PHILOSOPHY & GEOGRAPHY, VOL. 7, NO.

1, FEBRUARY 2004

SPECIAL SECTION

Plantations, ghettos, prisons: US racial geographies

EDUARDO MENDIETA
Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University (SUNY), Stony Brook, NY, USA

Abstract In the rst part of this essay, I develop the argument that Michel Foucaults work should be read with geographical and topological ideas in mind. I argue that Foucaults archeology and genealogy are fundamentally determined by spatial, topological, geographical, and geometrical metaphors and concepts. This spatial dimension of genealogy is explicitly related to racism and the regimes that domesticate agents through the practices, institutions and ideologies of racialization. The second part offers a genealogical reading of US history and spatiality in terms of its racial institutions. I suggest that if we want to read the US geographies of topographies and cartographies of racism in a Foucauldian manner, then we must focus on plantations, ghettos, and prisons as the spaces-institutions-geographies that consolidated the racial matrix of US polity. My goal is to acculturate Foucauldian racial genealogy to the US racial matrix, and, conversely, to read US geo-history in terms of racializing spatialities. Introduction This article is about race, space, and genocide. It is thus about the practices of racialization that are enacted through the production and control of social space for the sake of making both possible and necessary the right to kill some for the sake of the putative health of the social body. It is thus about the normalization and routinization of genocide. The essay, seen from a different angle, is about how to read Michel Foucault with American eyes; that is to say, how to read and make fruitful a theory that has traveled quite far, and across time, which nevertheless speaks powerfully to our contemporary United States context. The United States has become what Loic Wacquant1 has called the rst world historical carceral society. It is a society that has transformed slavery and legalized discrimination into the practices of gerrymandering and gentrifying African-Americans in ghettos. These ghettos, in turn, have been functionally and structurally assimilated into the prison-industry complex. This complex has become what Foucault called the carceral archipelago.2 In the rst part of the essay, I present a reading of Michel Foucaults work that links, originally and productively, his insights into spatiality with his genealogy of racism. In the second, I turn, with Foucauldian tools, to an analysis of the racial geographies of the United States that
ISSN 1090-3771 print/ISSN 1472-7242 online/04/010043-17 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1090377042000196010

44

E. MENDIETA

focuses on four major spaces, or spatial arrangements, for the containment and regimentation of African-Americans: the plantation, the ghetto, the prison industrial complex, and death row.

Foucaults Racial Geographies Notwithstanding the spatial, or spatializing, turn of contemporary social theory and the proliferation of works that gravitate around the question of space, geography, cartography, and urbanization, Foucaults contributions to this turn have not received the attention that they deserve.3 A full analysis is of course beyond the scope of this essay. Yet, we can venture some preliminary insights and lines of approach. Michel Foucaults work is uniquely marked by its use of spatial metaphors. From the earliest works to the very last works, Foucault approached his object of analysis by way of geometrical, geographical and spatial metaphors. In his works, we nd a plethora of topoi. There are discursive elds, conceptual grids, regions of displacement, gazes that spatialize, institutions that domesticate and make docile the bodies of agents by rendering space ever surveyable. There are architectures of power, and the seat of the sovereign, the head of the King. There are also the taxonomies and semiotic matrices that render visible the ordering of knowledge. There are regions, and providences, as well as archipelagos, landscapes, soil, horizon and domains. There are also besieged cities, with their environments, and the carceral city with its imaginary geopolitics.4 The Birth of the Clinic: an Archeology of Medical Perception opens with the lines This book is about space, about language, and about death; it is about the act of seeing, the gaze.5 In fact, while Foucault was studying the origins of clinical medicine, he considered the possibility of following up this book with another one on hospital or medical architecture.6 The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences begins with the declaration that the book rst arose because of the laughter occasioned by a passage in Borges, one that awakened in Foucault the suspicion that led him to the valorization of heterotopias.7 Madness and Civilization is centrally preoccupied with the question of connement and containment, and thus with the development of institutions like the insane asylum. His last works on the History of Sexuality deal with the spaces for the fulllment of desire and the confessions of the esh. The preponderance of the spatial and geographic in Foucaults writing is not aleatory or incidental, but rather methodological and conceptual. Foucaults concern with space, or rather with topos, is determined by three preoccupations. First and foremost, Foucault is concerned with how we know, or make something, that is, an object of study and investigation, knowable, and how this making knowable is linked to the ability to render something legible, visible, surveyable, and localizable. Thus, for Foucault, the question of epistemology is directly linked to the issue of topology, meaning how a place is a function of intelligibility. Spatialization and verbalization are entwined so as to render visible and sayable, but, in this way, they also constitute the object of their discourse. It is this spatialization that allows for knowledge to claim scientic status. As Foucault himself articulated it: What is striking in the epistemological mutations and transformations of the 17th century is to see how the spatialization of knowledge was one of the factors in the constitution of this knowledge as a science. If the natural history and the classications of Linneas were possible, it is for a certain number of reasons: on the one hand, there was literally a spatialization of the very of object of their

