The Ethics and Politics of Space

Reflecting on boundaries during a pandemic.

DEAN J. FRANCO

Black Lives Matter protest. Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay

 

How do we navigate space ethically in the midst of two national emergencies? The pandemic requires us to be distanced, keeping largely to our private spaces. The other emergency, enduring structural racism, prompts the collective occupation of public space. The distancing necessary for slowing the spread of Covid-19 is fundamentally ethical because we are acting as individuals to safeguard others, and we are rightly upset when social distancing and masking becomes politicized. Public protest, on the other hand, is fundamentally political, and may involve actions that would be considered unethical in other circumstances

Earlier this season, when I went to my first of several protests to decry and mourn the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and too many others—including John Neville who died in detention at the local Forsyth County jail—I was surprised and relived to find that all of my fellow protestors were wearing masks. Masking to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 is among the most straightforwardly ethical acts I can think of, representative of the ethics of proximity that would have us recognize the other as one who is or could be near us, our “neighbor” to draw out that word’s etymology. In Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, “the face” of the other hails me into ethical being and enjoins me to a responsibility for the other’s life ¹. Though for Levinas, “the face” is less a physical feature of the other and more the manifest vulnerability of being human, wearing a face mask to protect another is almost too on-the-nose, and though we could quickly get tangled up on a discourse of face/face-mask/effacement, it bears emphasizing that wearing a mask to a public protest is an expression of individual care for the collective. Masking at a protest may be the pivot ethics into politics, and certainly of individuality into collective will—from neighbor to neighborhood, as Levinasian theorists might put it—as particular people become part of the assemblage of a mass gathering. Raising our voices and fists, lying down in the streets, holding the tears and prayers of other protestors: even as we are assembled for a political cause, we assemble a community of love. 

For those of us who study literature and language, we are pressed to ask, what is the efficacy of writing and representation for material structural change?

There is a considerable amount of writing on the figure of the neighbor as the junction of ethics and politics, and there is likewise a wealth of scholarship on the complex overlay of history, geography, and the built environment which underwrites actual neighborhoods. However, there has been comparatively little written that engages theories of the neighbor with actual neighborhoods—one of many boundary crossings I undertake in The Border and the Line » on the way to examining how race materializes through spatial practice. The border of my own neighborhood is marked off by University Parkway, the site of a particularly bold protest in July when protestors stepped out into the street and blocked eight lanes of traffic. University is one of those roadways common across the south, which exists as a corridor for commerce and for flows of influence and power which also creates and perpetuates an ongoing, destructive barrier through the neighborhood upon which it was built. Constructed in the 1950’s as a connector of the northern part of the city where my university is situated to downtown, the creators of University Parkway tore through the largely Black, low-income neighborhood, which remains economically depressed. I was often dismayed to see residents dashing across eight lanes of traffic from one side of the street to the other—not just young men, but whole families, even, occasionally, individuals in motorized wheel chairs. There are almost no sidewalks nor crosswalks, even though a large school is on one side of University, with many students living on the other side. I came to understand, this is what racial abjection looks like: vulnerability and exposure, with Black residents spectacularly under-served by public infrastructure. As I argue in The Border and the Line, while race is a construct of law and language, it nonetheless materializes in real, physical ways, bearing its reality with a specific locality. In Winston-Salem, the built environment, including freeways, parkways, derelict manufacturing sites, and even a public land trust starkly divide black and white neighborhoods, and in some cases exist as buffers between the very wealthy neighborhoods founded by company town managers and the very poor neighborhoods founded for the workers of those same companies. For protestors, stepping out onto University Parkway disrupted the flow of commerce and called attention to the road’s deadening impact on local residents’ lives.

When confronting this sort of materially built, structural racism, the ethics of the neighbor, with its emphasis on person-to-person encounters, can seem misplaced, and even the anti-racist book lists and Black Lives Matter syllabi, not to mention all the online guest speakers and symposia generated by academics may seem beside the point, a way of talking about doing things without actually doing things. Personal responsibility, individual action, and the tidal wave of words can seem to be simply not enough or worse, self-indulgent as a response to the legal, structural, material arrangement of race, class, and caste in the US. 

The Border and the Line» takes up the central conceit of "the neighbor" to consider how the geography of racial identification and interracial encounters are represented and even made possible by literary language.

For those of us who study literature and language, we are pressed to ask, what is the efficacy of writing and representation for material structural change? In The Border and the Line I write about how, in the aftermath of the Watts rebellion in 1965, the white, Jewish writer Budd Schulberg drove from his home in Beverly Hills to Watts to bear witness to the destruction, and to try to understand the rage that had brought it about. Schulberg was what we might now call a progressive-minded liberal, and he responded to what he witnessed by founding the Watts Writers Workshop, rooted in his belief that the world needed to read Watts residents’ experiences in their own words. The workshop produced and published a considerable amount of writing by local area residents, but I argue that Schulberg’s real achievement—even if he didn’t realize it at the time—was his involvement in the material conditions of Watts itself. Using his own money, along with an NEA grant, Schulberg purchased and renovated a derelict building in Watts for the workshop’s headquarters. In the process, he became entangled in the sort of frustrating real estate restrictions and banking traps that sustain the underdevelopment of Black neighborhoods. The workshop would eventually produce an anthology of writing, and several of its participants continued to have productive careers in the arts, but it was Fredrick Douglass House—the workshop’s headquarters, including residential space for indigent writers—that made the deepest impact on the neighborhood, providing living, working, and performance space to a broad political cross-section of South Central LA. 

Schulberg showed up to bear witness to the deprivation of Watts and the rage it produced, and he returned repeatedly in an effort to overcome that deprivation. Initially aiming to be the ethical neighbor to Watts through liberal humanist recognition, he became the political neighbor instead, building and staffing Douglass House in collaboration with local writers. Douglass House was a space-making project, and over time, it became culturally and politically joined to other such arts-and-culture endeavors in Watts, taking on a material life well beyond what Schulberg had originally imagined. Schulberg’s transition from someone who drove repeatedly from Beverly Hills to Watts into someone who participated in changing the material space of Watts suggests an ethics of space worth sustaining in our moment. The lesson is: show up, and then do the real work required to alleviate the material conditions that are the source of danger, despair, and inequity. I am trying to learn that lesson, and trying to understand what matters most when I step out into the streets in this season of protest. 

Start reading The Border and the Line »

Notes

1.Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Duquesne UP, 1969

 

Dean J. Franco is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Institute at Wake Forest University. He is the author of Race, Rights, and Recognition: Jewish American Literature since 1969 (2012) and Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing (2006).

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