Root Shock. Mindy Thompson Fullilove
emergence of theories of complex systems, chaos theory among others, has helped us. We now understand the seemingly impossible proposition that the flapping wings of a butterfly in Beijing could affect the weather in New York.10 It is from that perspective that we must view the ecosystem of emotions. Root shock rips emotional connections in one part of the globe, and sets in motion small changes—jazz musicians in search of a venue, smokers acting out their annoyance—that spread out across the world, shifting the direction of all interpersonal connections. Imagine it as a version of six degrees of separation, the idea that each American is only six handshakes away from the president of the United States. We are each of us only thirteen handshakes away from anyone’s root shock—not much distance in a global world.
Where Are People Rooted?
Though I have already argued that people go into shock if uprooted, it is useful to consider: Where are people rooted? Before people moved to cities, this was a fairly straightforward question. They were rooted where they lived, and they lived where their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers, had lived. Of course, this is more complicated than it seems, as armies swept back and forth across the continents, trade routes linked distant lands, tribes exhausted their lands and had to move to new pastures, and adventurers wandered the world. Yet for a long time in human history, people lived for generations in small places—a few miles in diameter—and that is where they were rooted.
Things got complicated when people started to move to cities. After all, cities are much more unstable—people will leave a neighborhood within months or years, rather than decades or centuries, and they live with a fairly high level of anonymity. A few will live in stable neighborhoods, like the urban villagers who inhabited Boston’s West End before it was destroyed by urban renewal.11 But most live in a city neighborhood much looser and less secure. So where are they rooted?
The renowned urbanist Jane Jacobs had a profound insight into this puzzle. She identified the way in which people made the mazeway in the urban setting, what she called the “sidewalk ballet.” In one of the passages fundamental to our current understanding of rootedness, she wrote:
The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?)
While I sweep up the wrappers I watch the other rituals of morning: Mr. Halpert unlocking the laundry’s handcart from its mooring to a cellar door, Joe Cornacchia’s son-in-law stacking out the empty crates from the delicatessen, the barber bringing out his sidewalk folding chair, Mr. Goldstein arranging the coils of wire which proclaim the hardware store is open, the wife of the tenement’s superintendent depositing her chunky three-year-old with a toy mandolin on the stoop, the vantage point from which he is learning the English his mother cannot speak . . . It is time for me to hurry to work too, and I exchange my ritual farewell with Mr. Lofaro, the short, thick-bodied, white-aproned fruit man who stands outside his doorway a little up the street, his arms folded, his feet planted, looking solid as earth itself. We nod; we each glance quickly up and down the street, then look back to each other and smile. We have done this many a morning for more than ten years, and we both know what it means: All is well.12
The street, bordered by buildings, is the stage of the local world, Jacobs proposes to us, as she describes her entry onto the “scene.” She recounts the interactions she experiences daily, informing us through her interchange with Mr. Lofaro that she is part of this little spot and she knows its rules. “All is well,” she writes, letting us know how content she is to be a part of this small theater piece. This construction of theater and actors, all knowing their parts and performing them well, is what makes up the street ballet. It is another way of describing our ability to master and run the maze of life, the mazeway, the near environment within which we find food, shelter, safety, and companionship. We love the mazeway in which we are rooted, for it is not simply the buildings that make us safe and secure, but, more complexly, our knowledge of the “scene” that makes us so. We all have our little part to play, carefully synchronized with that of all the other players: we are rooted in that, our piece of the world-as-stage.
Try the following thought experiments.
First, imagine Jane Jacobs’s street altered in any way you like—change the size of the buildings and their use; reorganize the street—move the subway entrance, relocate the school—and then imagine people making use of it. If you look closely, a sidewalk ballet, albeit different from Jacobs’s version, will emerge before your eyes. In this thought experiment, you are observing the degree to which people can adapt to different settings, and not just adapt, but attach, connect. They are connecting not to the negatives or even the positives of the setting, but to their own mastery of the local players and their play.
Second, take any setting, and reduce it to shreds. The fundamental geographic points cuing the ballet are now gone. Center stage has disappeared. Jacobs’s entry is gone, and so are the stores and the stoop that made possible the three-year-old’s English lessons. For a long moment, the actors will be frozen in horror. As the horror recedes, confusion will set in. Where is food? Where is shelter? Should I still go to school? What you have just imagined is root shock, the traumatic stress from the loss of a person’s stage set, lifeworld, mazeway, home.
Just as Walter O’Malley, owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, uprooted his team without regard for Brooklyn, so too other entrepreneurs of that era reorganized the landscape so that they could make more money. The tool that they used was urban renewal, a program of the federal government that provided money for cities to clear “blight.”13 Blight, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and it happened, more often than not, that the part of the city the businessmen thought was blighted was the part where black people lived.
By my estimate, 1,600 black neighborhoods were demolished by urban renewal.14 This massive destruction caused root shock on two levels. First, residents of each neighborhood experienced the traumatic stress of the loss of their life world. Second, because of the interconnections among all black people in the United States, the whole of Black America experienced root shock as well. Root shock, post urban renewal, disabled powerful mechanisms of community functioning, leaving the black world at an enormous disadvantage for meeting the challenges of globalization.
Urban renewal is the butterfly in Beijing, the unseen actor who caused the tempest. The vigor of the civil rights movement led to the expectation that black Americans would be better off when segregation was defeated. In fact, by 1970, some were but many were not. Instead, the have-nots had tumbled deeper into poverty and dysfunction. The great epidemics of drug addiction, the collapse of the black family, and the rise in incarceration of black men—all of these catastrophes followed the civil rights movements, they did not precede it. Though there are a number of causes of this dysfunction that cannot be disputed—the loss of manufacturing jobs, in particular—the current situation of Black America cannot be understood without a full and complete accounting of the social, economic, cultural, political, and emotional losses that followed the bulldozing of 1,600 neighborhoods.
But we cannot understand the losses unless we first appreciate what was there.
In 1995, Richard Chubb took me for a drive through territory that, before urban renewal, housed Roanoke, Virginia’s black neighborhoods. We passed a series of businesses sitting in such wide swaths of grass, they seemed dwarfed by nature. Pointing in succession at Magic City Ford, the post office, and the civic center, he said with bitter insistence, “There used to be houses here. Those are just buildings.”
As we crossed out of that business area over a bridge, his bitterness dropped away. With pride