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES

45

analyses, since they gave themselves the rule of studying and classifying a plant only on the basis of that which was visible The object was spatialized.8 A second concern that determines the spatiality of Foucaults thinking has to do with the disciplinary grid that orders knowledges. Not only is knowledge spatializing, but systems of knowledge themselves are spatialized, meaning that knowledges occupy a particular locus within an epistemic topos. Knowledge itself is regimented by being contained and by being disciplined through the development of disciplines: Disciplines constitute a system of control in the production of discourse, xing its limits through the action of an identity taking the form of a permanent reactivation of the rules.9 The third guiding preoccupation certainly had to do with the very institutions that house these disciplines. Every one of Foucaults books deals with a social institution that is distinctly identiable by its location and architecture: the insane asylum, the hospital, the prison, the bedroom, the monastery, and all the heterotopias that contest the disciplining power of the legitimate and normalizing spaces. Foucaults archeologies and genealogies of knowledges are simultaneously archeologies and genealogies of social spaces and disciplines. They are excavations of the plural sites for the production of knowledges. I must note that in the mid-seventies Foucaults work underwent a recalibration that had effects on the ways in which space should be viewed, or rather approached. If we use Foucaults language from 1976, his work up through the early part of the seventies concerned the how of knowledge.10 After 1976, there is a shift from description to an analysis of origins, or the production of elds of force within which certain confrontations can be creative, hegemonic, yet also contestational and confrontational, meaning subjugating but also insubordinating. This shift has to do with Foucaults concern with discovering or unearthing what he called subjugated knowledges.11 Thus, the shift was from an analytics of power to a creativity of power, from an archeology of power to a genealogy of power. Here the term genealogy should be taken in its most literal sense, meaning a study of the origin or genesis of something. In this shift, space is not just rendered accessible as the horizon against which things can be made visible and verbalizable, but also as the horizon that is a eld, a eld of confrontation, of struggle and resistance. In this way, Foucaults earlier topologies turn into cartographies. From describing a topos that is inert, we proceed to an analysis of the production of spaces of knowledge, disciplinary regimes that encircle and contain knowledges, and the tracing, partitioning, and gerrymandering of social spaces that allow for the domestication and disciplining of subjects. Archeology is not abandoned, but rather is supplemented and transformed by genealogy.12 As he put it in an interview with members of the editorial board of the geography journal Herodote, the formation of discourses and the genealogy of knowledge need to be analyzed, not in terms of types of consciousness, modes of perception and forms of ideology, but in terms of tactics and strategies of power. Tactics and strategies deployed through implantations, distributions, demarcations, control of territories and organizations of domains which could well make up a sort of geopolitics.13 The seemingly paradoxical posture of a Foucault who appears to merely describe, without being able to give an account of his own locus of enunciation, is now dissipated. Genealogy is a form of analysis avowedly on the side of disqualied popular knowledge. Foucaults genealogies are dispositifs of resistance in as much as they bring together erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.14 Yet, while genealogy studies power, it is not solely for the sake of understanding power by itself.

46

E. MENDIETA

As Foucault afrmed, he did not write a treatise on power.15 Rather, he was concerned with the different modalities of power, which had to do with the different institutions for its production. Behind the focus on power, however, is the preoccupation with modalities of agency, of subjectivity. The genealogical study of power is really a genealogy of regimes of subjectivity. In response to a question by Dreyfus and Rabinow about how the works in the series on the history of sexuality t with his own works, Foucault answered: Three domains of genealogy are possible. First, an historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, an historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a eld of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, a historical ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents.16 I want to foreground the second domain, namely that domain in which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others. How we constitute ourselves as subjects has to do with the partitioning, distribution, linking, closing off, mapping, and the surveying of social space. The spaces that allow for certain truths to produce force effects and conversely, how certain powers produced certain truths, are spaces that come to bear upon the individual as a body. In Discipline & Punish, Foucault called the agents that exercised this power to discipline the individual as a body the orthopedists of individuality.17 In the History of Sexuality, he called these disciplines anatomo-politics.18 This politics of the human body, which is about the making of subjects, is linked directly and unambiguously to the production and creation of certain social spaces. Anatomopolitics is the other-side of social geography. In this way, the genealogy of the domain of a social ontology is also a genealogy of spatializing and spatialized political embodiments. Foucault put it eloquently in the following way: A whole history of spaces could be written that would be at the same time a history of powers, from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of housing, institutional architecture, from the classroom to the hospital organization, by way of all the political and economic implantations Spatial arrangements are also political and economic forms to be studied in detail.19 A Foucauldian genealogy reveals to us how power produces certain truths, and how certain truths have power effects. In revealing these power and truth effects, genealogy brings us close to the way in which certain truths and powers make certain forms of agency possible by territorializing and spatializing the body of the agent. In this way, the genealogies of truth and power are also genealogies of space, in which the power of space and the space of power are shown to be entwined in a furious embrace. It may be easily argued, without too much contrivance, that racism is a form of spatial regimentation, a way to enforce not just how subjects may conform and produce themselves as such, but also how they may or may not enter into interaction with certain other subjects. As Ronald Sundstrom put it eloquently: Race is not just expressed spatially, but it is experienced and produced spatially. Race is place, and racial places become encrusted with racial representations that become all too often materialized due to racist action and neglect.20 Racism is therefore about embodiment and social geography. Racism is about how one can and cannot be in a body. Racism is a technology of embodiment, or, to use Foucaults terminology, it is an anatomo-politics. Whether we approach racism from the standpoint of the putatively scientic discourse to which it appeals for its justication, or we approach it from the standpoint of a visual matrix that renders geometrical and spatialized a certain abjection or approval, racism has do with what space may or may not be occupied, transversed, possessed by certain subjects, and, concomitantly, what it has to do with what spaces are beyond reach, and are therefore unassailable, sanctied, and impenetrable. Succinctly put, racism is about space, embodiment, and territory: it is about privilege and about building the walls of

