Race, Culture, and the City: A Pedagogy for Black Urban Struggle.

Stephen Nathan Haymes. Race, Culture, and the City: A Pedagogy for Black Urban Struggle. Albany: SU of New York P, 1995. 167 pp. $12.95.

Scholarly literature on the United States city is not hard to come by. The corpus includes Jane Jacobs' classic work The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) with its utopian hopes for heterogeneous neighborhoods, as well as Mike Davis' City of Quartz (1990), which persuasively informs us that Jacobs's ideals will not be realized in an American future. The black city has been analyzed in such classics as Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and Cayton and Drake's Black Metropolis (1945). Stephen Haymes, thus, joins a company of scholarly commentators. Although he does not construct a new investigative site, he clearly hopes, by treating an array of topics that includes "race," "culture," pedagogy," and "urban struggle," to utilize existing research in radical and ambitious ways to aid "black urban struggle." The phase evokes the smoky fragrance of 1960s and 1990s rebellions in cities such as Newark and Detroit, Wilmington and Los Angeles. A question that suggests itself at the very outset is whether these diverse locales--spaced variously in time are amenable to a single "pedagogy." That is to say, what is intended by the term pedagogy in an era of school board budget cuts and a general legislative "know nothingness" that attack education at all levels? Does Haymes intend to lead us to a practical politics of the local, or does he have other goals in mind?

The chapters range from "Race, Culture, and the City: An Introduction," which is essentially a review of recent literature in urban and cultural studies, to "Conclusion: Toward a Pedagogy of Place for Black Urban Struggle." Between introduction and conclusion are chapters headed "Black Cultural Identity, White Consumer Culture, and the Politics of Difference" and "Black Civil Society and the Politics of Urban Space." Haymes's project is stated most clearly toward the end of his book:

Critical pedagogy in the context of black city life has a crucial role to

play in the production of counterpublics, in constructing political and

cultural practices that organize human experiences enabling individuals to

interpret social realty in liberating ways. However, for a "pedagogy of

place" this must be understood in terms of establishing pedagogical 

conditions that enable blacks in the city to critically interpret how

dominant definitions and uses of urban space regulate and control how they

organize their identity around territory, and the consequences of this for

black urban resistance. (114)

The quotation suggests that Haymes is interested in the process of what Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenford calls "learning and teaching"--the commonplace definition of pedagogy. Haymes wishes to connect his own efforts to a movement in the field of education defined by Paulo Freire's "pedagogy of the oppressed" and subsequently modified by adherents and disciples such as Ira Schor and Henry Giroux to read as "critical pedagogy." The aim of critical pedagogy is the liberation of the oppressed--outsiders, minorities, the so-called "underclass." Such marginal learners are invited to bring their unique languages and cultures to the pedagogical table, where the critical pedagogue helps to stir up a participatory stew of knowledge that nourishes and enlightens all.

Haymes seems to believe that most blacks in the United States are oppressed occupants of particular urban configurations. Moreover, he seems to feel that most blacks are subjected exclusively to a "banking pedagogy" in which they passively accept what is poured into their heads by non-critical pedagogues. If this were not an implicit assumption of his book, why would he feel the need to craft a critical pedagogy? The strengths and weaknesses of his project are conditioned by this initial assumption.

It must be acknowledged, before continuing, that Race, Culture, and the City has all the markings of an unrevised dissertation. And as such, we admire the scope and ambition, but wish there had been more loving care extended. The monograph is tiresomely repetitious, full of misspellings, dangling modifiers, run-on sentences, and suspended dependent clauses. We are trapped sometimes in a veritable miasma of obscure jargon, overly long quotations, pointless citation. It is a great shame that Haymes rushed himself into print and that the State University of New York Press appears to have done him no editorial courtesies whatsoever.

The unfortunate form of the book, however, should not divert us from its overall ambitions. For Haymes has entered a debate about public urban space in the United States at a time when matters have never been worse for black folks, and his aim is to offer insight about the United States urban situation that will be critically useful in the project of black, mass empowerment, education, and liberation.

The "debate" can best be understood, perhaps, if we turn our attention to such urban centers as Philadelphia, New York, or Los Angeles. It is Mike Davis who best captures the nature of these centers when he titles his chapter on downtown Los Angeles in City of Quartz "Fortress L.A." Davis carefully details how urban development and planning have converted a once heterogeneous neighborhood populated by what George Simmel calls "the crowd" into a fortified urban garrison. Freeways carry middle-class employees to interior parking lots of the fortress. Once inside, there is no need--ever--to smell, touch, or walk "the street." Connecting sealed-glass bridges and archways provide aboveground transit. Deeply-bunkered health clubs and shopping malls (to which one rides DOWN escalators) protect one from pollution and riff-raft. Most importantly, police (aerial, foot, and automobile patrols) keep "undesirables" out of downtown Los Angeles "public space." The Rouse redevelopment project of high-rises, bunkers, and fortresses in Philadelphia reveals the same ideological designs and profit motives that are at work in L.A. The 42nd Street renovations of New York--which are completely owned and overseen by Walt Disney Corporation--speak further to a post-industrial, globally capitalized conversion of urban public space into white-owned and operated zones of control. The "crowd"--a heterogeneous, multi-class, variably dressed, mixed-race group of urban dwellers with a stake in the land and profits of the center city--is always what is first removed and confined to Bantustan-like territories in order to facilitate this "mall-ing" of public space in America. No matter how alluring the name--"urban redevelopment," "gentrification," "historical restoration"--the process is still America's version of South Africa's "forced removals." Ultimately, public space comes to mean privately owned urban territories overseen by a postmodern white security network that makes the Star Wars Defense System look like a Menlo Park first draft. The scholar Richard T. Ford has written quite eloquently about the mechanisms of conversion that transform the very word public into a sign of conservative privatization in our era. Tax abatements, gated communities, legislated "redevelopment" that excludes minority participation-these are only the tip of the iceberg in America's great reclamation of urban territory for exclusively white middle- and upper-class use.

