mere accessories

Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton preface the book American Apartheid with a quote by Kenneth B. Clark: "Racial segregation, like all other forms of cruelty and tyranny, debases all human beings—those who are its victims, those who victimize, and in quite subtle ways those who are mere accessories."

But, if we accept Massey and Denton's argument that segregation has never been so severe as along the black-white binary, who are the mere accessories? I am reminded of Claire Jean Kim's concept of triangulation: if, along a scale of "foreigner" and "insider", we can place Asians (certainly), Latinos (tentatively), and Eastern and Southern Europeans (tentatively, and mostly historically) close to the "foreign" end, and white Americans at the "insider" end, then what about African Americans also makes them "insiders," according to Kim? Of course, the way she conceptualizes "foreignness" and "insiderness" refers to their acceptance in the nation as a whole; but, if we follow Massey and Denton, and reinterpret this scale to mean acceptance in the neighborhood, we complicate the position of African Americans as "insiders." "...African Americans in large northern cities were effectively removed—socially and spatially—from the rest of American society," Massey and Denton write (43).

It might be inappropriate to look at this with the same "foreigner" vs. "insider" terminology that Kim uses, however, so I want to propose a new dimension, because even though Kim's idea of triangulation is based only on two axes, it opens the possibility for many more. Using Massey and Denton's terms, we can look at African Americans (as well as Latinos, Asians, etc.) on a parallel scale of "integrated" vs. "segregated". I call this a parallel scale because it, in a sense, restructures Kim's original foreigner-insider axis, taking the very basic idea of belonging, and changing the specifics of space and acceptance.

If we look at this new version of racial geometry, the discrepancies between "foreignness" and "segregated" become truly apparent: although African Americans can be viewed as "insiders", they are predominantly segregated, as opposed to Asians, whom Kim places as "foreigners" but can be placed in a moderate position in terms of segregation/integration. I acknowledge however that my reinterpretation of racial geometry is flawed in that Kim's axes refer to the popular (and strongly white) imagination of different racial groups, while Massey & Denton discuss real-world consequences of these imaginations, but I think that fact reveals the disparity between imagination and consequence. It's telling, in fact, that "the percentage of whites who agree that 'black people have a right to live wherever they can afford' rose from 76% in 1970 to 88% in 1980" (91), but at the same time "have little tolerance for racial mixtures beyond 20% black" (93); in other words, they belong as "insiders" but do not belong as "integrated."

I return to this idea of "mere accessories": who are they, or what? Are they the Korean storeowners caught in the midst of the LA race riots, or the low-income Puerto Ricans being bought out of Spanish Harlem? Because, though I understand the ways in which realtors discriminate against African Americans, though I've seen firsthand the segregation of black communities in New York and in D.C., I don't know whether I am a "mere accessory" or not.