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES

47

exclusion that preserve and render invisible and acceptable that privilege and exclusion. Racism is a technology of subjection and agency that is enacted through the production and regimentation of bodily, social and epistemologies spaces.21 The power and truths that grant legitimacy and stability to racist practices have to do with the spaces of power that subjugate subjects to the alleged truths of their esh and the power of the space in which these same agents are contained and relegated. A genealogy of certain discourses that elucidates their spaces of power and the power that ows from its constructed and produced spaces would also, by denition, be a genealogy of racism. To put it summarily, on the basis of a Foucauldian genealogy we can match the matrices that map social and cognitive space with the matrices that lash the tortured esh of agents with racism. As signicant and tactically indispensable as this type of analysis may be, it is by no means the best that Foucaults work can offer. In Foucaults work we can also encounter a more condemning analysis of racism. While it could be argued that all of Foucaults work deals with racism insofar as all of it always deals with modes of agency and selfhood, the passions of the self, and the torture of the esh, Foucault wrote relatively little about racism directly. Foucault did address racism directly and explicitly, but in the context of his lectures at the College ` de France, from the academic year of 197576. A brief discussion of these lectures will allow us to appreciate the ways in which Foucaults approach to racism can be insightful and useful in an American context. These lectures, entitled Society Must be Defended, have been known partially for at least two decades.22 The rst two introductory lectures of this course were published in Italian from a manuscript by Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino, then translated into English in Colin Gordons anthology of Foucaults writings.23 These two lectures are some of the most cited texts of Foucaults because we nd in them his critique of the juridical concept of power, which is based on the domination-repression model. We also have an extensive discussion of the genealogical method, along with a discussion of ve methodological precautions for approaching questions of power. The discussion of these methodological precautions concludes with the following admonition: we should direct our researches on the nature of power not towards the juridical edice of sovereignty, the State apparatuses and the ideologies which accompany them, but towards domination and the material operators of power, towards forms of subjection and the inections and utilizations of their localized systems, and towards strategic apparatuses. We must eschew the model of Leviathan in the study of power. We must escape from the limited eld of juridical sovereignty and State institutions, and instead base our analysis of power on the study of the techniques and tactics of domination.24 These rst two lectures constituted some of the most important methodological and philosophical considerations of the study of power produced by Foucault. The lectures then proceed to discuss war and the emergence of historical knowledge, the development of historical narratives of wars among peoples, critiques of Thomas Hobbes, the rise of a distinctly bourgeois form of power, biopower, and, nally, racism in relationship to biopower.25 It is this last discussion that makes these lectures particularly important for an analysis of racism. In them we encounter an original analysis of racism in relationship to a new form of power, one that is not based on contract-repression, but rather on domination-subjugation. Racism, in short, is an expression of a new form of power, a power that is both individualizing and generalizing, a power that acts on the individual by acting on a people as if it were a living entity. This form of biopower

48

E. MENDIETA

emerges at the end of the eighteenth century as an extension and supplementation of what Foucault had called anatomo-politics, which is a power that seeks to domesticate and regiment the human body. This type of power acts upon the body as though it was a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines.26 Linked to this form of power, there emerged another that focused on the species body, the body as the basis of all biological processes: propagation, birth and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population.27 These quotes came from the last chapter of The History of Sexuality, a text written around the same time that these lectures were being delivered.28 In the lectures themselves, Foucault provides a more extensive discussion of what elds biopower29 seeks to regulate. Among them we nd control over relations between the human race, or human beings insofar as they are a species, insofar as they are living beings, and their environment, the milieu in which they live. This includes the direct effects of the geographical, climatic, or hydrographic environment: the problems, for instance, of swamps, and of epidemics linked to the existence of swamps this is essentially, the urban problem.30 But, notably, biopolitics also includes: accidents, inrmities, and various anomalies. Biopolitics, in short, is a form of power that rules over a population, a people thought of as a living body, by attending, ensuring, securing and promoting its health. In short, biopolitics dominates and subjugates by making live. The novelty of biopolitics is that it reverses the relationship between power, on one side, and life and death, on the other. Classical sovereignty ruled by taking life and letting live. Its control over death was absolute. The power of the monarch was a power to put to death, while life itself was beyond its purvey. Biopolitics, in contrast, is deployed over the living, attending to it as a pastor tends to a ock, and, in this way, death begins to slip away from power. A destabilizing asymmetry emerges, one that threatens the very omniscience and omnipotence of this new form of power over the living. It is the asymmetry between making live and letting die. Death slips away from the grip of biopower. Racism is biopowers response to this destabilizing asymmetry. Racism allows biopower to reintroduce the threat of death into the exercise of power, while making death an extension of life. Racism is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under powers control: the break between what must live and what must die.31 Racisms primary function is to tear and create ssures precisely in that which had been unied and made one by having been seen as a living continuum. Racism introduces discontinuities and caesura that are to be treated as threats and contaminants precisely because they are gaps and brakes in a living continuum. As it introduces these brakes into the living body of the population, we discern already its secondary, but equally important, function, namely to establish a positive relation that assures that killing is for the sake of the living. Racism both normalizes and makes imperative killing. Racism afrms that the more you kill, the more you let die, the more there is the possibility for living, for the living: if you want to live, you must take lives, you must be able to kill.32 Of course, Foucault grants, this positive relationship was invented neither by the modern biopolitics state nor by racism. Rather, this has always been an axiom of war. In war, to live, you must ensure the death of the enemy. With this reection and acknowledgment, Foucault takes up the thread of these lectures: war in society. But this is quite explicit, even if it is not said in as many words:

