An Unsparing New Geography of ‘American Apartheid’
In his new book, “The Black Butterfly,” public health scholar Lawrence Brown explores how urban housing and land use policies have been deployed as weapons of oppression against African Americans.
A mural in an alley in East Baltimore, where persistent poverty can be traced to decades-old patterns of housing segregation.
Photographer: ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images
The line connecting the two grim U.S. anniversaries that bookend the last week in May — the year that’s passed since George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, and the century since hundreds of Black residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, were massacred by a white mob on May 31, 1921 — is one that Lawrence Brown has long been tracing.
In his new book, The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America, the scholar and public health researcher illuminates the process of “spatial racism,” a force that has bound oppression up with the geography that African Americans occupy, and the public health effects of this historical trauma: