DYING FAST AND DYING SLOW IN BLACK SPACE

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 535-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naa Oyo A. Kwate ◽  
Shatema Threadcraft
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Scale Up ◽  
Public Health Problem ◽  
Black Body ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Action ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Stop And Frisk

AbstractAggressive policing strategies have come under scrutiny for stark racial and ethnic inequities. New York City, home to the United States’ largest police force, was subject to a federal class action lawsuit that culminated in its “Stop, Question and Frisk” policies being ruled unconstitutional. In this paper we argue that Stop and Frisk not only violates constitutional rights, but also constitutes a public health problem. Operating as one process in the death world, Stop and Frisk transforms urban space from a resource to a source of danger; induces perceptual dysfunctions that stymie possibilities for Black engagement with the state and make blackness a metonym for crime and disorder; depletes economic and civic resources; and is embodied, by imprinting on the Black body, physically and mentally. Taken together this policing practice induces stress, fear and trauma, marks the Black body as the proper target for erasure by those who would restore the moral order of the polity, and sets Black lives on a trajectory of debility. Stop and Frisk, whatever its intent, is a necropolitical project. Though Achille Mbembe defined necropolitics as the sovereign determination of who lives and dies, we argue that necropolitical projects need not produce a dead body immediately to function. We extend Mbembe’s concept to include diffuse, environmental factors that scale up from individual encounters to Black communities. Though Foucault’s widely cited analysis sees the prison as central in the management and regulation of populations, we hold that Stop and Frisk has more in common with necropower than with biopower, producing dysfunctional bodies awaiting death.

Manufacturing Distress: Race, Redevelopment, and the EB-5 Program in Central Brooklyn

2021 ◽  
pp. 089692052098661
Author(s):  
Amanda T. Boston
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Foreign Investment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Neighborhoods ◽  
Uneven Development ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Racial Inequalities ◽  
Development Policies ◽  
Job Growth

Gentrification’s racial consequences are garnering increased attention as the process advances into majority–minority urban neighborhoods. This study examines the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program’s implementation in Brooklyn, New York to ground these trends in policies through which gentrification is promoted, histories of racism and uneven development against which they are unfolding, and their disparate impacts on Black communities. While the program purports to use foreign investment to promote job growth in high unemployment areas, its financing of multimillion and billion-dollar development projects facilitates the displacement of longtime residents of the very places the initiative was designed to improve. Central Brooklyn and its outlying areas, home to one of the largest contiguous Black communities in the United States, are host to numerous EB-5 projects that have failed to produce sustainable job growth for existing residents and heightened the growing crisis of unaffordability. My analysis shows how EB-5 projects have enabled investors to use distressed areas disproportionately inhabited by poor and working-class Black communities to qualify for funding, while redistributing benefits upward to wealthy developers and affluent residents and consumers. Ultimately, the EB-5 program and other neoliberal, colorblind urban development policies exacerbate existing racial inequalities in the organization and operation of urban space.

Stop-and-Frisk Policing

Criminology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Law Enforcement Officers ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Action ◽  
Deterrent Effect ◽  
Stop And Frisk ◽  
Reasonable Suspicion

Stop and frisk is a proactive policing strategy that is widely used by police departments across the globe. In the United States, the origins of stop and frisk are rooted in the English practice of allowing night watchmen to stop and question individuals who were deemed suspicious. This ability to stop and question suspicious individuals serves two primary purposes. First, it gives law enforcement officers the ability to identify individuals who are looking to engage in criminal activity, stop those individuals, and prevent them from committing a criminal offense. Second, it may have a deterrent effect if potential offenders refrain from criminal offending because they do not want to risk being stopped. By the early 20th century, the implementation of stop and frisk in the United States varied by state. The Uniform Arrest Act, proposed in 1942, sought to standardize the practice. While several states adopted the Uniform Crime Act, which stipulated the circumstances under which a stop and frisk could occur, most states failed to do so. The practice of stop and frisk also faced constitutional challenges, with plaintiffs alleging violations of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures. In 1968, the US Supreme Court affirmed the constitutionality of stop and frisk. When law enforcement officers can establish reasonable suspicion, they can stop and question an individual. If there is reasonable suspicion to believe that a stopped individual possesses a weapon or poses a threat, law enforcement officers can also conduct a frisk. Stop and frisk has faced significant criticism and has been the subject of several class-action lawsuits, particularly in New York City. First, there is significant concern that nonwhite pedestrians are more likely than white pedestrians to be stopped, frisked, and subjected to the use of force. Next, stop and frisk may reduce perceptions of legitimacy and trust in law enforcement. The practice may also have adverse health consequences for those who are subjected to it or are in fear of being subjected to it. Finally, it is unclear whether stop and frisk prevents crime. It is also important to note that stop and frisk faces these same criticisms in other nations. The literature cited in this article summarizes key pieces on stop and frisk.

Conclusion

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Fanning
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Critical Time ◽  
The United States ◽  
Community Leaders ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Diverse Group ◽  
Haitian American ◽  
The Relationship

This concluding chapter argues that the 1820s was a critical time in the relationship between the United States and Haiti, a time when each exerted influence on the other that had the potential to change their respective histories even more radically. During this decade, Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer concentrated on U.S. relations in his work to improve the standing of his nation and opened up the island to African American emigrants as a gambit to strengthen his case for diplomatic recognition from the United States. Boyer's emigration plan found support among a diverse group of Americans, from abolitionists to black-community leaders to hard-nosed businessmen who all saw profit in the enterprise for different reasons. Ultimately, the project had a lasting effect on thousands of emigrants; on the black communities of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York; on Haitian-American relations; and on African American political discourse.

Safe Routes to School? Black Caribbean Youth Negotiating Police Surveillance in London and New York City

2018 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
DERRON WALLACE
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Public Schools ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
York City ◽  
Black Youth ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Stop And Frisk ◽  
Black Caribbean

In this article, Derron Wallace examines how Black Caribbean youth perceive and experience stop-and-frisk and stop-and-search practices in New York City and London, respectively, while on their way to and from public schools. Despite a growing body of scholarship on the relationship between policing and schooling in the United States and United Kingdom, comparative research on how students experience stop-and-frisk/search remains sparse. Drawing on the BlackCrit tradition of critical race theory and in-depth interviews with sixty Black Caribbean secondary school students in London and New York City, Wallace explores how adolescents experience adult-like policing to and from schools. His findings indicate that participants develop a strained sense of belonging in British and American societies due to a security paradox: a policing formula that, in principle, promises safety for all but in practice does so at the expense of some Black youth. Participants in the ethnographic study learned that irrespective of ethnicity, Black youth are regularly rendered suspicious subjects worthy of scrutiny, even during the school commute.

scholarly journals The melting point of palladium

1929 ◽  
Vol 125 (798) ◽  
pp. 517-531 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Melting Point ◽  
High Temperatures ◽  
Scale Up ◽  
Planck Equation ◽  
Black Body ◽  
The United States ◽  
Measuring Instruments ◽  
Independent Basis ◽  
Thermodynamic Scale ◽  
Melting Point Of Palladium

The melting point of palladium is a convenient reference point for the measurement of high temperatures. In fixing a scale of temperature the aim is, of course, to approximate as closely as possible to the thermodynamic scale. From the absolute zero up to moderately high temperatures this ideal scale is realised most directly and accurately through the medium of the gas thermometer. However, with increase of temperature beyond a certain limit, the experimental difficulties of gas thermometry multiply rapidly, so that ultimately it becomes necessary to adopt another basis for obtaining the scale. This is conveniently found in the laws governing the radiation from a black body, which have a sound theoretical foundation and permit the use of measuring instruments of precision. The establishment of a practical scale of temperature on the lines above indicated has been the subject of considerable discussion between the national standardising laboratories of Germany, Great Britain and the United States of America. As a result, proposals for the definition of an "International Temperature Scale" were submitted to the 7th General Conference of Weights and Measures, and approved by them. In effect, the basis of the scale up to the melting point of gold is the gas thermometer, and beyond this temperature the Wien or Planck law of radiation with an agreed value for the constant c 2 . Owing to the difficulty of absolute measurements of radiation, no attempt has so far been made to place the radiation scale on an independent basis by fixing the other constant in the Wien or Planck equation. Consequently the scale is defined, for the present, relatively to a fixed point on the thermodynamic scale, as given by the gas thermometer, namely the melting point of gold (1063°C.).