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES

49

racism is the acme of the war that always simmers beneath the peaceful appearance of civil society, and racism reintroduces war, now as a war against the living body of the human race. Racism is the continuation of war by biopolitical means: it is a war on the biological threats to the health, integrity, and unity of the living body of a people. If the people are to live, if a population is to be made to live in health and optimally, then inrmities, pollutants, dysfunctions, illnesses, diseasein short, anything that threatens both the natality and mortality of a populationmust be waged war on. Racism is biopolitics war on the body politic for the sake of its life. Racism was rst deployed against colonial peoples, represented as the other against which war must be waged. Later, this colonizing genocide is introjected and deployed against the colonizing people themselves. If you are functioning in the biopower mode, how can you justify the need to kill people, to kill the population, and to kill civilizations? By using the themes of evolutionism, by appealing to racism.33 In this way, racism legitimates and normalizes the murderous and genocidal function of the state, while making quotidian and imperative that the killing of some, of the others, be pursued for the sake of the survival of the living, the race, the species, the population. Racism, as a form of biopower, biologizes the foe and makes total war on it indispensable and absolutely necessary. The more we exterminate the threat, the more secure and healthy the people become. Racism, thus, is total war on the biological body of the people for the sake of its health.34

US Racial Geographies The history of power is also the history of space, the space within which that power was deployed and exercised. The history of power therefore has to be a history of local geographies and local topographies. Such histories will also include histories of the relationship between industries and the appropriation and distribution of raw materials. Therefore, these histories will also be histories of roads, lines of communication, and the development of systems of transportation. In this way, these histories will be histories of the immigrations and emigrations of peoples, and the ways in which their ows were, and continue to be, instigated, regulated, monitored, sanctioned or penalized. But, insofar as the power of the modern state is a biopower, the history of its particular form of power will be a history of the ways in which it has attended to the living body of the people by regulating how that body extends and takes up geography.35 In this way, the history of biopower is a history of a racialized body politic, a body at war with itself. The history of a people is the history of its biological body, which is also a history of its racial geography and topographies. Few countries make this as evident as the United States does. For the history of the United States is above all a history of racial conict, one that has left its imprint in the very geography of the nation and the urban cartography of its metropolises. The history of the United States is frequently periodized with reference to its racial question. Following this customary timetable, I will discuss US racial geographies in terms of four racialized and racializing topographies: the plantation, the ghetto, the prison, and death row. Following Loic Wacquant, I will also assume that the United States has had not one, but several, peculiar institutions, which are not so peculiar but are integral to the very political, cultural, social, and geographical identity of the country.36 These institutions are the slave plantation, Jim Crow, the ghetto, and the prison industry complex (see table 1).

50
E. MENDIETA

Table 1. The four peculiar institutions and their basis. Core of Economy Plantation Agrarian and Extractive Segmented Industrial/Industrial Polarized/Postindustrial Services Dominant social type Slave Sharecropper Menial Worker Welfare recipient & Criminal

Institution:

Form of Labor

Slavery (16191865) Jim Crow (South, 18651965) Ghetto (North, 191568) Hyperghetto & Prison (1968)

Unfree Fixed Labor Free Fixed Labor Free Mobile Labor Fixed Surplus Labor

Source: Loic Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the race question in the US, New Left Review, 13 (JanFeb 2002): 42.

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES

51

The Plantation The plantation is a social, economic, and cultural system that emerged from instituting slavery as the core economic institution in the North Atlantic English colonies, and later, in the United States. Putting the plantation at the core of the colonies economic system made this emergent society shift from being a society with slaves to a slave society.37 In the early years of the colonies, African and English were distinguished not by the color of their skins, but by their place of origin and whether they had a contract. Eventually, as labor needs increased, blackness and servitude began to converge: as the colonies expanded southward and westward, there emerged the legal difference between English indentured laborers, who could provide a contract, one which remained the same in the process of exchange and that stood in proxy for the laborer, on the one hand, and, on the other, the Africans who did not and could not provide such a contract, and thus had to stand for himself or herself as the guarantee of the exchange. This legal codication of dispossession was biologized when the anti-miscegenation laws were introduced beginning in 1662. These laws established matrilineal servitude status.38 It is not true that anti-Black animus permeate the colonies, nor was blackness ipso facto associated with servitude. The conation between skin color and the status of servant was slowly codied in legal norms that had the specic goal of buttressing the power of the land-owing classes. As Steve Martinot put it, [t]he laborers body thus substituted itself for the juridical instrument, the contract, in the market.39 In this way, not having a proxy in the market, meaning a contract, requires that ones own body stand in for the contract. This resulted in codifying dispossession in the esh of the indentured laborer. At the same time, the anti-miscegenation laws established the black body as possession of the white master and as a polluting element within the body politic. Its presence is allowed but as the mark of dispossession. To be tainted by blackness entails servitude. This is what the one-drop of blood rules established, and which incidentally are only legally codied in the second half of the nineteenth century.40 Thus, absence in the market turns into legal dispossession, but presence in it is only allowed as property of those who are untainted. In this way both are now indexicalized chromatically. Blackness is both dispossession and servitude, that is, absence and inability to possess. In contrast and simultaneously, whiteness gets codied as possession and possessiveness.41 Just as blackness is to be property, whiteness is what grants property. The plantation was a system of exploitation that sequestered and contained slave laborers for the express purpose of expropriating their labor power. It was a geography of dispossession and containment as it was an entire episteme and dispositif that simultaneously dispossessed the black body. The plantation is an institution for spatial containment that is geared to the maximum exploitation of the slave. This containment, however, is enabled by the processes of legal disenfranchisement that hides itself behind the veil of a naturalized chromatic indexicalization that conates blackness with servitude and dispossession. The geography of slavery, to use Ira Berlins felicitous expression,42 is matched by a racial topography that dislocated and displaced blackness into a cultural, legal, and even ontological negativity.