Since cities are so clearly dominant as sites of power for the service, communication, and knowledge-based global flows of capital that mark a post-industrial world, the relationship of "blackness" to the urban scene must be a critical issue for the student of Afro-American cultural studies. Further, it is impossible from a perspective in critical pedagogy to conceive of a genuinely "black education" that does not articulate specific, carefully detailed syllabi, classroom exercises, filmographies, behavioral objectives, parent-teacher organizing strategies, and ideological mappings of school-board/black-student-body relationships. Only such specificity will result, I think, in a critical black pedagogy geared to a specific, local urban context of black struggle.

Haymes seems to want to be a missionary of black cultural studies to the black masses. However, he also seems to want to be a purveyor of "black public intellectual" wisdom to the discipline "education" in the American academy. These aims are, perhaps, misguided with respect to the very real and urgent debate that is now at work, transforming American urban areas and their school systems into binary opposition of white privilege, mobility, leisure, and profitable use, on the one hand, and virtual black incarceration, on the other.

Given such a situation, why does Haymes spend two chapters of his book summarizing work that tells us (1) that the racialized politics of city planning and urban redevelopment has led designers, architects, legislators, and white citizens alike to see the orderly "white city" as a proper and "natural" model and (2) that white global capitalism has fetishized black popular culture and seduced inner-city blacks into a postmodern fit of violent consumption. One would think, based on the long literature of urban life in the United States, that Haymes would have taken these two propositions as givens and moved quickly onward to the specifics of an actual pedagogy of black struggle. Instead he spends page after page weaving reviews of the literature. When he does, finally, get down to business in his third chapter, devoted to black civil society and considerations of "place," he provides interesting and original formulations. When "place" is conceived not as abstract "location," but as a space of identity formation, then one is able to read the ideological and perceptual networks that condition occupancy. Moving away from functionalist and crudely reflective theories of place, Haymes suggests an interconnection between a political economy of the sign and "visual spaces" of the city in the ideological construction of what the powerful deem a "good city." (Witness George Will in recent years saying that Northeastern cities should be left to rot, if rot they will. He goes on to say that there are perfectly good cities in the United States, as instanced by, say, Kansas City!) Haymes writes:

By evoking the nostalgic image of the harmonious city, preservationists are

able to rationalize ideologically that the dispersal of black settlements or

ghettos from downtown is essential for the re-establishment of harmony....

unlike the early city planners who believed that the decay of the physical

urban environment caused the moral and behavioral decay of European

immigrants, today's urban planners argue that it is black

American culture itself which is mostly responsible for the physical and

moral deterioration of American cities. (103)

Had Haymes begun his work with the insights of his third chapter, he might have gone on to produce specific critical pedagogical strategies for confronting such "preservationist" assumptions and their interlocking ideological, political, and educational entailments. Instead, presumably because he believes that certain black public intellectuals such as bell hooks and Cornel West know so much more about the black masses than the black masses know about themselves--Haymes devotes immense amounts of space to explaining the "black village" to itself. As Gertrude Stein said, it is all right to listen to the village explainer, if you are a village. If not, not. There is no conceivable reason for Haymes to be so utterly dependent upon high-theoretical sources of urban planning and black public intellectuals.

Why didn't he spend much of his energy on that "black popular culture" which he feels has been appropriated for white capitalism? Why didn't he get busy with specific examples of "local resistance" by black schools in the American cities? Why are there no game plans--or lesson plans--for classroom teachers who want to empower their black students in the cities? The only answer that I can provide is that Haymes was far more interested in sharing with us the fruits of his modish reading than in articulating his own, gut-level black educator's perspective on a critical pedagogy for black liberation.

Simply stated, Haymes's book will be a disappointment for those who want genuinely to find strategies of "black urban struggle." Further, the book will sometimes annoy those who sense a genuine, ambitious, and talented scholar behind the endless quotations from secondary sources in Race, Culture, and the City. Too often Haymes's own voice floats adrift in a sea of vaguely organized information. One hopes that, since the ritual process of dissertation is past, Professor Haymes will seriously engage the debate over urban space and produce out of his own very important discipline a useful course of instruction for those who wish critically to engage an active, fiercely productive, and extraordinarily perceptive community of black urban students in search of learning. There is a good book yet to be written on race, culture, and the city. Let's hope that Haymes will write it.