Reclaiming the Streets: Black Urban Insurgency and Antisocial Security

Reclaiming the streets Black urban insurgency and antisocial security in twenty-fi rst-century Philadelphia Jeff Maskovsky Abstract: Th is article focuses on the emergence of a new pattern of black urban insurgency emerging in major US metropolitan areas such as Philadelphia. I lo- cate this pattern in the context of a new securitization regime that I call “antisocial security.” Th is regime works by establishing a decentered system of high-tech forms of surveillance and monitory techniques. I highlight the dialectic between the extension of antisocial security apparatuses and techniques into new political and social domains on the one hand and the adoption of these same techniques by those contesting racialized exclusions from urban public space on the other. I end the article with a discussion of how we might adapt the commons concept to consider the centrality of race and racism to this new securitization regime. Keywords: commoning, inner city, race, securitization, United States, urban politics In Philadelphia, on 10 April 2013, dozens of Af- broadcast sensationalized reports about “crazed rican American youth converged in what mu- teens,” “mob violence,” and “youth rioting.” nicipal authorities described as a “fl ash mob” at In 2011, Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter the heart of the city’s central business district. (2008–2016) criticized African American teens Called together with the use of social media, for participating in unruly gatherings in public these young people blocked traffi c, massed on spaces. From the pulpit of Mount Carmel Bap- street corners, and ran down several city blocks tist Church in West Philadelphia, where he is until they were dispersed by the local police. a member, he scolded: “You’ve damaged your- Dozens of fl ash mobs, some involving hundreds self, you’ve damaged another person, you’ve of African American teens, took place in Phila- damaged your peers and, quite honestly, you’ve delphia from 2009 to 2016.1 In response, politi- damaged your own race” (quoted in John-Hall cians and police offi cials held press conferences 2011). In 2010, then City Council member Jim during which they condemned participants for Kenney described the disruption caused by a vandalizing property, shoplift ing, disrupting gathering of African American teens as an act commerce, and violence. Th e local TV news of “urban terrorism” (quoted in Owens 2017). Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 79 (2017): 39–53 © Stichting Focaal and Berghahn Books doi:10.3167/fcl.2017.790104 40 | Jeff Maskovsky Nutter signed legislation stepping up police en- on urban African Americans (Massaro and forcement of teen curfews, while Kenney called Mullany 2011), then “turbulent crowd actions” for aggressive “zero tolerance” policing and involving African American teens should be steeper punishments for unruly teens. Kenney understood, I think, as part of a broader protest succeeded Nutter as mayor of Philadelphia in landscape that is revolting against these arrange- 2016. ments.2 Christian Ducomb and Jessica Benmen I begin with this example of a moral panic (2014) coin the term “turbulent crowd action” over African American teen “fl ash mobs” to open in an article that applies Latour’s actor-network a discussion of race, insurgent politics, and se- theory to fl ash mob performances and that em- curitization in Philadelphia. Broadly speaking, phasizes both the historical continuities of con- I am interested in how urban elites understand temporary actions with those from the past and and enact security over public spaces, the strug- the contingencies that shape crowd action; in gles that ensue when subordinated groups seek contrast, I use the term to emphasize its nascent to occupy and reclaim public spaces in ways that political potentialities for the present. disrupt and unsettle elite plans for their use, and Central to this perspective is my framing of how race politics shape these dynamics. More these actions also as a response in part to the specifi cally, I am interested in the intersection rise of a new urban securitization and surveil- of race, insurgent politics, and securitization in lance regime that I call the regime of antisocial Philadelphia during the period from 2008 to security. Th is regime is graft ing onto the ra- 2016 of what Jamie Peck (2012) calls “austerity cialized urban post-welfarism and the carceral urbanism.” In a context characterized by lean turn of the late twentieth century a decentered municipal government, new reductions in so- surveillance and security system comprised cial-service delivery, reduced fi scal capacity, and of high-tech monitory procedures and hyper- austerity politics, the disruptive actions taken by specifi c forms of mediatized