The Ghetto To put it in simplest terms, the ghetto is the racial geography that takes over the role of the plantation once the United States had abolished slavery. In other words, once slavery, as a legal and political condition, had been abolished, a new mechanism was

52

E. MENDIETA

required to contain people with the end of exploitation. The ghetto is the spatial segregation of the African-American, but it is at the same time the mechanism through which their labor is made available for optimized exploitation. After the civil war, the emancipation of the slaves, and the derailed project of integration into white society that was undertaken under the reconstruction, White Americans countered with Jim Crow. Jim Crow extended and further codied the anti-Black animus that began to be codied under slavery. In fact, Jim Crow went beyond the juridication of anti-Black racism. Its virulence and violence was more acute precisely because the African-American was now nominally and de jure a free being. In the words of Wacquant, Jim Crow consisted of an ensemble of social and legal codes that prescribed the complete separation of the races and sharply circumscribed the life chances of African-Americans while binding them to whites in a relation of suffusive submission backed by legal coercion and terroristic violence.43 The ghetto begins to emerge as a space of containment in urban areas as the North reconstructed (although some revisionist historians may use the term colonized) the South after the civil war, and as the recently freed slaves begin a massive migration northward. The exodus to the North was occasioned not just by Jim Crow, which now has become a euphemism for legalized political disenfranchisement, but also by the everyday violence of quasi-legalized lynching. Between 1882 and 1968, there were 4,723 reported lynchings of African-Americans. I must mention that lynching seems to have been a common practice and was originally used against whites, but as the nineteenth century comes to a close, it came to be used predominantly against blacks.44 It is noteworthy that the paroxysms of this ritualistic violence reached its zenith at the turn of the twentieth century, almost half a century after slaves had been emancipated. A geographical analysis of the distribution of these lynchings reveals that 90 percent of them took place in the Deep South.45 The decline of the southern agricultural economy due to natural disasters, plagues, and geopolitical competition from Latin America, India, and Africa, compounded with the emergent labor demand brought on by industrialization in the metropolises of the North, and the policing and terrorizing violence of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, led to what we should call a massive refugee inux of persecuted African-Americans into northern cities. Between 1910 and 1960 almost ve million African Americans migrated northward, mostly to the Midwest and the Northeast.46 As African-Americans arrived in the North to the Fordist city of metropolitan industry, they were relegated and cordoned off in those regions where they could be accessed as cheap labor and also not present a threat to the property of the white order of Anglo-America.47 It is signicant that the process of northern urbanization takes place in tandem with the process of racial gentrication. This racial gentrication is overseen by the state itself through its housing policies. These policies ensure that the poor and colored are concentrated in the dilapidated and poorly serviced urban centers while wealthy whites, per denition the primary beneciaries of state benets, are granted the license and funding to ee to the suburbs. In other words, the development of the ghetto has to be seen in tandem with the suburbanization of the US. Both processes, however, were strategies of racial regimentation. An overview of the different agencies and acts used by Congress to regulate housing policies and availability reveals that the government conspired to segregate through its loaning practices, and actually participated in the very act of destroying housing that was and could have been available to AfricanAmericans and poor people in the inner cities. Martin Anderson has argued in his notorious book, The Federal Bulldozer, that the government has destroyed more low-

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES

53

income housing than it actually built.48 The GI bill, which gave federally-secured loans to soldiers returning from WWII, and later the Fair Housing Act, and the Fair Housing Amendments of the sixties and eighties, have been mechanisms for extending the possessive investments in whiteness and the dispossession of blacks, thus paralleling and exacerbating what began to be codied during slavery times. The economists Melvin Oliver and Tom Shapiro estimate that these discriminatory policies have cost black homeowners $10.5 billion in extra mortgage payments, and that every black homeowner loses $4,000 as direct result of the 54 percent higher rate they pay on their mortgages.49 Since the 1930s the American government has pursued strategies to deal with the challenge of urbanization. One was to encourage and nance homeownership through long-term, low-interest mortgages. The other was a housing initiative that involved the federal government in the actual construction of public housing. These federally built structures were almost always located in the poorest parts of the major US metropolises. These two strategies were deployed over the following demographics: from 1960 to 1977, as the number of whites living in suburbs increased by 22 million, 4 million joined them by ying from the inner city. During the same period, the inner-city African-American population grew by 6 million, while its suburban counterpart only grew by 500,000.50 As Kenneth T. Jackson noted in his celebrated Crabgrass Frontier, American housing policy was not only devoid of social objectives, but instead helped establish the basis for social inequities. Uncle Sam was not impartial, but instead contributed to the general disbenet of the cities and to the general prosperity of the suburbs.51 In short, the ghetto is, and continues to be, a major instrument for labor extraction, but also, and perhaps more importantly as de-industrialization desiccates the inner city, it has turned into a mechanism of ethnoracial closure52 that has transformed the inner city into a region of racial war. The Prison The prison is an institutional space for connement, punishment, and, allegedly, for re-education, but over the last half century it has turned into a major disciplinary sociospatial institution that enables dominant status group in an urban setting simultaneously to ostracize and exploit a subordinate group endowed with negative symbolic capital.53 This sociospatial institution takes over the structural and functional role that the ghetto played in the rst part of the twentieth century, namely the spatialized racial containment and gerrymandering that perpetuated the exclusion and marginalization of African-Americans. In Wacquants analysis, the prison enacts and replicates the ghettos main mechanisms for ethnoracial control, which are: stigma, constraint, territorial connement, and institutional encasement.54 Seen through the prism of these disciplinary and normalizing technologies, the ghetto ought to be understood as an ethnoracial prison or what Foucault called the carceral archipelago. At the same time, however, the prison is an ethnoracial ghetto. To many African-Americans, prisons evoke the plantations of their slave forefathers and foremothers. The Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center in New York is named after the family name of a slave-owning plantation. To a predominantly black inmate population this fact must have more than overwhelming irony.55 The rise of the ethnoracial prison has to be put in the context of suburbanization, the implosion of the inner city, the ight of industrial capital, the assault on the federal government by Republican administrations, and, simultaneously, the launching of a war on drugs that has made the ghetto as violent and predatory as the jungles of Vietnam.

