A Sufficiently Severe Crisis: On Jason Hackworth’s “Manufacturing Decline”
Jason Hackworth | Manufacturing Decline: How Racism and the Conservative Movement Crush the American Rust Belt | Columbia University Press | October 1, 2019 | 336 Pages
Geography professor Jason Hackworth’s new book, Manufacturing Decline: How Racism and the Conservative Movement Crush the American Rust Belt, is not about Covid-19, or quarantine, or the question of what we should do to live through or recover from a pandemic. It’s not about which communities are affected more intensely by this virus, or where the economic impacts are felt most keenly.
Except that I read it right now, so of course it is.
Near the end of the book, Hackworth suggests that rethinking American cities might only happen after “a sufficiently severe crisis.” In Manufacturing Decline, the crisis is the collapse of Rust Belt cities, not the Covid-19 pandemic. Still, both crises share certain notable characteristics: they disproportionately affect black communities, they are exacerbated because of organized neglect by political leaders, and the responses to them are impelled by racism.
For those reasons, not to mention the ways that each crisis has caused us to reflect on our use of space and our relation to the people around us, it seems appropriate to consider our current moment in light of the histories presented in Manufacturing Decline.
This book’s central thesis is that the conservative movement exploited the racist backlash against the civil rights movement to weaken cities and gain political power. Hackworth focuses on Rust Belt cities because they have much larger black populations than Midwestern rural areas, which is also a marked difference from regions like the South where black populations are spread more evenly throughout country and city. According to Hackworth, “the Rust Belt is a place where ‘inner city,’ ‘blackness,’ and population decline can be imagined and deployed politically.” The conservative movement thus used imagery of declining Rust Belt cities to enact austerity policies, which had the effect of further impoverishing black communities and consolidating the electoral power of corporate and other highly capitalized interest groups.
This is not a simple story, and Hackworth effectively shows how conservative politicians (primarily Republicans, but also neoliberal Democrats) exploit the many facets of what he calls “organized deprivation” to provide themselves a measure of plausible deniability regarding their motives.
In the book’s first section, “Othering the Deprived City,” Hackworth demonstrates that urban decline’s association with blackness started alongside white flight, discriminatory state laws and sentencing guidelines, the absence of government oversight, and the visibility of black political leaders in Rust Belt cities. Conservative politicians capitalized on this association to solidify political affinities between small-government types and “racially resentful” voters. Hackworth closes this section with the development and outcomes of manufactured decline in places like Detroit, which are presented time and again as “unsalvageable—their landscapes too broken and their residents too morally irredeemable to save.”
The second section of Manufacturing Decline, “Depriving the Othered City,” demonstrates how the decline of urban spaces—caused partly by racist austerity measures—became an excuse to replace cities’ democratically elected politicians with corporate managers beholden to free market ideologies and outstate politicians rather than residents of the city itself. In this context, “rightsizing” plans took hold throughout the region, and demolition became a common method of addressing abandonment and dereliction. This happened most frequently in nonwhite neighborhoods, usually without large-scale reinvestment. Part II closes with a return to Detroit and highlights the “deliberately hopeful” tone of Detroit Future City, a 2012 rightsizing plan promoted by then-Mayor Dave Bing. Hackworth suggests that this shift in tone is nothing more than an evolution of earlier policies of urban deprivation: “Rightsizing without a redistributive state is just austerity with green packaging.”
Hackworth asserts that urban decline, a crisis in and of itself, also precipitated successive crises. For instance, unequal services give way to abandonment, which result in rightsizing campaigns that further decimate black neighborhoods. Part of what creates this cycle is that city politicians have adopted austerity measures as a solution, despite the many ways they contribute to disinvestment and further decline. In short, the conservative movement exacerbated urban decline to create a crisis, and neoliberal politicians of both parties now consider the damage caused by austerity politics as an acceptable compromise for development elsewhere in the city.
According to Hackworth, the conservative movement’s association of blackness and urban decline has had a lasting effect on cultural and political conversations in the United States. In concrete terms, austerity policies have become the reflexive response to the effects of austerity policies, a self-fulfilling sequence that creates weakened neighborhoods, food deserts, and reduced city services. The cyclical nature of this process captures both the practice of organized deprivation and its long-term result: manufactured decline.
Hackworth seems sympathetic to city leaders across the Rust Belt who attempt to creatively rethink urban structures—he acknowledges, for instance, that reorganizing around denser developments with greenways in between is an attractive solution. Still, throughout Manufacturing Decline, he demonstrates how even the most well-meaning plans maintain the austerity structures that became prevalent in the last half-century. These have immediate and long-lasting effects on the black populations of Rust Belt cities, which suggests that the crisis of decimated neighborhoods is not actually “sufficiently severe,” at least not enough to help the people who live there.
This raises the question: what kind of crisis, after all, would be severe enough to create and sustain the political will to restructure cities for the benefit of their residents? Certainly, Covid-19 social distancing guidance has caused us to reflect on the way we inhabit space, which has vast implications for the structure of communities—from closing streets to extend outdoor seating for restaurants to organizations advocating for more extensive and wider recreation trails.
Much of the conversation, however, has remained at the level of personal responsibility. While discussing Detroit’s plans to bring some city employees back to work, Mayor Mike Duggan touted the city’s successful response to the pandemic: “They all want to talk about what's happening in Detroit because it is really remarkable how the people of Detroit are embracing social distancing.” Of course, this is right and good. Wearing a mask and maintaining physical distance are necessary to slow the spread of Covid-19. They cannot, however, be the extent of our efforts, because mask-wearing and social distancing place the burden of pandemic response on the individual. While Hackworth is not writing about this pandemic, he might liken governmental responses to Covid-19 to the need for reinvestment campaigns after urban rightsizing initiatives. Without large-scale interventions, the emphasis on individual measures threatens to calcify pre-existing racial and socioeconomic stratification.
Perhaps Covid-19 is “a sufficiently severe crisis” to facilitate rethinking the geographical orientation, tax structures, and services provided by Midwestern cities. The real question might be whether political leaders embrace a style of governance that supports a diverse population or double down on austerity. In Detroit, they’re already talking about budget cuts and layoffs, which are likely to have a more significant impact on people of color.
As they begin to recover from the pandemic, it won’t be surprising if Midwestern cities revert to belt-tightening budgets and pro-business tax structures. But, as Hackworth knows (and we all know), that won’t be enough:
Most questions of urban decline pivot on the labor economy: bring back jobs and prosperity will follow. This is clearly insufficient in the context of Rust Belt urban distress. There must be some recognition that other forms of social division affect the flow of people and capital to and from places. These are not add-on ideas, they are central. Nonwhite people in the United States were effectively excluded from the shift toward Keynesian democracy in the 1930s. To the extent that a partial transformation emerged during the civil rights movement, it was limited in scope and was followed by five decades of angry conservative reaction. White reaction has as much to do with urban decline as deindustrialization. Racial animus is necessarily part of any tenable theory of decline. Progressive idea development cannot be blind to the legacy and ongoing impacts of racial animus.
So, wash your hands, wear your mask, and expect more from your leaders.