The Right to the Creative City in the Era of #blacklivesmatter
In August 2020, I was invited to contribute a response to a prompt entitled "The Right to the Creative City." The prompt solicited essays to be published as part of an edited colloquy on Stanford University's on-line platform, "Arcades," at some point in 2021. According to the prompt, the colloquy would be focused on "how the 'creative city' has affected marginalized communities, including communities of color, low-income communities, LGBTQ communities, and postcolonial societies." The colloquy on "The Right to the Creative City" grew out of a three-year project entitled "Creative Cities" that was based at the Stanford Arts Institute; the project hosted two fellows each year between 2016 and 2019--I was one of the fellows in the program's first year--and a seminar where fellows, Stanford faculty, and scholars in the Bay Area presented work-in-progress on topics related to the "creative city." Stanford's "Creative Cities" program is subtended by the Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged in 2013 and continues today. And yet, the relationship between Stanford's program, which endeavored to mobilize some of the massive resources of an elite university towards an examination of "creative cities," and today's most important on-the-ground movement to transform contemporary urban life was complicated and perhaps not without contradiction. My proposed response, which attempted to examine the prompt in relation to Black Lives Matter, was rejected by the editors, who suggested that I "address more fully a particular 'case study'." In the hope that I might support inquiry into the ways in which the study of the contemporary city could engage Black Lives Matter, I submitted my response to PLATFORM instead.
A Right to the Creative City?
Is there a right to the creative city? If so, is a right to the creative city worth claiming and fighting for? Could the creative city be rehabilitated by claiming a right to it? These questions certainly seem worth asking. And not only are these questions suggested by the theme of the collection of essays I have written these words to contribute to, but, some years ago, I posed versions of these very questions myself.[1]
To think about a right to the creative city might seem like a response to the ways in which most attempts to foster so-called "creative cities" have advanced socio-economic inequalities and animated the displacement of working-class people of color from their neighborhoods. To think about a right to the creative city might seem like an attempt to include communities of color and working-class communities into contemporary urban development. To think about a right to the creative city might seem like a way to rethink neoliberal creative city policies in the context of progressive claims to the right to the city.
A right to the creative city might seem worth claiming in the light of each and every one of the preceding contexts. And yet, I believe that there is another context, vividly put forward in the Black Lives Matter movement, that renders discussion of this right a distraction from the urban issues that I think are of most concern, and a deferral of the urban discussions that I think are of most urgency—issues and discussions that discourse and practice on the city could only negotiate by abandoning the concept of the creative city, at least in its current forms.
The Right to Have Rights
To speak about a right to the creative city is to presume that all inhabitants of the city already possess the right to have rights. This presumption takes for granted that formal principles about equality before the law apply to all members of a political community, takes for granted that these principles are translated into the experience of all people who live under the law, and takes for granted that individual rights can be claimed within a political community without transforming who is included and who is excluded from that community. This is all to say that, at least in the world at present, the right to have rights should never be presumed.
Hannah Arendt elaborated the concept of the "right to have rights" in her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In the previous decades, she had lived through experiences that made this right all-too-clear to her. Arendt was born in Germany in 1906; to the Nazi regime, however, she was first and foremost a Jew. In 1935, two years after she fled to Paris to escape that regime, the Nuremberg Laws revoked the citizenship of German Jews and transformed them into stateless refugees. After most of France was occupied by Nazi forces and Arendt was interred in what became Vichy France, she was able to secure illegal visa documents and escape to the United States, where she spent the rest of her life.
“To speak about a right to the creative city is to presume that all inhabitants of the city already possess the right to have rights.”
As Arendt theorized in The Origins of Totalitarianism, when the citizenship of German Jews like her was revoked, these people lost not only the particular rights of citizens, but also the very right to have rights. What saved Arendt and other survivors was not being recognized as human beings with human rights, but being recognized as political subjects by a nation-state--a political community that could extend, enforce, and defend rights. Arendt's experience taught her that even human rights, the rights that are supposedly intrinsic to every human being, can only be recognized and granted when a human being is accepted as a member of a political community and, thus, as more than simply human. Here are her words:
We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one's actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of organized community, only when millions of people emerged who had lost and could not regain those rights because of the new global political situation.[2]
Rights and Racism
Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism after she had been living in the United States for almost ten years. While her book is preoccupied with European anti-Semitism, it is haunted by another system of oppression--the system of anti-Black racism in colonial and settler colonial contexts, among the latter, of course, including Arendt's new homeland in the United States. I read this haunting in the fleeting moments when Arendt's passages on the situation of stateless Jews in Europe turn towards the situations of colonized Africans and Black Americans; while Arendt incisively unfolded the political dimensions of anti-Semitism, she insistently resisted seeing anti-Black racism in the same way.[3] Thus, implicitly comparing the situation of Black Americans and German Jews, she writes,
If a Negro in a white community is considered a Negro and nothing else, he loses along with his right to equality that freedom of action which is specifically human; all his deeds are now explained as 'necessary' consequences of some 'Negro' qualities ...Much the same thing happens to those who have lost all distinctive political qualities and have become human beings and nothing else.[4]
“In Arendt’s lifetime, the relationship between rights and racism that she gestured towards but failed to fully grasp was fully cognized by those who experienced that racism.”
