamp once covered the space of two thousand square miles and is thought to have contained tens of thousands of self-emancipated individuals throughout the period of 1700-1865. I weigh the historical scale, scope, and impact of marronage in the swamp and its surrounding cities and counties. I investigate autonomous maroon and enslaved community building and organized, collaborative, insurrectionary maroon and enslaved networks of freedom along the peripheries of the swamp. I argue that the presence of the swamp itself greatly influenced opportunities for enslaved resistance, as the rise of marronage and insurrection by the early 19th century threatened the very foundation of the surrounding plantation world, as evidenced by the attempted rebellions of 1792 and 1800-1802.

The second part of this dissertation examines the present-day relationships between the suppression of the history of enslaved agency, marronage, and resistance in public history, and collective memory. I point to the defining role race plays in power struggles for historical representation and the building of memory (or forgetting) about slavery and marronage throughout the swamp’s built landscape. I analyze texts, plaques, signs, markers, tour narratives, and other discourse at twenty-seven historical sites and sites that publicly inform the historical significance of the Dismal Swamp and the surrounding Tidewater region of Virginia and North Carolina, to examine the ways these institutions (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Services, museums, historical societies) control the narratives about the swamp and its interpretive significance. I find that institutional practices of representation privilege the historical and present “logic of whiteness” that minimizes, distorts, segregates, or silences histories involving white culpability and the experiences of those that challenge the status quo. This is particularly applicable to those pasts shaped by Black autonomy (marronage) and violent protest. But despite these silences and ensuing struggles for more equitable and just historical representation, interviews with thirty-two Black people living around the swamp today show how Black communities continue to contest dominant epistemes and create alternative spaces of knowledge and resilient memory that are self-validating, empowering, and that directly inform local Black identity, place, and belonging.

The dissertation develops our theorizing about the dynamics of racialization, and the role of race and ethnicity, in the United States, particularly in order to account for the dynamics and processes unique to Latinos. It does so by examining white attitudes towards Latinos in Orange County, California through public discourse analysis of the "Ask a Mexican" column, a survey instrument and a series of in-depth interviews to triangulate whites' use and logic of racial stereotypes and policy preferences. Orange County is a good testing ground for contemporary Latino racialization because it is a majority minority area, which has a long history of migration from Mexico, with deep racial segregation that reflects racial inequalities between whites and Latinos. While Latinos in the United States as a whole are a heterogeneous group my data demonstrates how the current racialization of Latinos in the United States has a homogenizing effect.

Empirically my data maps racial stereotypes whites have had and continue to reference as the Latino population has increased. These include: Latinos are inherently criminal; do not value education; abuse public assistance; and do not assimilate. They further diametrically oppose what it is to be an American and from being Mexican. Whites use the illegality frame, but frequently assign characteristics to all Latinos regardless of their status and generation. The findings demonstrate how the perceptions of whites towards Latinos are used when whites make daily decisions and also form their larger policy preferences. While some supported a pathway to citizenship most of the respondents overwhelmingly held negative and frequently racist views of Latinos.

Theoretically, my work interrogates how Latinos/Mexicans have their own complex, multifaceted dynamics, including the implications of proximity to Mexico, the torrid race relations between whites and Latinos that included labor exploitation, segregation and lynching as well as the ongoing dominant discourse centered around Latinos being "illegal," a threat, and undeserving of citizenship. My research reveals that whites often use "ethnic" terms to really mean biological, racially fixed terms. Thus, the extent to which Latinos are imagined to be a race or ethnicity among populations outside the academy have major implications. Importantly, whites consistently express the belief that Latinos are not assimilating and consistently assert that an alleged "backward" culture is passed down from generation to generation, leading whites to believe Mexicans are an inferior group. Furthermore, my data account for context of reception, measured by white attitudes towards Latinos, that the literature does not take into account. My data also supports Ngai's and other scholarship about Latinos treated as perpetual foreigners, but also adds how other parts of the Latino community are labeled and treated as racial minorities. Thus, my data challenges past literature that examines the Latino experience solely through an immigrant paradigm. Lastly, my findings challenge Black exceptionalism and a black/non-black color line, because it proves in fact that whites have racist sentiments towards Latinos and do not see them similar to themselves.