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Gary, Indiana, Spring and Summer of 2010
Quite a few years ago, the City of Gary spent $1.2 million in a bid on the rights to host the "Miss USA" pageant. The Mayor, Scott King, told one reporter the suggestion to bid came from Donald Trump, who owns Miss USA as part of the Miss Universe franchise (Wolverton Mountain, 2001). He also owns a local casino. The city's bid got national coverage, and that was the explicit goal. Things have been tough indeed for this company town established in the early twentieth century by U.S. Steel. The place has been "crippled -- a lifetime ago, it seems -- by the demise of the steel industry, rampant poverrty, and a staggering crime rate." (Fountain, 2001). The Miss USA broadcast provided an opportunity for six hours of national television coverage that would put the host city in the spotlight ... for something other than deindustrialization, poverty, crime, ...
...and the racial inequality that makes it acceptable for suburbs, regions, states, and the political system of the United States to allow capital to abandon entire cities. The Times reports that there was widespread support for the Miss USA bid, and that "nearly everyone here believes it is necessary" to reshape the city's image. "A predominantly black city of about 111,000, with a white mayor, Gary bills itself as a city on the mend," the Times reports. "Mayor King, in his second four-year term, said the pageant 'has the ability to build local pride in the city and the psychology of the public in a positive way. If you don't have that, nothing else you do is going to work.'" (Fountain, 2001).
The City of Gary certainly seems to embody the "isolation of America's urban outcasts," as diagnosed so carefully by Loic Wacquant (Wacquant, 2008, p. 224). The joint withdrawal of the market and the state reflect "public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment," creating systemic and permanent crises. Wacquant's story is a comparison of the French banlieus with the Chicago ghetto, but most analysts would agree that it applies just as well to Gary, which is just a few miles down the highway east of Chicago. Wacquant's analysis: "From schools and welfare to housing, justice, health care and physical infrastructure, the public institutions of the American hyperghetto have been abandoned to a spiral of deterioration to a degree such that, far from enhancing the life chances and fostering the integration of its residents into national life, they further accentuate thir stigmatization and deepen their marginalization." (Wacquant, 2008, p. 224).
And yet how do we rage against the injustice without reproducing the very stigma that makes a Trumped-up Miss USA media extortion a rational economic calculation? Families, workers, companies, children, public officials, and people playing all the other roles of cities and citizens -- thousands of them remain, and live their lives as best they can. It's too bad the national and international media coverage always showcases the bad; but every now and then you see a more subtle account. In The Guardian, Paul Mason (2010) began with the vivid, horrifying descriptions of a city struggling through "one of the most advanced cases of urban blight in the developed world," but eventually found reasons for hope and respect: "It took just a single century for Gary to rise and fall," Mason reminds us. "Its people still carry that relaxed pride you find in black communities across the industrial mid-West. It's a developed and quite mature urban culture - where everybody seems to know each other, an edgy community but not really a broken one, despite the night-time drug and gun antics of some young men. Go into the schools and you can feel that its spirit is not broken. What is broken is the landscape."
