“The Ghetto is a Gold Mine”: The Racialized Temporality of Betterment

Abstract

Gentrification makes trash a discursive and material index of degeneration, mobilizing projects to “clean” and “better” neighborhoods and people. This ethnographic article explores how trash's movements and labor reveal the spatialized and temporalized racial histories of neighborhood transformation in the historically black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy), Brooklyn and the gentrified town of Norfolk, Virginia. Foregrounding the objects and people whose value(s) are called into question as the context around them changes, I draw on two key interlocutors whose scavenging is conditioned by the “betterment”—community revitalization and “clean up”—programs that seek to displace them. As Sal “saves” Bed-Stuy by directing the flow of the dismembered ghetto, Superfly redirects coffee shop ephemera to black barbershops. By attending to how trash moves, Sal's and Superfly's labor make visible the material conditions of gentrification and point to how race and time are spatialized under racial capitalism.

The western and non-western dichotomization of time in anthropology

“…Bear (2016) notes that a recent reconciliation between the anthropological analyses of history and capitalism has created a 'temporal turn', generating 'new theoretical insights into the times of capitalist modernity and vectors of inequality'. Therefore, anthropology will become imperative in relation to the solution of contemporary issues regarding environment, global trade, international conflicts, legalities, and identity as it recognizes the experience of multiple temporalities (Abram and Weszkalnys 2014;Awasis 2020;Cons 2020;Garza 2018;Hodges 2008;Ialenti 2020;Schulz 2012;Solomon 2019). However, anthropology will have to adopt more multidisciplinary approaches to study time.…”

On how to live while being thrown away: Black people who use drugs and the politics of anti‐disposability, North Philadelphia, circa 2007 to 2010

“…If one of policing's justification is that the people who live in particular neighborhoods bear an inappropriate, criminal, value‐destroying relationship to those places (Solomon, 2019), Lew's insistence on indebtedness‐to‐others, rooted in a sense of collective identity and shared history, recast quotidian neighborhood sociality as part of an ongoing, specifically Black struggle to claim urban space and community self‐determination over and against urban processes, like Operation Sunrise and its aftermaths, that criminalize and eliminate Black and junky presences in the city. Against the violence of Black disposability, the politics of anti‐disposability and its associated practices of care work coalesced around loving incorporation, defense of, and care work for those most vulnerable to expulsion, criminalization, and premature death: Lew and all his wives.…”

The Limits of Resilience: Managing Waste in the Racialized Anthropocene

“…Rather than examine toxic embodiments (Alaimo 2016; Lock 2017; Shapiro 2015), material waste accumulations (Dillon 2014; Hecht 2018), and climate change's effects on nonhuman species (Haraway 2016; Kohn 2014; Tsing 2015), I focus on the forms of racialization—and responses—that emerge from the everyday management of material accumulation 33 . Waste accumulations and their resulting labor and environmental inequalities are part and parcel of racial capitalism and the racialization of the people who manage it (Kelley 2017; Pellow 2016; Pulido 2016a, 2016b; Robinson [1983] 2000; Solomon 2019; Thomas 2002). I draw on what Barnor Hesse (2016, xviii) calls the “colonial constitution of race,” “an inherited western, modern‐colonial practice of violence, assemblage, superordination, exploitation, and segregation.” By thinking through race as constructed by and producing both environmental inequalities and the capitalist systems that create these environmental inequalities, 34 this article pushes conversations about the Anthropocene into a discussion of the intersection of class, race, environmental inequity, and the politics of scale itself.…”

“…Rather than examine toxic embodiments (Alaimo 2016;Lock 2017;Shapiro 2015), material waste accumulations (Dillon 2014;Hecht 2018), and climate change's effects on nonhuman species (Haraway 2016;Kohn 2014;, I focus on the forms of racialization-and responsesthat emerge from the everyday management of material accumulation. 33 Waste accumulations and their resulting labor and environmental inequalities are part and parcel of racial capitalism and the racialization of the people who manage it (Kelley 2017;Pellow 2016;Pulido 2016aPulido , 2016bRobinson [1983Robinson [ ] 2000Solomon 2019;Thomas 2002). I draw on what Barnor Hesse (2016, xviii) calls the "colonial constitution of race," "an inherited western, moderncolonial practice of violence, assemblage, superordination, exploitation, and segregation."…”

“…1717My approach to racial capitalism draws on work by Lowe (2015), Pulido (2018), Robinson ([1983] 2000), Solomon (2019), and Thomas (2002). …”