A Love Song for All of Us?: Macklemore's “Same Love” and the Myth of Black Homophobia

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 425-448 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURON KEHRER
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
American Culture ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gay Marriage ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Strategic Performance ◽  
Proposition 8 ◽  
Top 40

AbstractAccording to theNew York Times, white rapper Macklemore and his DJ partner Ryan Lewis's “Same Love” was “the first song to explicitly embrace and promote gay marriage that has made it into the Top 40.”1In 2013, as the Supreme Court of the United States prepared to rule on challenges to the Federal Defense of Marriage Act and California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage, the track quickly climbed the charts and became a nationally recognized anthem for marriage equality. Despite this generally positive reception, however, the song does not reflect all queer-identified listeners. Macklemore raps, “If I were gay, I would think hip hop hates me,” an assertion that positions black communities as a significant threat to (white) LGBTQ rights. Much like the backlash against black voters following the 2008 passing of Proposition 8, this claim relies on an invented black pathology that locates homophobia in black American culture specifically rather than American culture at large. This article offers a close reading and contextualization of “Same Love” and demonstrates that, rather than combating homophobia in hip hop, Macklemore's lyrical claims actually bolster his strategic performance as a socially and politically aware white rapper, while erasing queer and trans hip hop artists of color from the discourse.

Puerto Rican Nationhood, Ethnicity, and Literature

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances R. Aparicio
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
Puerto Ricans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Island Population ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Global Identities

Given Puerto Rico’s long colonial history, Puerto Ricans both on the island and in the diaspora have had to grapple with contested notions of nationhood. Having been described as a “divided nation” and a “commuter nation” due to the geographical divides between the island population and those who have migrated to cities in the United States, Puerto Ricans have deployed literature to forge and re-imagine a space for belonging and community informed by the experiences of living in between the island and New York, in between Spanish and English, and in between racial notions of skin color, social class, and gender and sexualities. Challenging and unsettling the foundational discourses of national identity on the island, “Diasporican” literature proposes alternative imaginaries that resist power inequalities. This essay argues that Diasporican literature has come into its own, contributing new understandings of the fissures of Puerto Rican national, ethnic, and cultural identities. Puerto Rican writers in the United States have textualized their experiences of migration and transnationalism through their poetry as well as fiction, memoirs, and autobiographical narratives. They have contested traditional notions of home and have explored the failures and limitations of a sense of belonging. Rejecting both the island of Puerto Rico as the geographical site for Puerto Rican authenticity and the dominant urban imaginaries of New York City that have long excluded their working-poor communities, Puerto Rican writers in the United States have represented el barrio as an urban space that offers them a sense of community despite the mainstream notions of hyper-masculinity, violence, and illegal practices. Afro-Boricua and Diasporican writers have also reflected on the fissures of racial belonging, as their dark skin color is not always integrated into dominant notions of the Puerto Rican and U.S. national imaginaries. Their deployment, in poetry, of English, Spanish, and “Spanglish” speaks mostly to the centrality of orality and sounds in the formation of nationhood, while challenging the homology of Puerto Rican nationality to Spanish. Exploration of the ways in which female, feminist, and queer Diasporican writers grapple with issues of belonging, gender, and sexuality foregrounds how these categories of identity continue to go against the grain of traditional masculine narratives of nationhood. It is essential to acknowledge the geographic dispersion of Diasporican voices away from New York and the transcultural alliances and global identities that are being produced in Morocco, Hawaii, and other far regions of the world. A short discussion of Lin Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights” focuses on an example of staging a return home to New York, in a performance that celebrates community, family, and the neighborhood for second- and third-generation Puerto Ricans among other Latino and Latina groups. The multiple and complicated ways in which Diasporican literary voices, from poetry to theater to fiction, textualize notions of home, belonging, and community are examined within the larger frameworks of nationhood and ethnicity.

