Table of Contents

Introduction. "Race, Place, and Power" 1. The White Spatial Imaginary 36-76 2. The Black Spatial Imaginary 77-107 3. Space, Sports, and Spectatorship in St. Louis 108-144 4. The Crime The Wire Couldn't Name. Social Decay and Cynical Detachment in Baltimore 145-175 5. Horace Tapscott and the World Stage in Los Angeles 195- 225 6. John Biggers and Project Row Houses in Houston" 226-255 7. "Betye Saar's Los Angeles and Paule Marshall's Brooklyn" 256-293 8. "Something Left to Love. Lorraine Hansberry's Chicago" 294-324 9. New Orleans Today. We Know This Place 325-370 10. A Place Where Everybody Is Somebody 371-399 Acknowledgments Index

Promotional Information

How racism shapes urban spaces and how African Americans create vibrant communities that offer models for more equitable social arrangements

About the Author

George Lipsitz is Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His previous books include The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics and A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition (both Temple). Lipsitz serves as President of the Advisory Board of the African American Policy Forum and as a member of the Board of Directors of the National Fair Housing Alliance.

Reviews

"Veteran scholar Lipsitz provides another deeply probing look at US racism...Lipsitz provides original analyses of urban development in St. Louis (a football stadium) and a television series (The Wire) on Baltimore to show how such activities obscure links between institutionalized racism and urban space--including urban poverty and predatory lending--in front of unreflective observers... Summing Up: Highly Recommended." Choice "This book strengthens Lipsitz's position as one of the major contributors to theoretical and historical works on race... In powerful and compelling writing, Lipsitz examines the problems...and provides insights into the broad context and multiple factors that shape the ways race continues to work in society." Journal of American History, September 2012 "This big-hearted and incisive book reveals how policies and practices related to the demarcation, commodification, and valuation of urban space reinforce hierarchies of race and class... This work both painstakingly documents the ways in which the white spatial imaginary excludes people, and particularly women, of color, even as it seduces them with promises of upward mobility and consumer citizenship... [T]he book mounts a powerful challenge to the recent justifications of racialized inequalities through revanchist scientific racism or the various 'culture of poverty' concepts." - Contemporary Sociology