ancient cities

630 Racialization
planners, suburban residents, and other people living
outside of these spaces. But racialized spaces may
be created from within the neighborhood as well.
Gang graffiti advertises the presence of groups
competing for control of urban space and creates
racialized spaces that may appear dangerous and
mysterious to the outsider. Racialized spaces may
also be positive. In many ethnic neighborhoods,
murals and museums create a racialized space that
becomes a source of pride and identity for the
group. Tourist bureaus in major cities supply maps
that show the location of ethnic neighborhoods,
such as Chinatown in New York and San Francisco,
along with lists of restaurants and stores. The
example of Chinatown is interesting in this respect,
showing how a racialized space that for a long
time held negative meanings (opium dens and
prostitution) in the popular imagination has now
been given a positive meaning (an important tourist
destination) that becomes part of the city’s
advertising campaign.
As the following examples demonstrate, it is
important to expand the discussion of the racialization
of space beyond the usual reference to
negative labels given to an area by people or agencies
of greater social position and to recognize that
racialized space may be created from above or
below (by state agencies or by people within local
communities) and that it may have positive as well
as negative meaning.
Insiders and Outsiders
We normally think of racialized spaces as located
somewhere “over there”—in other words, racialized
spaces are places where groups of people different
from ourselves live, literally, the space
occupied by “the other.” Racialized spaces are seen
from the outside as spaces that we can name, that
we have the authority to name. At the same time,
people who occupy racialized space recognize that
the area where they live occupies a specific niche
within the larger community. They may have a
definition of the racialized space very different
from that of the outsiders—their others. This dialectic
can be seen in two classic illustrations from
the Chicago School of Urban Sociology.
The first illustration is Ernest Burgess’s wellknown
diagram of the growth of the city (see the
Chicago School of Urban Sociology entry). This
model of concentric zones surrounding the central
core of the city formed the basis for all later
Chicago School studies and continues to influence
urban ecology to the present day. The diagram
notes the location of particular ecological niches
within the city, for example, a small area on the
northwest side of the city is labeled Little Italy.
This is the area of settlement for Italian immigrants—the
slum neighborhood in Harvey
Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slum.
Stretching south from the Chicago Loop in the center
of the diagram is an area labeled the Black Belt.
This refers to the dense settlement of African
American families in the Federal Street slum, a rectangular
area created following their migration to
the city to work in wartime industry. Housing discrimination
and violence directed at Black families
that tried to move into adjacent neighborhoods
established the boundaries of the Black community
in this narrow corridor, which would remain intact
for nearly two decades. For those who live in other
areas of the city and suburbs, the Black Belt is a
racialized space that signifies an area of slum housing
and a part of the city to be avoided.
St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s study of
Black Metropolis was published some 20 years
after Burgess’s diagram of the growth of the city.
Black Metropolis is a neglected classic in urban
sociology and represents one of the most significant
pieces of social science research on African
American life in the American city in the twentieth
century. The growing Black community on
Chicago’s south side had rejected the label of
Black Belt and referred to their community as
Bronzeville (just as Joe Lewis was known as the
Bronze Bomber and Dinah Washington as the
Bronze Nightingale). Drake and Cayton created
a map, labeled “the lower class view of Chicago,”
that presented a view of the city from the Black
neighborhoods on the south side of the city. The
Black Belt was shown as an area distinct from
other parts of the African American community.
One might suggest that within the larger Bronzeville
community, the Black Belt has become a racialized
space.
In addition, there are several referents to other
ethnic communities outside of the community: a
note that indicates where the Mexicans live to the
west and a note further north, where the Dagos, a
pejorative term for Italians, live. From within the