54

E. MENDIETA

Over the last half century, as the population has grown by about 28 percent, the prison population has risen by about 500 percent. Between 1985 and 1995, federal and state governments opened a new prison every week to house the inux of prisoners. By 1999, there were a total of 1.7 million prisoners.56 This means that there are about 645 inmates per 100,000 citizens, or, approximately one out of every 155 American is in prison.57 In 1995, the United States was second to Russia for its rate of incarceration. Compared to other industrialized nations, the United States has a six to ten times higher incarceration rate.58 Yet, compared to these very same industrialized nations, the level of crime tends to be lower, except when it pertains to violent crimes. Comparatively, the United States enjoys lower rates of crime. Yet, it has one of the largest inmate populations in the world. This has been directly linked to the punitive character of our sentencing laws, which continue to make more intense and lengthy the punishment of certain sentenced inmates. Yet, when one looks at the ethnoracial composition of this inmate population, one will discover exorbitant disparities. At the turn of the twenty-rst century, we face Du Boiss race predicament, but now in an even more desperate way. Half of the present inmate population is African-American, while 17 percent is Hispanic.59 But this number does not betray the level at which both African-Americans and Hispanics are criminalized, stigmatized, and institutionally encased within a prison culture that spells for them only the accumulation of negative symbolic capital. The prison industrial complex does not just conne for a period of time. Over the last two decades as the war on drugs has made the punitive retribution against African-Americans more acute, the juridication of political, economic and social exclusion has been exacerbated. A study conducted jointly by The Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch disclosed the grim fact that approximately 3.9 million Americans, which is one in fty adults, are either permanently or currently politically disenfranchised due to criminalization. Of this almost 4 million, 1.4 million were African-Americans; or, in other words, 13 percent of the African-American male population.60 With a greater likelihood of being imprisoned and criminalized at a rate of one out of every three young African Americans,61 this means that between 30 percent and 40 percent of African Americans will lose their right to vote. Thus, not only are criminal justice policies resulting in the disproportionate incarceration of African American[s]; imprisonment itself reduces black political ability to inuence these policies.62 But exclusion is not just political. It is also economic, social, and cultural. Orlando Patterson described slavery as natal alienation and a form of social death.63 The ethnoracial prison, as extension of the ghetto, continues this form of natal alienation and social death through its policies of cultural, social, and political exclusion. The ethnoracial prison is a landlocked slaveship stuck on the middle passage to nowhere.64 For instance, a 1996 analysis of state statuses concerning inmates revealed that there had been a rise in the number of states that (a) permanently denied felons the right to vote (in fact now forty-eight states and the district of Columbia do not permit prisoners to vote65), (b) allowed the termination of parental rights, and (c) converted the status of felon into grounds for divorce.66 In addition, The Higher Education Act of 1998 withdraws eligibility for felons convicted of a drug-related crime.67 In addition, The Work Opportunity and Personal Responsibility Act of 1996 banishes former felons from Medicaid, public housing, and section 8 vouchers and similar forms of public assistance. This act extends the punitive measures of earlier laws that suspended either temporarily or permanently welfare payments, veterans benets and food stamps for anyone who was in prison for more than sixty days.68