The risks of photography have worsened in recent years, and so I engage in the ritual of a shared visual appropriation with some hesitation and a lot of guilt (Wyly, 2010). But I try to include here a broader sample of images, of landscapes of survival as well as the imprints of abandonment and what Wacquant (2008, p. 224) calls the "active process of institutional detachment and segregation." And I also remember that Gary has been here before, and in a previous generation served as host for a different kind of pageant -- a pageant of political mobilization, what Neil Smith (2011) might have called a "manifesto for the poetry of the future." In March of 1972, eight thousand African American political organizers gathered in Gary for the national Black Political Convention. The agenda warned that "we stand on the edge of history" in a time of great crisis for Black America, where "our cities are crime-haunted dying grounds. Huge sectors of our youth -- and countless others -- face permanent unemployment. Those of us who work find our paychecks able to purchase less and less." And yet the Convention was one of many ongong catalysts in the evolving struggle for civil rights in America -- a struggle that has continued to expand and evolve, in an outward diffusion of progressive demands that, unfortunately, mirrors the contribution of so many central cities to their suburbs. Gary gave, and gave. An oral history of the Civil Rights era (Hampton and Fayer, 1990, p. 567) places the moment in context: "the Black Agenda at Gary encompassed issues raised in years of struggles: the antiwar movement; black impatience with calls for 'law and order' as a code for racial oppression; sexism; and the growing environmental crisis in America. The writers sensed that it was a historic moment and in that moment seemed to search for a moral center in the struggle for power in America." At a crucial moment, for anyone who listened carefully, the writers of the Black Agenda at Gary gave us inspiration for the expanding coalitions of progressive change that continue so much important work today. The Black Agenda of Gary of 1972 could well describe so many other alliances of the present day: "We will have joined the true movement of history, if at Gary we grasp the opportunity to press Man forward as the first consideration of politics. Here at Gary we are faithful to the best hopes of our fathers and our people if we move for nothing less than a politics which places community before individualism, love before sexual exploitation, a living environment before profits, peace before war; justice before unjust 'order,' and morality before expediency." (quoted in Hampton and Fayer, 1990, p. 567.
We are all in debt to Gary. And since every photograph is a debt to the subject, every image here puts me ever deeper into moral and ethical obligations to this place, its people, and the processes it helps us to understand.
References
Fountain, John W. (2001). "Struggling City Preps for National Close-Up." New York Times, March 2.
Hampton, Henry, and Steve Fayer (1990). +Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s.+ New York: Bantam Books.
Mason, Paul (2010). "Gary, Indiana: Unbroken Spirit Amid the Ruins of the Twentieth Century." BBC Newsnight, October 12.
Smith, Neil (2011). +Manifesto for the Poetry of the Future.+ Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery / Urban Subjects.
Wacquant, Loic (2008). +Urban Outcasts: A Sociology of Advanced Marginality.+ Cambridge: Polity.
Wolverton Mountain (2001). "Interview with Mayor Scott King." Wolverton Mountain, March.
Wyly, Elvin (2010). "Things Pictures Don’t Tell Us: In Search of Baltimore." City 14(5), 497-528.
Quite a few years ago, the City of Gary spent $1.2 million in a bid on the rights to host the "Miss USA" pageant. The Mayor, Scott King, told one reporter the suggestion to bid came from Donald Trump, who owns Miss USA as part of the Miss Universe franchise (Wolverton Mountain, 2001). He also owns a local casino. The city's bid got national coverage, and that was the explicit goal. Things have been tough indeed for this company town established in the early twentieth century by U.S. Steel. The place has been "crippled -- a lifetime ago, it seems -- by the demise of the steel industry, rampant poverrty, and a staggering crime rate." (Fountain, 2001). The Miss USA broadcast provided an opportunity for six hours of national television coverage that would put the host city in the spotlight ... for something other than deindustrialization, poverty, crime, ...
...and the racial inequality that makes it acceptable for suburbs, regions, states, and the political system of the United States to allow capital to abandon entire cities. The Times reports that there was widespread support for the Miss USA bid, and that "nearly everyone here believes it is necessary" to reshape the city's image. "A predominantly black city of about 111,000, with a white mayor, Gary bills itself as a city on the mend," the Times reports. "Mayor King, in his second four-year term, said the pageant 'has the ability to build local pride in the city and the psychology of the public in a positive way. If you don't have that, nothing else you do is going to work.'" (Fountain, 2001).
The City of Gary certainly seems to embody the "isolation of America's urban outcasts," as diagnosed so carefully by Loic Wacquant (Wacquant, 2008, p. 224). The joint withdrawal of the market and the state reflect "public policies of racial separation and urban abandonment," creating systemic and permanent crises. Wacquant's story is a comparison of the French banlieus with the Chicago ghetto, but most analysts would agree that it applies just as well to Gary, which is just a few miles down the highway east of Chicago. Wacquant's analysis: "From schools and welfare to housing, justice, health care and physical infrastructure, the public institutions of the American hyperghetto have been abandoned to a spiral of deterioration to a degree such that, far from enhancing the life chances and fostering the integration of its residents into national life, they further accentuate thir stigmatization and deepen their marginalization." (Wacquant, 2008, p. 224).