surveillance. Anti - African American youth are best understood, I social security is oriented not so much to argue, as an eff ort to reclaim urban public space, maintain social order by segregation or fortifi - albeit fl eetingly, for those who have been labeled cation but rather to surveil and police parts of as “undesirable,” “pathological,” or a “threat” to the city—its downtown commercial districts Philadelphia’s future and who have thus been mostly—that are diffi cult to secure. Th ese are targeted by the city’s policing, surveillance, and public spaces where the daily fl ow of people legal apparatuses. makes fortifi cation, citadelization, or ghettoiza- In contrast to both popular and political tion logistically or politically diffi cult in a post- discourses that emphasize black youth gath- industrial context in which commercial activity erings as antisocial criminal conduct, or that dominates the urban core (cf. Marcuse 1998). treat them as apolitical, I argue that they are a What has emerged in these spaces, then, is a form of black urban insurgency. In Philadelphia nimble form of securitization and surveillance and elsewhere, we have seen a recent uptick in that seeks to identify threats in racially diverse acts of protest against the spatialized instanti- and socially inclusive spaces without impeding ation of antiblack racism and violence, includ- the movement and mobility of the people who ing, of course, Black Lives Matter (BLM) and are inhabiting them. At the same time, antisocial the Movement for Black Lives (MBL) (Camp security also must work almost paradoxically to and Heatherton 2016; Williams 2015; on race, privilege elite groups of shoppers, workers, and place and space, see Brown 2009; Gregory 1998; residents; to racialize public space; and to subju- Lipsitz 2007; Maskovsky 2006). Indeed, if “teen gate urban African Americans and other people fl ash mobs” are a fi ction told by municipal elites of color. Th is article sheds light on this paradox. and their supporters to obscure the spatialized It builds on scholarship on insurgency (Holston eff ects of large-scale political economic change 2009; Murphy 2015) and on securitization and Reclaiming the streets | 41 urban public space (Hall 1978; Holdbraad and urban revitalization policies, commercial dis- Pedersen 2013; Low 2017; Low and Smith 2006; tricts, and neighborhood “quality of life” pro- Maguire et al. 2014; Mitchell 2014) to explore grams.4 Scholars in anthropology, geography, the unique political and governmental chal- and other related fi elds tend to tie these devel- lenges that antisocial security poses for urban opments closely to the rise of urban neoliber- African Americans on the one hand and the alism (Low and Smith 2006; Maskovsky 2006) new forms of racial politics that contest its in- and to the integration, post-9/11, of more co- stantiation and extension into new geographical ercive, militarized policing and surveillance and institutional spaces on the other hand. techniques into urban securitization schemes I focus on three related issues. First, I dis- (Maskovsky and Cunningham 2009; Ruben cuss in more detail what I mean by the regime and Maskovsky 2008; for a non-US example, of antisocial security and highlight how I see it see Goldstein 2010). Along these lines, in “Th e reshaping the US urban core and its racial geog- War on Teenage Terrorists: Philly’s ‘Flash Mob raphy, with Philadelphia serving as my primary Riots’ and the Banality of Post-9/11 Securitiza- example. Second, I analyze the new pattern of tion,” feminist geographers Vanessa A. Massaro black urban insurgency and street protest that and Emma Gaalaas Mullaney (2011) describe I see on the political horizon. In my discussion the crackdown on public gatherings of African of insurgency, I bring into focus the “common- American youth in Philadelphia’s commercial ing” of parts of the new security apparatus as an districts as part of a wider pattern of post-9/11 essential aspect of attempts to resist new forms antiterrorist securitization, which they see as of racialized cultural, material, and spatial en- supporting the militarized enforcement of spa- closure (Ecologist 1993; Nonini 2007; Susser and tial segregation and the defense of spaces for Tonnelat 2013). I end the article with a critical neoliberal capitalist development and commer- discussion of the commons concept as an anti- cial consumption.5 By calling it banal, they are racist emancipatory rubric given the implica- drawing on Cindi Katz’s notion of banal ter- tions of the new securitization regime. I draw on rorism, which, she writes, “embraces a theme ethnographic and historical evidence gathered about ‘us’—‘we’ are ‘threatened,’ ‘they’ hate/are through long-term fi eldwork conducted inter- jealous of ‘us,’ ‘we’ share

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