Urban heterogeneity transformed race into an internal threat requiring spatial controls

Evidence

Racism’s more modernizing modes in the wake of abolition and nineteenth-century industrialization, by contrast, are increasingly associated with urbanization and metropolitan life. Modern cities have traditionally been places of migratory attraction and moral repulsion. They have offered the lure of employment and recreational excitement, consumptive novelties and cultural development, radical possibility and intense anonymity. It is this radical heterogeneity that has served more or less simultaneously as magnet and threat, as appealing, even transgressive of conserving inhibition, and repulsion. … The perceived threats to homogeneity, to the reproduction of sameness and identity, to the expected and the usual, to order and control, with which cities are associated historically prompted the institution of controls over urban space, restrictions on entry and movement, limits on access and acceptability. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 360

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how cities as sites of ‘migratory attraction and moral repulsion’ echo the spatial orderings discussed in readings on infrastructure and social control. — connects to: Urban space mediates how diversity and racialization play out differently — Sivamohan Valluvan, Conviviality and Multiculture: A…, 67; Race when invoked to categorize humans almost invariably operates as threat and disruption — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1842
• SEED: The shift from race as rural colonial externality to race as internal urban threat could anchor an essay on how physical geography of cities encodes racial classification — comparing plantation slavery’s rural geography to modern urban policing of movement.