And yet how do we rage against the injustice without reproducing the very stigma that makes a Trumped-up Miss USA media extortion a rational economic calculation? Families, workers, companies, children, public officials, and people playing all the other roles of cities and citizens -- thousands of them remain, and live their lives as best they can. It's too bad the national and international media coverage always showcases the bad; but every now and then you see a more subtle account. In The Guardian, Paul Mason (2010) began with the vivid, horrifying descriptions of a city struggling through "one of the most advanced cases of urban blight in the developed world," but eventually found reasons for hope and respect: "It took just a single century for Gary to rise and fall," Mason reminds us. "Its people still carry that relaxed pride you find in black communities across the industrial mid-West. It's a developed and quite mature urban culture - where everybody seems to know each other, an edgy community but not really a broken one, despite the night-time drug and gun antics of some young men. Go into the schools and you can feel that its spirit is not broken. What is broken is the landscape."
The risks of photography have worsened in recent years, and so I engage in the ritual of a shared visual appropriation with some hesitation and a lot of guilt (Wyly, 2010). But I try to include here a broader sample of images, of landscapes of survival as well as the imprints of abandonment and what Wacquant (2008, p. 224) calls the "active process of institutional detachment and segregation." And I also remember that Gary has been here before, and in a previous generation served as host for a different kind of pageant -- a pageant of political mobilization, what Neil Smith (2011) might have called a "manifesto for the poetry of the future." In March of 1972, eight thousand African American political organizers gathered in Gary for the national Black Political Convention. The agenda warned that "we stand on the edge of history" in a time of great crisis for Black America, where "our cities are crime-haunted dying grounds. Huge sectors of our youth -- and countless others -- face permanent unemployment. Those of us who work find our paychecks able to purchase less and less." And yet the Convention was one of many ongong catalysts in the evolving struggle for civil rights in America -- a struggle that has continued to expand and evolve, in an outward diffusion of progressive demands that, unfortunately, mirrors the contribution of so many central cities to their suburbs. Gary gave, and gave. An oral history of the Civil Rights era (Hampton and Fayer, 1990, p. 567) places the moment in context: "the Black Agenda at Gary encompassed issues raised in years of struggles: the antiwar movement; black impatience with calls for 'law and order' as a code for racial oppression; sexism; and the growing environmental crisis in America. The writers sensed that it was a historic moment and in that moment seemed to search for a moral center in the struggle for power in America." At a crucial moment, for anyone who listened carefully, the writers of the Black Agenda at Gary gave us inspiration for the expanding coalitions of progressive change that continue so much important work today. The Black Agenda of Gary of 1972 could well describe so many other alliances of the present day: "We will have joined the true movement of history, if at Gary we grasp the opportunity to press Man forward as the first consideration of politics. Here at Gary we are faithful to the best hopes of our fathers and our people if we move for nothing less than a politics which places community before individualism, love before sexual exploitation, a living environment before profits, peace before war; justice before unjust 'order,' and morality before expediency." (quoted in Hampton and Fayer, 1990, p. 567.
We are all in debt to Gary. And since every photograph is a debt to the subject, every image here puts me ever deeper into moral and ethical obligations to this place, its people, and the processes it helps us to understand.
References
Fountain, John W. (2001). "Struggling City Preps for National Close-Up." New York Times, March 2.
Hampton, Henry, and Steve Fayer (1990). +Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s.+ New York: Bantam Books.
Mason, Paul (2010). "Gary, Indiana: Unbroken Spirit Amid the Ruins of the Twentieth Century." BBC Newsnight, October 12.
Smith, Neil (2011). +Manifesto for the Poetry of the Future.+ Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery / Urban Subjects.
Wacquant, Loic (2008). +Urban Outcasts: A Sociology of Advanced Marginality.+ Cambridge: Polity.
Wolverton Mountain (2001). "Interview with Mayor Scott King." Wolverton Mountain, March.
Wyly, Elvin (2010). "Things Pictures Don’t Tell Us: In Search of Baltimore." City 14(5), 497-528.