Arendt here poses "a Negro" in a racist political community as losing a right and freedom that are "specifically human." In comparison, the stateless refugees who she then invokes lose "political qualities" and thereby become only human. As Katherine T. Gines writes, "Arendt is overlooking the fact that while the Jew may be denied political qualities, the Negro is denied both human and political qualities or rights."[5]
In Arendt's lifetime, the relationship between rights and racism that she gestured towards but failed to fully grasp was fully cognized by those who experienced that racism. Four years after the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, for example, Aimé Césaire published Discourse on Colonialism and concisely connected the putatively universal "rights of man" and anti-Black racism. "That is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism," Césaire wrote, "that for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been—and still is— narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist."[6]
Black Lives Matter and the Right to Have Rights
"Black Lives Matter began as a call to action in response to state-sanctioned violence and anti-Black racism. Our intention from the very beginning was to connect Black people from all over the world who have a shared desire for justice to act together in their communities. The impetus for that commitment was, and still is, the rampant and deliberate violence inflicted on us by the state."[7]
George Floyd Square, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 5 June 2020. Photograph by Vasanth Rajkumar, Creative Commons.
Emerging in response to the systemic killing of Black men, women, and children by police and white vigilantes in the United States, Black Lives Matter has posed the anti-Black racism that Césaire understood as foundational to colonialism as also foundational to US history and contemporaneity. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has described this foundation as the breach between legal citizenship and the history and experience of Black Americans: "The distance from the end of the Civil War, with the birth of Black citizenship and civil rights, to the state-sanctioned beating and torture of Freddie Gray constitutes the gap between formal equality before the law and the self-determination and self-possession inherent in actual freedom—the right to be free from oppression, the right to make determinations about your life free from duress, coercion, or threat of harm.”[8]
Taylor suggests that the struggle to end state- and state-sanctioned violence inflicted on Black Americans is, among other things, a struggle for Black Americans to create a political community in which they possess the right to have rights. In this sense, Black Lives Matter reveals a racialized short-circuit in claims for things like a right to the creative city. When Black lives are not protected from state- and state-sanctioned violence, what does it mean to make a racially neutral claim for a right? At least at present, I think that such a racially neutral claim can only further mystify the anti-Black racism that has structured access to rights in the US into the present. Naomi Murakawa calls this mystification "the problem of colorblindness": "If the problem of the twentieth century was, in W. E. B. Dubois's famous words, 'the problem of the color line,' then problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification."[9]
“What if a creative city would be a city in which Black lives, Indigenous lives, and the lives of other people of color would matter?”
Towards Another Creative City
In September 1967, in the wake of unrest in cities across the United States that passed as "riots" in the white power structure and white public eye, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a keynote address to the American Psychological Association; he was assassinated before his address would be published the following year in American Psychologist.[10] In his speech, King pointed out how, in the North, so-called "riots" were a tactic of resistance to the systemic violence of anti-Black racism. King's speech ended with a call for what he called "creative maladjustment":
I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence ... Through such creative maladjustment, we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.[11]
King wrote those words after the passage of landmark civil rights legislation in the United States: the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. As he pointed out in "The Testament of Hope," almost all the provisions in these laws were deliberately ignored.[12] But, for King, the creative maladjustment to white supremacy, anti-Black racism, exploitive capitalism, and militarism would yield much more than simply legislation; the struggle by Black Americans for freedom and justice was much more than a struggle for particular rights. King suggested that when Black Americans gain the right to have rights, the United States would become a fundamentally different sort of society:
The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws--racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are deeply rooted in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society is the real issue to be faced.[13]
What if a creative city would be a city in which Black lives, Indigenous lives, and the lives of other people of color would matter? What if the creativity of King's creative maladjustment would be the creativity of the creative city? What if the city's creative reconstruction would come out of the radical reconstruction that, for King, was the authentic political project? What, then, would a right to the creative city promise? What would life in the creative city offer?
Notes
[1] "The Right to the Creative City" was a pair of public discussions co-organized by Johanna Taylor and myself in 2017 when we were Creative Cities Fellows at the Stanford Arts Institute. Exploring the politics of urban futures from the perspectives of movement-based activism, technology, and aesthetics, these discussions attempted to bring work on the "creative city" into relation with ongoing struggles for the right to the city. The first discussion, "Towards Arts of Co-Liberation," took place at the Chinese Cultural Center's 41 Ross Gallery in San Francisco on May 17, 2017 (https://events.stanford.edu/events/693/69397/) and the second discussion, "Urban Technopolitics," took place at the Stanford Humanities Center on May 25, 2017 (https://arts.stanford.edu/event/69399/2017-05-25/).
[2] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1968 <1951>), 296-7.
[3] Arendt's understanding of anti-Black racism has been expertly analyzed by Katherine T. Gines in Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
[4] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 301-2.
[5] Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, 72.
[6] Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000 <1955>), 37.
[7] Black Lives Matter, "Guiding Principles," https://3o9d0y1wloj7e90sc37nviar-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/Handout-1-Black-Lives-Matters-Document-Set.pdf.
[8] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 192.
[9] Naomi Murakawa, The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7.
[10] Martin Luther King, Jr., "The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement," American Psychologist 23, no. 3 (1968): 183.
[11] King, Jr., "The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement," 186.
[12] Martin Luther King, Jr., "A Testament of Hope," in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986 <1969>), 320.
[13] King, Jr., "A Testament of Hope," 315.
