Poverty and the New Geography of Blame in the United States

Jeff Maskovsky, Queens College, City University of New York, Department of Urban Studies

Poverty and inequality are being re-territorialized in the United States, and so too are the ways that we think and talk about them.  Decades of gentrification, part of the globalization of real estate capital, have produced new urban and ex-urban pockets of wealth just as the dismantling of urban public housing and the foreclosure crisis, with its largely suburban geography, produce a new landscape of “de-concentrated” poverty.  Parallel to these changes, longstanding blame ideologies that freight blackness, dependency, and moral delinquency with the city on the one hand, and self-sufficiency, whiteness and virtue with the suburbs on the other have been unsettled.  In recent decades, for example, both right and left have made efforts to assign blame and promote responsibility in more race- and place-neutral terms while the longstanding denial of poverty and inequality in American political discourse has ended recently, thanks in part to OWS.  The burning question is whether these trends will reinvigorate critical thinking about the material roots of impoverishment, or will they merely encourage repackaged victim-blaming discourses.  This project will address this issue by exploring how responsibility and blame get mapped onto the US metropolitan landscape.  Different chapters focus on the new spatial coordinates of virtue and immorality around drugs, sex, housing, consumption, and work in the US popular and political imaginary.