The Devastating Impact Of #Globalization Upon #Poor and #Minority #Communities

No sensible person can say #globalization has helped economically disadvantaged minorities in America. In fact it has made their situation worse.

One thing you'll never get out of a fan of globalism is what they think happens to one of these communities when a factory closes and moves overseas. It's a whole lot different than moving out of state. Hint: moving to a job outside the country requires a passport and immigrating or getting a work visa, either of which is a long, expensive and horrific process in addition to the cost of moving, that is assuming the other country will even let you in. Nope, you won't hear about that, because then globalism isn't looking so great, is it? Especially if you're a low-income working class minority.

But hey, as long as we aren't " #protectionist " it's okay to throw the economically disadvantaged minorities under the bus, right? Right? Only if they're American, of course.

Globalization, the Global Trope, and Poor Black Communities: The Recent American Experience

Today, in the shadows of shiny gentrified blocks and gleaming downtown skyscrapers, many poor African American neighborhoods in America continue to suffer. Globalization continues to afflict these already punished terrains in ways that are now well chronicled. Most conspicuously, globalization engulfs these terrains and eradicates decent paying jobs and lowers pay rates. Hyper-frenetic, globally coordinated businesses and corporations, increasingly dominating urban economies, potently order and re-order locations of jobs, investment, and physical infrastructure (notably plant and store locations). In a process described by David Harvey (2000, 2005), capital’s continuous search for profitability takes the form of a restless and relentless re-making of the spaces of production. In its wake, these communities experience intensified poverty, underemployment, and unemployment. 

But the impact of globalization on these communities has another dimension. Less recognized is that globalization, as a kind of cultivated imagining that is aggressively spoken, is widely put in the service of neoliberal urban politics (via diverse kinds of communicating) that deepens the production of these disadvantaged communities. Here, what globalization is thought to be by people is seized and wielded like a cudgel to punish and discipline planning measures, social welfare programs, and urban policy. Planning, political expediency, and opportunistic pronouncements of a new ominous reality meld into one potent political force. In the process, the public often comes to casually accept an “entrepreneurializing” of cities that afflicts these racialized communities. Let me provide specifics about this profoundly influential but only dimly recognized process (see also Wilson, 2007). 

These poor African American communities today continue to suffer with a strengthened functional logic assigned to them: to warehouse “contaminants” in the new competitive, global reality. These communities across Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Los Angeles, and the like have, for decades, warehoused the racial poor as the real-estate sectors in these cities have used planning and policy to keep key housing markets healthy and profitable. But in the latest twist on this, ghetto maintenance has increasingly involved wielding the recent fear and obsession within a supposed new era: globalization. This elaborate rhetoric, now served up heavily in newspapers, planning documents, and politician oratory, has been a key trigger to mobilize and put into play crucial ghetto-afflicting forces (targeting of government resources to cultivate a robust entrepreneurial city, retrenching the local welfare state, rhetorically attacking these populations and spaces). This rhetoric, which I term “the global trope,” typically extends neoliberal principles and designs into common thought and city planning measures (particularly the notion of the private-market as best determinant of social and land-use outcomes). The global trope, in this frame, is served up as a frank and blunt package of truths about city realities and needs that can no longer be suppressed. In assertion, its pleas correspond to core truths; deft interpreters read and respond to clear truths as a policy prescriptive, progressive human intervention onto a turbulent and fragile city.

The rhetoric of the global trope has thus been a perceptual apparatus with profound material effects. It has served up a digestible reality that, following Robin Wagner-Pacifici (1994), guides construction of programs and policies by making certain actions thinkable and rational and others not. Imposed webs of meanings, like symbolic cages, build bars around senses of reality that place gazes within discrete and confining visions. One reality is ultimately advanced while alternatives are purged. Here is Mikhael Bakhtin’s (1981) implicit dialogue with other points of view, the simultaneity of asserting one vision and annihilating others. This strategic affirmation and rebuke, forwarding what exists and what does not, continues to make this rhetorical formation a fundamental instrument of power. As this apparatus has resisted and beaten back competitive visions of city and societal realities, even as it is contested and struggled against, it grows stronger in many U.S. cities.