The wolf is always at the door. It just changes its clothing.
In fact, the War on Terror has, in so many ways, played out like the law and order obsession with crime that preceded it. Events grounded in truth—the crime rate really was rising in an unprecedented fashion, and the worst attack in the history of the Republic really did take place—morphed into panic. The panic then became so widespread that the communal experience of it—the urgent white fear that citizens, politicians, and media all collaborated in producing—overrode the reality that it was reacting to. Mass incarceration almost certainly wouldn’t have happened had crime not spiked the way it did. But mass incarceration was by no means the only available response to that spike. The War on Terror wouldn’t have happened without 9/11, and any society attacked like that would have responded, but 9/11 didn’t mean that an open-ended, multitrillion-dollar global war was the natural or appropriate response.
Through our shared cultural inheritance, Americans convert white fear into policy. When the system receives a shock—a crime wave, a terrorist attack—and we must answer the question What is to be done, our collective response is punishment, toughness, and violence. We build a bureaucracy and vocabulary of toughness that then take on their own power, their own gravity and inertia. We then bequeath the institutions of toughness to the next generation of politicians and policy makers, even after the initial problem they were meant to solve has dissipated.
Because white fear is a constant, because it persists even when specific threats have subsided, it functions as a one-way ratchet in constructing the architecture of the Colony. It can build prisons but not knock them down. For decades, Gallup has been asking Americans if they think crime has gone up, gone down, or stayed roughly the same. Every year since 2002 a majority of Americans have told Gallup crime had gone up the previous year, even though, in all but one year, it had declined. In fact, between 1993 and 2014 the rate of crime victimization fell from about 80 to 20 per 1,000, but by the end of that period, a full 63 percent of respondents still told Gallup crime had “gone up” in the previous year. In 2016 Gallup found American’s fears of crime hit a fifteen-year high, even as crime itself was near historic lows.
Undoubtedly the atmosphere around crime and policing today is worlds different from what it was in, say, 1968 or 1989 or 1994. Incarceration in many states is actually declining, and the beginnings of something like a political consensus—however tenuous and uneasy—has formed, between left and right, that locking up millions of our own citizens has been an expensive, tragic, and embarrassing mistake.
But the law and order demagoguery of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, its aggressive celebration of white fear—of terrorists, immigrants, and black criminals—shows just how weak that consensus is.
Because white fear is always waiting in the wings. In Ferguson, the fear felt by the nonprotesting, overwhelmingly white citizens of the Nation was palpable. The people I met putting up “I Heart Ferguson” signs in a local coffee shop spoke with pride about the quiet orderliness and the trustworthiness of the police. But there were problems, of course, they would say vaguely, leaving you to fill in the blanks.
Problem areas.
Problem blocks.
Problem people.
V
The New York of my childhood was seedy. It’s a word my parents used a lot, though I almost never hear it these days. That may be because the condition it named has been so thoroughly, triumphantly banished; or perhaps sketchy has replaced it. Seediness was everywhere in the New York of the 1980s and ’90s, in the streets and subways and neighborhoods as well as in representations of the city in TV and film.
In its most common usage, seediness has to do with vice. A red-light district is seedy; it’s a place where no one wants their face seen. But in the context of New York, the adjective had descriptive force far beyond the peep shows on Eighth Avenue in midtown. (I remember clearly driving past them in the car with my family on the way home from visiting my aunt in Greenwich Village. We fell awkwardly silent in the presence of so much concentrated and unabashed seediness.)
Seediness was distinct from, but still somehow related to, danger. A neighborhood could be seedy but not necessarily dangerous. The iconically seedy Times Square of the 1990s never had particularly high violent crime rates, at least nowhere near as high as in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where gun violence was commonplace. But if Washington Heights and East New York and the South Bronx came to represent New York at its most dangerous, Times Square was New York at its seediest. Denizens of porn shops, peep shows, and SROs, vagabonds, homeless men and women, people struggling with addiction or mental health crises, panhandlers, hustlers—all congregated on the streets. People who lived on the edges of society took up physical space in the public square at the very center of the physical city.