Urban Change and Conflict - Essay Example

Urban Change and Conflict The movie Selma directed by Ava DuVernay illustrates the events that brought about to the passage of the ‘Voting Rights Act’ in the year 1965. The movie is not a documentary despite the fact that it is centered on historical events. The main point of the movie is validating the power of social movement to create urban change and the conflicts involved in this process. During this process, the movie places Martin Luther King center and front so that viewers can feel and understand the leader’s personal struggle in balancing the longing for change, the safety of his followers, and his sense of the utmost strategy for accomplishing change. In a perfect world, the movie would exist uniquely as a representation of darker days long since past. However, ‘Selma’ displays the evolution of urban change and conflict while gleaming a spotlight on the slow growth of that which has not changed. The movie’s story offers a blueprint not only on the past events, but of the way forward in terms of urban change and conflict. The movie ‘Selma’ of course did not happen in a vacuum. The mass movement against Jim Crow apartheid, for the right to vote and equal rights in public accommodations, had been growing for almost a decade, ever since the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. However, the early 1960s witnessed the Freedom Rides and lunch counter sit-in movement against segregation on interstate bus transportation1. This movement for equity and democratic rights was made possible by the struggle of the working class of the 1940s and 1930s that preceded it. The Urban crisis is jarringly evident in the shattered storefronts and fire-blemished African apartments in the movie. Rates of poverty among these black residents are very high. With a few expectations, most of them have witnessed loss of manufacturing job and the arrival of a low-wage service sector. Most of the streets that are revealed in the movie have ghettos that are characterized by extreme spatial isolation and segregation. This means that central-city residence, joblessness, race, and poverty were intertwined in the urban areas. It can be noted that patterns of racial and class segregation in the cities in America had continued and hardened. As evident from the movie, racial conflict and tension as a tenacious refrain in the people living in the urban areas. Discrimination by race and color was a key fact of life in the urban areas of America in the 1950s and 60s. However, the significance, dimensions and very meaning of race varied depending on its economic, cultural and political context. Notably, the relationship across racial lines adopted countless forms and had differing results. Racism in ‘Selma’ is portrayed as a pathological condition, which is an unchanging part of the white culture. But then again the word ‘racism’ oversimplified what was a multifaceted and complicated reality in ‘Selma’. As evident from the movie, race relations were the product of a variety of racial practices and beliefs. Racial ideology served as the backdrop to the relationships between whites and blacks in America. Discriminatory actions and attitudes were built and justified in part by the different images of African Americans to which the white city-dwellers were exhibited too. As evident from the movie, racial identity rested on extensively held assumptions around the mediocre intelligence of the African Americans2. It was also held to the notion that the African Americans were better well-matched for certain types of jobs, and stereotypes about African Americans’ sexual promiscuity, dependency, licentiousness, and laziness. The physical state of white neighborhoods and African American neighborhoods in ‘Selma’ reinforced perceptions of race. The extensiveness of racial segregation in American urban areas made ghettoization appear as unavoidable, the natural consequence of deep racial differences. The blockades that kept the African Americans curbed to racially isolation worsening, inner-city neighborhoods were widely invisible to the white people. Overcrowding, deteriorating houses, and visible poverty were signs of moral deviancies and not a demonstration of structural inequalities. White opinions of African American neighborhoods provides undisputable ratification of African American inferiority and the set terms of debate over the presence African Americans in the urban housing and labor markets. This can be explained further by Paul Knox and Pinch Steven where they claim that the people of greatest wealth, the best knowledge, and the most power will be the best placed to reap the benefits of the positive externalities, and often fed off activities that generate negative externalities3. The action and ideologies of the white and the African American shaped the evolution of conflict in ‘Selma’. The whites who controlled the city’s industry influenced the range of employment opportunities through their long-term corporate planning strategies and labor policies. They had an uneven influence on the city’s development due to their economic power. According to Paul Knox and Pinch Steven, the implication of the richest and powerful people controlling city development is that city development is dominant by peripheral adjustments in social ecology as new developments are made to fit status quo4. Additionally, ‘Selma’ reveals that company is upgrading and hiring policies laid down and strengthened discriminatory patterns in the workplace. African Americans were far less effective than businesses, white specialists and mortgage holders, and the government as performers forming the social and financial geology of Detroit. They were not, in any case, feeble. In 1950s and 60s as evident in ‘Selma’ African Americans mortgage holders and African Americans tenants, the common laborers and working class, in some cases teamed up with white associations, at times unwittingly abetted racial divisions, and regularly tested examples of isolation and separation. African American associations, faced superintendents, unions, and government organizations over the issue of the equivalent open door in the work and lodging markets and succeeded in extending the skylines of chance for African Americans. In any case developing class divisions inside the citys African American populace repressed the endeavors of African American change gatherings to address the situation of poor and unemployed Detroit occupants. Well-to-do African American mortgage holders, similar to their white partners, fled to distant segments of the city and added to the private isolation of the African American poor. African American mortgage holders and white property holders likewise united to contradict freely financed lodging for poor people. African-Americans were excessively the ones without the assets to escape from the method for that tempest, and, in addition, the ones moved in the areas whose levees had gone unrepaired for a considerable length of time. The schools were isolated with urban, overwhelmingly Black schools got fewer resources and set up to fall flat. These schools more look like detainment facilities with metal locators and children getting ceased and searched on their approach to class by uniformed police who watch their lobbies. Frequently these schools spend around half as much every understudy as those in the well-to-do rural areas. African-American unemployment was reliably twofold the white rate, and dark laborers were jammed into the most reduced talented and minimum generously compensated occupations. Dark understudies experienced accepted isolation, the absence of dark educators, packed schools, and one-sided school sheets. This can be explained more by Paul Knox and Pinch Steven who claim that the display of un-patterned inequalities characterizes the lack of communication between the spatial organization of amenities and services and community status to a combination of bureaucratic decision rules and idiosyncratic events5. The financial destiny of the auto business in ‘Selma’ was not only a question of nearby characteristic or neighborhood interest. Car and related commercial enterprises drove the American mechanical economy after World War II, representing around one-6th of the nations work at midcentury. In the 1950s and 1960s, the American car industry was at its peak of power and profitability, still unchallenged by remote imports and the administration emergencies that would torment it in the 1970s and 1980s6. In view of its predominance in auto creation, ‘Selma’ was the core of a provincial web of businesses key to the countrys economy. What befell ‘Selma’ specifically influenced other significant assembling segments -Steel in Chicago, Pittsburgh, Youngstown, and Gary; elastic and tires in Akron; machine devices in Cincinnati; glass and gadgets in Toledo and Dayton; and more cars in Cleveland, Milwaukee, and South Bend. At the point when ‘Selma’ sniffled, the proverb went, different urban areas got pneumonia. Moreover, ‘Selma’ was home to an extensive variety of different businesses, including chemicals, steel, pharmaceuticals, development, and fermenting, in which the motion of monetary rebuilding and race played out in ways that take into account correlations with different urban communities. The African-American uprising in ‘Selma’ spread from city to city and the resultant effect was a new generation of Black Power organizations. Each uprising developed a distinct perspective on the meaning of black power. Despite their differences, they shared some fundamentals. However, the uprising led to service sector restructuring. As Paul Knox and Pinch Steven claims, in parallel to reorganization and reorganization of industrial production that transformed the economic base, the uprising resulted in some interdependent changes in the structure of local and national welfare systems which resulted in noteworthy changes to the geography of urban service establishment7. In conclusion, the movement in ‘Selma’ had a huge effect on the unification of USA in 1960s. Martin Luther began his civil activism in 1955. The protest was against segregation in Montgomery bus system. In general the main aim of Martin Luther was equity among the whites and the blacks. However, the various benefits and costs associated with equal access to services but urban residents enormously affects the quality their life. From the movie, it can be noted that the struggle for access to limited resources results to a coalition of interests. This coalition is mainly based on neighborhood. This is evident from the movie. Bibliography Knox, Paul, and Steven Pinch. "Chapter 13: Urban Change and Conflict." In Urban Social Geography: An Introduction, 392. 6th ed. New York: Routledge, 2014. Read More