“Heavy Surveillance”: State-Sanctioned Slow and Spectacular Violences in Gentrifying NYC

Caitlin Cahill Pratt Institute

As feminist and critical race theorists have long argued, the body, family, home, and school --the sites of social reproduction -- are targeted by capitalism in part because they are locations of resistance and intervention. Drawing upon an intergenerational participatory action research project, Growing Up Policed, focused upon young people of color’s everyday experiences with police in New York City, our inquiry considers how young people interpret and make sense of what one youth researcher, calls “heavy surveillance,” and the feeling that the police “accumulate on you.” Theorizing connections between the ontological assaults of criminalization and forms of state-sanctioned violence, we situate our analysis of policing within the context of gentrification. Informed by environmental historian Rob Nixon’s conceptualization of slow violence, as ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ (Nixon, 2011, 2). We trace how slow and spectacular violences intertwine, through the lens of history, situating our understanding of the intimate, social, and spatial relations of the security state of gentrification within the context of the disinvestment and state abandonment of communities of color (paying particular attention to 1970s- 80s New York City). Framing processes of urban segregation and gentrification as state-sanctioned violence organized for profit, we consider at the same time the ways young people respond, resist and organize offering a counter story and a counter topography for what Nixon explains as “narrative imaginings that witness sights unseen.” Foregrounding the stories of young people of color, their families, and neighborhood histories that illuminate the role of the state in dispossessing working class communities of color, we reclaim our “right to the city.”