Urban Space and Religion in the United States

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Day
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Spatial Dimension ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Religion ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Institutional Dynamics ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
The Relationship

Religion has always been a contextually based phenomenon, particularly in urban space. Cities of every size, in every period, and in every region of the country have been defined by the towers and spires of faith traditions. They have mapped cities, providing anchors to religionists who worship there, and contributing to the construction of civil society and a sense of place. Communities of faith have drawn migrants and immigrants to settle in a particular place and provided resources for adaptation and integration. Houses of worship have often defined neighborhood identities and become progenitors of social capital beyond their walls. Increasingly the physical and social forms of religion are becoming more diverse—different accents, practices, music, dress, and even scents pour into and out of houses of worship that may not be grand old structures but more modest structures built for other purposes, blending into the cityscape. Still, religion is influential in shaping its context both spatially and socially. But the relationship is reciprocal, as context acts on the questions, meanings, and practices of faith groups as well. The city has occupied the religious imaginations of many traditions as an ambivalent symbol, seen as both the locus of depravity and of redemption. Out of these imaginaries religious questions, meanings, practices, and forms of engagement have been shaped. Further, the economic, political, social, and institutional dynamics of the urban space impact the practice and understanding of religion, and how it is expressed and lived out in everyday life. The interaction of religions and urban space—what can be described as a dynamic synapse in a human ecology—is emerging as a focus of exploration in understanding how cities work. Although religion is often overlooked by many urban theorists, researchers, planners, developers, and governments, it is gaining fresh attention by scholars. Drawing on major schools of urban theory—particularly the modernist Chicago School and the postmodern L.A. School of Urbanism—the spatial dimension of urban religion is being analyzed in research projects from a growing number of contexts. Theoretical and empiric work is enabling a deeper understanding of the relationship of religion and cities; they cannot be considered in isolation. Religious agency cannot be exaggerated or romanticized but should be considered as what two researchers have called “one of the ensemble of forces creating the new American metropolis” (Numrich, Paul D., and Elfriede Wedam. Religion and Community in the New Urban America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.). In the same way, faith groups of all traditions and dimensions do not exist in isolation of their context as bubbles in city space. The intersection of space and urban religion is complex, especially as both religion and cities are in the midst of great change in the 21st century.

Presumed Criminal

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Suddler
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
York City ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
War On Crime ◽  
The 1960S

Presumed Criminal is a provocative analysis of youth, race, and crime in New York City from the 1930s to the 1960s that shows how shifts in the criminal justice system bolstered authoritative efforts that criminalized black youths. Grounded in extensive research, it is a startling examination of a historical past that appears to be anything but past.The criminalization of black youth is inseparable from its racialized origins. Thus, when the federal government entered the debate on how to address juvenile delinquency in the United States, it occurred at a critical juncture when Progressive-era modes of rehabilitation were being replaced by disparate means of punishment. Black youths bore the brunt of the transition. In New York City, increased state surveillance of predominantly black communities compounded arrest rates into the post–World War II period, which gave reason to become tough on crime. Extreme police practices, such as stop-and-frisk, combined with media sensationalism, cemented black youths as the primary cause for concern. Consequently, before the War on Crime, black youths already faced a punitive justice system that restricted their social mobility and categorically branded them as criminal—a stigma they continue to endure.

scholarly journals Chagas Disease in the New York City Metropolitan Area

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Crystal Zheng ◽  
Orlando Quintero ◽  
Elizabeth K Revere ◽  
Michael B Oey ◽  
Fabiola Espinoza ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
Chagas Disease ◽  
Metropolitan Area ◽  
York City ◽  
Clinical Manifestations ◽  
Public Health Problem ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asymptomatic Patients

Abstract Background Chagas disease, caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, once considered a disease confined to Mexico, Central America, and South America, is now an emerging global public health problem. An estimated 300 000 immigrants in the United States are chronically infected with T. cruzi. However, awareness of Chagas disease among the medical community in the United States is poor. Methods We review our experience managing 60 patients with Chagas disease in hospitals throughout the New York City metropolitan area and describe screening, clinical manifestations, EKG findings, imaging, and treatment. Results The most common country of origin of our patients was El Salvador (n = 24, 40%), and the most common detection method was by routine blood donor screening (n = 21, 35%). Nearly half of the patients were asymptomatic (n = 29, 48%). Twenty-seven patients were treated with either benznidazole or nifurtimox, of whom 7 did not complete therapy due to side effects or were lost to follow-up. Ten patients had advanced heart failure requiring device implantation or organ transplantation. Conclusions Based on our experience, we recommend that targeted screening be used to identify at-risk, asymptomatic patients before progression to clinical disease. Evaluation should include an electrocardiogram, echocardiogram, and chest x-ray, as well as gastrointestinal imaging if relevant symptoms are present. Patients should be treated if appropriate, but providers should be aware of adverse effects that may prevent patients from completing treatment.

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