“This is real hip-hop, and it don't stop / 'Til we get the po-po off the block”
Rashad Shabazz’s Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago maps a historical landscape of the everyday contradictions of Black life, laying bear the blind corners and liminal spaces of “possibility and punishment”—the places of precarity, criminalization and confinement so many call home (page 69). Drawing out both the causal and structural links that conjoin the underdevelopment of Black neighborhoods and the captivity of incarceration, Spatializing Blackness argues that even before Black men enter the prison system they are already inhabiting the prison-like environments and carceral politics of the prison industrial complex in their everyday lives. Shabazz situates his study in his hometown of Chicago, in the seven-by-one-mile stretch on the city’s South Side, an area colloquially known as the Black Belt. His genealogy of Black masculinity begins in the late 1900s and traces the layers of deeply sedimented social, political, and physical containment that define the contours of race and gender formation in the geopolitics of a city notorious for the terrific tragedy of its racial tensions. The city of Chicago becomes both backdrop to and protagonist in a theater of anti-black violence: a “sociospatial” impasse of economic divestment, de-industrialization, and criminalization. As Shabazz argues, “carceral power not only contained black people; it was also a way … for producing masculinity” (page 2).
In contrast to traditionally romantic images of nuclear family life, iconic representations of domesticity that flood the American imaginary with idealized images of privacy, refuge, and safety, Spatializing Blackness details the panoptic pressure-cooker of Chicago’s carceral power as a context in which the very space of the home becomes a technology of incarceration. As Shabazz explains in the first half of the book, Black migration posed a clear and present danger to Chicago’s largely European immigrant landscape and especially to their already fragile claims to masculinity, whiteness, and employment. In this environment Black men were left with little space to live, either within the domestic sphere or within political life, without falling outside the protections of the law. In Spatializing Blackness domestic reincarnations of carceral power inundate the home, the housing projects, general imaginations of gender roles, and all but foreclose lawful opportunities for collective resistance, reinforcing public reliance on prisons by restricting Black mobility, ensuring overcrowding, lack of privacy, and constant surveillance.
The five genealogically connected “geographies of containment” that anchor this text carefully document the city’s preemptive dispossessions of Black life, in particular the rights of Black men to love and live without fear of finding themselves culpable for compromising the safety of White Chicago. In the first chapter, “Policing Interracial Sex: Mapping Black Male Location in Chicago during the Progressive Era,” Shabazz takes seriously the city’s obsessive regulation of interracial sexual behavior, detailing the multiple ways miscegenation laws were used to organize social and spatial life, literally policing “lines of demarcation to de-eroticize the landscape” (page 21).
Chapter two, “Our Prison: Kitchenettes, Carceral Power and Black Masculinity During the Interwar Years,” insightfully draws on the literary genius of Richard Wright to show how practices of population control moved from the vice district—the hotels, dancehalls, and bars of Chicago’s South Side—into the “cramped living spaces that contained black migrants” (page 32). In contrast to studies such as the Moynihan Report that place the blame for the fragility of Black family life at the feet of Black women, the dispersal of the Black family is contextualized and explained here as a consequence of the constant policing of Black domestic space in Chicago. Unpacking the double-bind of anti-Black racism—the cramped domestic spaces available to Black families and the capitalist pressures of patriarchy Black families faced—Shabazz analyzes a devastatingly familiar dynamic in which Black men are both held accountable for being providers as the patriarchs of the family and are systematically shut out of many opportunities for gainful employment, precipitating, for many, their flight away from the domestic sphere. As Shabazz writes, “because the kitchenette was a claustrophobic, carceral space that restricted mobility, escape was a rational and pragmatic response. Men fled because they were free people being treated like prisoners” (page 52).