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES

55

The prison industry complex, which capitalizes on the so-called war on crime (in an age of declining crime rates) and the need to attract federal funds in lieu of industrial capital that keep bleeding out of the nation, has expanded into one of the most lucrative industries. The state of California, which has the largest prison system in the world, has augmented its budget for state correctional facilities from $200 million in 1975 to $4.8 billion in 2000. In 1994, in fact, the state funds invested in the prison system surpassed those allotted to the University of California college system.69 The United States spends about $7 billion a year in prison building. In 1996 alone, contractors began twenty-six federal prisons, and ninety-six state prisons. Yearly expenses for running this prison industrial complex is between $20 and $35 billion, close to the annual military budget before the war on terrorism was launched. These expenses certainly match the levels of the military budget at the height of the Cold War.70 In fact, such levels of societal inversion on the deliberate criminalization and imprisonment of African-Americans, which parallels the levels of inversion of the military industrial complex itself, signal the development and maintenance of a domestic war machine deployed against the body politic itself. The prison industry complex is not just a mechanism for exclusion and marginalization, it is also a mechanism for waging a war on the alleged criminal, the threat, the pollutant felon and deviant. It is a war pursued by means of geographical and territorial means. The prison is a dispositif for race marking and race making.71 It races by stigmatizing, constraining, conning, and encasing. The prison betrays how race and place, and race and topography, are intricately entwined. At the same time, however, we see how these territories, elds, regions, and pyramids of power are also mechanism for war making, in which the more you kill, the more you may live. The more we imprison the criminal and felon the more we can enjoy our lives. If racism is the means by which biopower reintroduces the right to kill, the prison is one of biopowers dispositifs for executing this socially sanctioned and normalized killing. But this is not its only one. Nor is it the most blatantly racialized and racializing. Death Row Capital punishment is co-extensive with slavery and the ethnoracial prison. They were and continue to be legal, institutionalized, and normalizing mechanisms and spaces for the punishment, disciplining, and extermination of African-Americans. Again, as we saw with the ghetto and the prison industrial complex, the uses of capital punishment reect topographies of power that seek to police the borderlands of racial encounter and friction. There is no way to get around the fact that the death penalty is overwhelmingly used against African-Americans. The Bureau of Justice and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) statistics make this painfully evident. Between 1930 and 1990, 4,016 people were put to death by the state. Of these, 2,129 were African-Americans, that is to say, 53 percent. In 2003, African-American are 42 percent of the death row population, although people of color constitute 55 percent of all death row inmates.72 Between 1930 and 1976, 90 percent of people executed for rape were African-American. Furthermore, similar studies show that African-Americans are 4.3 times more likely to be given the death sentence if the victims of their crimes are white.73 The death penalty is used precisely to police racial encounters, and thus they mark indelibly the racial geographies of US biopolitics. Thus, a report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), notes that of the more than 700 executions carried out in the United States over the last quarter of a century, 82 percent were performed in ten states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South

56

E. MENDIETA

Carolina, Texas and Virginia). But Texas and Virginia together accounted for more than half of these executions. Texas, more disturbingly still, executed 245 death row inmates between 1976 and 2001;74 that is, almost one-third of all executions.75 These southern states, which account for approximately 26 percent of the US population, accounted for 83 percent of executions. Eighty percent of all federal death row penalties charges presented by prosecutors come from ve out of the ninety-two judicial districts.76 Indeed, the death penalty demarcates a deep racial line in the American body politic with its particular racial topography.77 We have learned from Michel Foucault that the history of powers is the history of spaces. From him we have also learned to see the relationship between space and race, and how geography and topography are entwined with the productivity of power. Power deploys itself by constituting a horizon of confrontation. In this eld, power is resisted as it enacts its subjugation. Race is produced by the encounter between powers and spaces in the practices of subjectivity and subjection that makes our time uniquely modern, uniquely our time. Racism is the name for a technology of subjection, of agency, that regulates not just how we relate to ourselves, but most importantly to others, and through them to ourselves. Racism, above all, is what allows diffused biopower to claim the right to kill. But biopower is social power; it is power over the social by the social; it is a power over a population that the population itself exercises over itself via the techniques and technologies of making live. To live, a people must make the technologies of survival and the health of the people routine, quotidian, and normalized. As Foucault noted, however, this is where racism is interjected: it introduces the need and right to put to death, but now as a routine, as a normalized science. Racism makes genocide quotidian, necessary and a right. Nothing makes this as patently clear as does the use of the death penalty in the United States. Death row is no less grotesque than the slave ship, the auction block, the tree with its lynched mutilated corpses, and yet we regard it or disregard it with the neglect that Hannah Arendt rightly called the banality of evil.

Notes
1. Loic Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: Rethinking the Race Question in the US, New Left Review, 13 (JanFeb 2002): 4160. See also Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh, Punishment & Society, 3, no. 1 (2001): 95134. 2. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 301. 3. Two exceptions are Chris Pilo, Foucaults Geography, in Thinking Space, eds Mike Crang and Nigel Trift (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 20538, and Stuart Elden, Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History (London and New York: Continuum, 2001). See also the use of Foucault by J. B. Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, ed. Paul Laxton (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), especially chapter 2: Maps, Knowledge, Power, 51 ff. Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1996), chapter 5: Heterotopologies: Foucault and the Geohistory of Otherness, 14563. 4. Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 307. 5. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), ix. 6. Michel Foucault, The Eye of Power, in Michel Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 19611984, Michel Foucault, ed. Sylvere Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 226. ` 7. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), xviixviii. 8. Michel Foucault, Space, Knowledge, and Power, in Michel Foucault Live, 346.

