narrator responds in a way that will come to typify the urban Left: He looks into their eyes, tries to express sympathy and empathy, conceives of them and himself as united in a human “family of eyes.” His girlfriend responds in a radically different way that can be said to typify the urban Right: “These people are unbearable with their big saucer eyes. Can’t you call the maître to send them away?”
More than a century after Baudelaire’s death, urban Americans are still living inside the parameters of his poem. We are faced with a very large underclass, and the people in this class don’t want to go away; they, too, want a place in the bright light. And their presence in public space forces us to think not only about their place but also about our own.
Walzer believes (as I do) that fear of the underclass is one of the main forces that has led America’s urban middle class to flee the open-minded cities they have made, and to settle into (and settle for) a single-minded suburban environment that is less risky but a lot less alive. He also believes that many people who grew up in that closed world have grown sick of it and are now “ready for the pleasures and willing to pay the costs of urbanity.”
I hope he is right. But once again he undermines his long-range aims by getting entangled in the very middle-class anxieties and self-deceptions that he is trying to overcome. Thus he proclaims a dualism of successful versus unsuccessful streets. “A successful street,” he said, “is self-policing.” Policing is meant to fend off all the elements of “an unsuccessful street,” which “by contrast always seems inadequately policed, dangerous, a place to avoid.” What are these bad elements? Walzer casts his net very wide, and comes up with “social, sexual, and political deviance: derelicts, criminals, political and religious sectarians, adolescent gangs.” Rather than subject themselves to close encounters with these kinds, “ordinary men and women flee as soon as they can into private and controlled worlds.”
Now, as an account of the way many people feel, this is undoubtedly accurate. The modern world is full of people who are terrified of other people, socially, sexually, or politically different from themselves. But Walzer seems to take their terrors at face value, to understand them as plain facts, or alternately as eternal laws of social physics, rather than as the historically relative and socially conditioned ideologies that they are.
Thus, when we encounter categories like success/failure or normal/deviant, we need to ask: By what criteria? By whose criteria? For what purposes? In whose interests? When we hear about successful public spaces, we should ask: Successful for what? Who benefits from a police definition of success, that is, success as absence of trouble? (By this definition, most of the great public spaces in history—Greek agoras, Italian piazzas, Parisian boulevards—would rate as failures, because all were turbulent places, and needed large police forces to keep the seething forces from exploding. On the other hand, some of the world’s most sterile shopping malls would rate as shining successes.) Walzer himself explains who benefits from this: the upscale merchants and real estate promoters who want public space to be nothing but an unending golden shower of big spenders. But these people and their interests are, as Walzer shows, the greatest menace to free public space today; optimal success for them would mean total destruction of public life for all of us. When Walzer accepts their image of successful space, he loses hold on his own critical perspective and his deepest beliefs.
Walzer gets caught up in his enemies’ values once more when he adopts the dualism of “ordinary men and women” versus “deviants.” Why should he accept an ideology that stigmatizes difference as “deviance” and that considers it normal to flee from anybody different from ourselves? After all, any idea of normality is a norm and as such necessitates a choice of values. Why doesn’t Walzer insist on standards of success and normality that square with his own values? Then he could see that the real failures in public space are not the streets full of social, sexual, and political deviants but rather the streets with no deviants at all. And he could fight for a truly open-minded idea of normality: the capacity to interact with people radically different from ourselves, to learn from them, to assimilate what they have to give, maybe even to change our lives, to grow, without ceasing to be our selves.
Walzer concedes grudgingly that his various “deviant” groups “belong, no doubt, to the urban mix.” But he warns that they had better not get “too prominent within it.” In other words, the people of the underclass (along with all the other deviants) can be tolerated, so long as they keep their place on the outer fringes of public space. I would argue, on the contrary, that there isn’t much point in having public space, unless these problematical people are free to come to the very center of the scene. The reason for this is not that they are so lovely to look at (though some of them are, just like some of us). The reason is that they are there, part of the same city and the same society as ourselves, linked with us in a thousand ways that would take a lifetime to fully understand. The glory of modern public space is that it can pull together all the different sorts of people who are there. It can both compel and empower all these people to see each other, not through a glass darkly but face to face.
One reason I get so persistent about the urban underclass is that I have spent the last fifteen years working with students who come from that class, who have grown up looking at the life of the city through the eyes of the poor. On lucky days they were allowed to look, so long as they didn’t try to touch. On unlucky days—and any young black or Latin person, along with most poor whites, will have experienced plenty of these—they encountered middle-class or upper-class people who perceived them as assailants, saw their eyes as drawn weapons and, like the woman in Baudelaire’s poem, called guards to get rid of them fast. What they have had to face, in Northern cities’ public space, has been not so much overt racism—though, God knows, they have felt plenty of it—as a free-floating hysterical fear. They have found themselves in the bizarre position of having to convince a multitude of strangers that they have no criminal designs on them. If they fail in this attempt—especially in encounters with police (often off-duty or in plainclothes) or, recently, with such free-lance vigilantes as Bernhard Goetz—they may well get killed.
Most of the young people I know have developed a repertory of dress and body language that manages to convince their social superiors of their innocence, and so enables them to move through the city in relative safety. On the other hand, it’s hard to see how they can possibly—to return to one of Walzer’s central ideas—be urbane in our urban space, if they are perpetually on trial in it.4 Their lot is depressingly similar to that of the Marranos in the Plaza Mayor three hundred years ago: Now, as then, only eternal vigilance can keep the subject alive, and any slip at any moment might be his last; even in the middle of the most spacious square, he is up against the wall.
A more contemporary kindred spirit would be Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. It would be no surprise if many of these young people should come to feel, like Ellison’s hero, that it would make more sense to stay indoors or in a hole underground.
I hope they don’t stay away. If they do, it will diminish not only their lives—which already are constricted enough—but our own. In fact, poor people have taught us so much of what we know about being fully alive in public: about how to move rhythmically and melodically down a street; about how to use color and ornamentation to say new things about our selves, and to make new connections with the world; about how to bring out the rhetorical and theatrical powers of the English language in our everyday talk.
Middle-class people often have no idea how much they have learned from underclasses, because they have picked it up second or third hand. But our serious musicians and composers, our dancers and choreographers, our designers and painters and poets can tell us, if we ask, how much inspiration they have drawn from our underclasses’ overflowing life. And they have come into contact with this life, for the most part, not by making expeditions into dark ghettos (though a few adventurous spirits have done this), but simply by paying attention to the rich sounds and rhythms and images and gestures that poor men and women and boys and girls pour out on the sidewalks and in the subways of New York,
