The American Dystopian Gaze: Race, Place and Perceiving African Americans as Criminals in Baltimore

• In Event: Race, Ethnicity, Age, and Sanctions: Disparate Sentencing and Biased Perceptions of Offenders

Abstract

Well before twenty-five-year-old Freddie Carlos Gray Jr.’s arrest on the morning of April 12, 2015, for appearing suspicious to three white male bike patrol officers near the Gilmore Public Housing complex (City of Baltimore, Maryland), most Americans were fully conditioned to perceive racial minorities and their social practices as out of place and threatening. In the context of Baltimore, this paper presentation explores the development of a dystopian gaze that increases the criminalization of African Americans, particularly males in the public way. The dystopian gaze is a post-911 racially charged field of visibility that operate in public space to protect the inviolable sanctity of white space by criminalizing blackness.

This paper presentation, based on research on a major Baltmore corridor in the eastern part of the city, namely the Greenmount Avenue/York Road, uses walking tours, semi-structured, structured interviews and the general ethnographic method of hanging out with community members to answer the following questions: (1) How does urban environments (built, social and natural) intersect and long with racism, to view African Americans as dangerous criminal? (2)What are the experiences of African Americans attempting to negotiate criminalization in public spaces and (3) What are the social consequences of the American dystopian gaze?

Author

• Kalfani Nyerere Ture, Yale University