In “Carceral Interstice: Between Home Space and Prison Space,” Shabazz turns to the instability of life that emerged with the planning, architecture, and securitization of the South Side’s high-rise housing projects designed to improve upon the failure of the kitchenettes. This chapter foregrounds the similarities between the experiences of prisoners and public housing patrons by analytically intermingling the discourse of the Chicago Housing Authority and the writings of US prison intellectuals, in particular, political prisoners whose “critiques of carceral power … shed light on how living under forms of captivity inform identity” (page 57). The forth chapter, “Sores in the City,” serves as a critique of gang studies and shows how Black men created identities in opposition to the spaces of exclusion they were often forcibly encouraged to inhabit (page 82). Shabazz focuses on the circulation of prison masculinity, theorizing expressions of toughness as the inevitable response to the pressures of white anti-Black patriarchy, a form of self-defense that did not require material forms of power (page 84).
Chapter five, “Ghost Mapping: The Geography of Risk in Black Chicago,” turns to the contemporary public health crisis and alarming rates of AIDS/HIV infection in Chicago’s South Side. It traces the sociospatial production of the virus’s transmission and the implications of its concentration within the physical spaces of jails and prisons for the communities to which formerly incarcerated Black men returned. This chapter builds upon the first to show how the tyranny of respectability politics and the legal and extralegal policing of sexuality in the Black community combine to exacerbate and accelerate the spread of the AIDS/ HIV infection. As Shabazz’s research shows, the mass incarceration that resulted from the combat zones of America’s war on drugs threw so many Black men behind bars that by the time the general public understood the dangers intravenous drug use posed to the spread of AIDS/HIV, Black men already made up more than 65% of the prisoner population, subject to and culpable for their proximity to places where the virus had been allowed to grow unchecked for years (page 103).
Shabazz’s interdisciplinary activist-driven critique of the prison industrial complex takes Michel Foucault’s classic texts, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, for a ride along through the horrific spectacle of literal and figurative intersections of space, gender, class, race, and sexuality that collide to regulate the racial politics that unfurled in the streets of Black Chicago, from in its kitchenettes to its public housing plans, from its jails and prisons to its community spaces. Rather than advance an argument on the injustices of carceral power that turns on simple oppositional relationships between the vice of state violence and the virtues of black innocence, Spatializing Blackness challenges conventional liberal notions of innocence and personal agency to ask:
“What happens when people are raised in environments built to contain them? How does this affect their sense of mobility and inform their conditions of possibility? What role does this play in how they perform gender?” (page 3).
Although work still needs to be done on how spaces, genders and sexualities intersect in the formation of black masculinities, Shabazz does an excellent job of demonstrating how Black Chicago’s prisonscapes leave little place for the presence of black masculinity to exist without feeling like a fugitive. The value added to the fields of Black Studies and Critical Prison Studies by the analytic innovations of this book by virtue of its unapologetically activist commitments ought not be underestimated. Rather than defend the origins of criminality associated with black masculinity, “macho or hyperaggressive forms of masculinity … violence … anger and frustration … running away and disease” (page 8), as merely discriminatory notions of anti-blackness, Shabazz maps out the conditions of possibility for the emergence of black masculinity as a “problem,” through the built environment of urban planning, shifting our concern about how it may feel to be a problem, to borrow from W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic Souls of Black Folks, from the individual to the built environments in which young men are finding their identities and laying claim to their adulthood. Working through the challenges of a structural analysis of race and gender formation with care, creativity, and a lot of heart, Shabazz’s writing bears the clear, storytelling power of an activist scholar steeped in a rich archive of historical data, political discourse, and testimonial-based black feminist critique. It is a project that follows in the radical Black tradition of critical prison studies and new abolitionist literatures whose protest quality both leads and informs the ethics and analytic investments of its research methods. In Spatializing Blackness, the prison becomes a technology, not only for punishment and containment, but also for a gendered criminalization of black domestic life—a means by which black men become the city’s most wanted alibi for the legal preservation of the color line in the afterlife of slavery, lynch culture, and Jim Crow.