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES

57

9. Michel Foucault, The Discourse on Language, in Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 224. 10. Michel Foucault, Two Lectures, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 19721977, Michel Foucault, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 92. 11. Foucault, Two Lectures, 8283. 12. See Beatrice Han, Foucaults Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, trans. Edward Pile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), especially chapter 3: The Reformulation of the Archaeological Problem and the Genealogical Turn, 73107. 13. Foucault, Question on Geography, in Power/Knowledge, 77. 14. Foucault, Two Lectures, in Knowledge/Power, 83. 15. Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 209. 16. Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 237. 17. Foucault, Discipline & Punish, 294. 18. Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 139. 19. Foucault, Eye of Power, 228. 20. Ronald R. Sundstrom, Race and Place: social space in the production of human kinds, Philosophy and Geography, 6, no. 1 (2003): 8395, quote at 90. 21. The idea of racism as a technology of subjection and agency determination can be made more precise with reference to Foucaults clarication of the concept of technology. Foucault writes: [T]here are four major types of these technologies, each a matrix of practical reason: (1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signication; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of another a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. These four types of technologies hardly ever function separately, although each one of them is associated with a certain type of domination. Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, in Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 18. 22. Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended Lectures at the College de France 19751976, trans. David ` Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). The French version only appeared in 1997. 23. Foucault, Two Lectures, in Power/Knowledge, 78108. 24. Foucault, Two Lectures, in Power/Knowledge, 102. 25. See Pasquale Pasquino, Political Theory of war and peace: Foucault and the history of modern political theory, Economy and Society, 22, no. 1 (Feb 1993): 7788. 26. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139. 27. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 139. 28. See Alessandro Fontana and Mauro Bertani, Situating the Lectures, in Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 27393. See also the special issue of Cites dedicated to these lectures. Cites: Philosophie, Politique, Historie, 2 (2000): Michel Foucault: de la guerre des races au biopouvoir (Paris: Presses Universitaries de France, 2000). 29. Foucault devoted his 1979 lectures to the birth of biopolitics. See the resume of these lectures: The Birth of Biopolitics, in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault. Volume One, Michel Foucault (New York: The New Press, 1997), 7380. See the following discussions: Thomas Lemke, The birth of bio-politics: Michel Foucaults lectures on neo-liberal governmentality, Economy & Society, 30, no. 2 (May 2001): 190207, and his book Eine Kritik der politischen Vernunft: Foucaults Analyse der modernen Gouvernementalitat (Berlin and Hamburg: Argument, 1997), especially part two, chapter 1. See also Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London and Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999), chapter 5: Bio-Politics and Sovereignty. 30. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 245. Italics added. 31. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 254. 32. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 255. 33. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 257. 34. See the suggestive if misguided reection on Foucaults similarity to Carl Schmitt by Mika Ojakangas, Sovereign and Plebs: Michel Foucault Meets Carl Schmitt, Telos, 119 (Spring 2001): 3240. 35. See David Theo Goldberg, Polluting the Body Politic: Racist Discourse and Urban Location, in

58

E. MENDIETA

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

Racism, the City and the State, eds Malcolm Cross and Michael Keith (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 4560. Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 4142. The distinction is discussed by Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 9. Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 5460. Martinot, The Rule of Racialization, 50. See Scott L. Malcomson, One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race (New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2000), 35657. Cheryl I. Harris, Whiteness as Property, Harvard Law Review 106 (June 1993). Reprinted in Critical Race Theory: The key Writings, eds Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas (New York: The New Press, 1995), 27691. Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 7. Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 46. Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), viiiix. Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in two American Centuries (New York: Basic Civitas, 1998), 17576. Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 47. See Loic J. D. Wacquant, The Ghetto, the State and the New Capitalist Economy, in Metropolis: Center and Symbol of our Times, ed. Philip Kasinitz (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 41849. Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer, quoted in Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier. The Suburbanization of the United States (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 228. Melvin L. Oliver and Tom Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth (New York: Routledge, 1995), 142. Quoted in George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Prot from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 32. Lipsitz has one of the most perspicacious analyses of the ways in which civil rights have been used by Whites to further codify what Cheryl Harris called Whiteness as Property. Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 7. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 230. Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 49. Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 50. Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 50. See Bryonn Dain, Three days in NYC jails: Black Terrorist Thug: The New Racial Prole?, Village Voice, September 2430, 2003, 3031. Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate (New York: The New Press, 1999), 1, 9, 19. Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 19. Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 23. Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 119. Marc Mauer, Mass Imprisonment and the Disappearing Voters, in Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, eds Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind (New York: The New Press, 2003), 51. Young African-American male means a male between the ages of eighteen and fteen. Of these, one in three are under criminal justice supervision. See Loic Wacquant, Four Strategies to Curb Carceral Costs: On Managing Mass Imprisonment in the United States, Studies in Political Economy, 69 (Autumn 2002): 1930, quote at 19. Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, 186. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1982), 714. Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (London and New York: Verso, 1999), 170. Mauer, Mass Imprisonment and the Disappearing Voters, 51. Jeremy Travis, Invisible Punishment: An instrument of Social Exclusion, in Marc Mauer and Meda Chesney-Lind, eds., Invisible Punishment: The Collateral Consequences of Mass Imprisonment (New York: The New Press, 2003), 22. See also Austin Sarat, When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 1624. Travis, Invisible Punishment, 24.

PLANTATIONS, GHETTOS, PRISONS: US RACIAL GEOGRAPHIES

59

68. Wacquant, From Slavery to Mass Incarceration, 58. 69. Wacquant, Four Strategies to Curb Carceral Costs: On Managing Mass Imprisonment in the United States, 20. 70. Parenti, Lockdown America, 213. 71. Wacquant, Deadly Symbiosis, 116. 72. NAACP www.naacp.org/work/washington_bureau/DeathPenalty032803.shtml . The 55 percent people of color statistic can be found in a report by the ACLU entitled Race and the Death Penalty, www.aclu.org/DeathPenalty/DeathPenalty.cfm?ID 9312&c 62 . 73. John Bessler, Death in the Dark: Midnight Executions in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 160. 74. Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Rep. Jesse L. Jackson, Jr., Bruce Shapiro, Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and Americas Future (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 71. 75. Report entitled Geography Determines Death Sentences, www.aclu.org/news 76. Jackson, et al., Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and Americas Future, 71. 77. Jackson, et al., Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and Americas Future, 70.

Note on contributor
Eduardo Mendieta is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University. He is the editor and translator of Enrique Dussels The Underside of Modernity (1996). He is the author most recently of The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apels Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (2002).