Pittsburgh Mayoral Elections Update

The Pittsburgh mayoral election will be held tomorrow, and the result will be historic regardless of which of the leading candidates wins: either Ed Gainey will be the city’s first Black mayor, or Tony Moreno will be the first Republican mayor since the 1930s. The endorsements, campaign ads, and mailers have been out in full force, and now I’ve even seen discourse around the election spilling out into the spaces of the street.

I took the above photograph at the bus stop last week. There are several things worth noting about the handwritten flyer, some maybe more trivial than others. For instance, the fact that Moreno’s name seems to be spelled as “Marino.” More troubling are the racist rhetoric and tropes, including the closing allusion to Chicago. While we could debate just what is intended by the term “safe” another passerby has already contributed a more pressing question: “Who is THEY?”

The Post-Gazette asked the mayoral candidates to select supporters who exemplified their respective visions for a recent article. The themes that emerge across the supporters’ comments have to do with expectations of community engagement and a desire to upend the status quo. The city’s approach to policing is another prevalent topic which has remained salient since last years’ protest movement and the broader conversations they engendered. Meanwhile at the City Paper Tereneh Idia has penned an open letter to Pittsburgh’s next mayor asking the incoming administration to foreground the experiences of Black women in the city.

Pittsburgh 2021 Mayoral Elections

On November 2nd Pittsburghers will elect a new mayor. Whatever the results, it will mark a post-Peduto era for the first time since I’ve lived in the city. I was completely caught off guard when Ed Gainey won the democratic nomination earlier this year. I had assumed that Peduto was a shoo-in for a third term, though admittedly I had not followed the primaries closely. Since I had relocated outside of Pittsburgh in the midst of the pandemic I was also not in touch with how the local political climate had been impacted not only by the public health crisis but also by the social justice uprisings and reckonings with racial disparities that unfolded across the country last summer. Indeed, the national discourse on policing was cited as a significant influence on the Pittsburgh mayoral race. In the wake of Peduto’s loss commentators situated the surprising results in relation to a nationwide trend against incumbents. 

Peduto had branded himself as a progressive mayor who promoted policies based around modernizing Pittsburgh’s postindustrial economy and infrastructure through technological innovation. He acknowledged legacies of unequal development in the city even though his responses to rampant neighborhood gentrification were underwhelming. In contrasting himself against Gainey, Peduto was firmly established as part of the old guard of mainstream democratic liberalism, with Gainey representing the new spirit of social progressivism. With Gainey’s primary win he also became the presumptive first black mayor in Pittsburgh’s history. This historic milestone took on greater salience not only in relation to national discourse on racial injustice but also in light of the specific disparities faced by Black Pittsburghers. Pittsburgh has long promoted itself as a “most livable city,” but the city’s own research has confirmed that this “livability” is often not available to its Black residents. The disparities are particularly pronounced for Black women in Pittsburgh, with many Black women talking about leaving the city. This accords with broader demographic trends of Black residents leaving Pittsburgh. 

The election is now framed as a contest between Gainey and Republican candidate Tony Moreno. The two have debated their differing visions for the city, and while policing remains a salient talking point they have also debated affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization. The prospect of a Gainey administration is exciting, although as the Moreno mailer I received demonstrates (pictured above), the rhetoric around his policies will inherently be racialized in both overt and covert ways. During Peduto’s administration bicycle lanes became one of the most hotly debated topics in local politics. Peduto foregrounded a robust approach to mobility and infrastructure, but the bike lanes became a stand-in for a particular inflection of the culture wars as they manifested in Pittsburgh, a signifier of progressive cultural policies that signaled being out of touch with “old” or “authentic” Pittsburgh residents and values. If Ed Gainey becomes Pittsburgh’s first Black mayor then I expect that the fixation on bike lanes will be replaced by more distinctly racially-coded exemplars of development agendas and priorities. As of now I remain optimistic that the discussions have shifted to more explicit concerns with unequal outcomes in urban governance.

AOC invokes McLuhan with “Tax the Rich” Gala dress

Last week congresswoman and media-discourse-lightning-rod Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez kicked off a firestorm of hot takes by wearing a ball gown emblazoned with the message “Tax the Rich” to this year’s Met Gala. The annual super-exclusive social event and big money fundraising soiree typically attracts buzzing commentary over its dramatic displays of eye-catching haute couture. The buzz over AOC’s dress hinged on the fact that she tied her fashion statement to an explicit political statement.

As is common in our highly-polarized sphere of social media discourse, reactions to the dress tended to fall on either end of a spectrum from adoring commendation to cynical derision. On subreddits that are more favorable toward AOC users posted images of the dress with comments that she was “staying true,” remarking that she “had the balls” to wear the dress, and calling her “the hero we deserve”. More critical users commented on the perceived hypocrisy of brandishing a class-conscious message at an ultra-elite event. Commenters on a TrueOffMyChest post called the dress “cringey asf” and the “definition of cringeworthy.”

So what to make of the “Tax the Rich” dress? Is it based or cringe? AOC herself weighed in with an Instagram post of the dress. The accompanying text begins with the statement: “The medium is the message.”

The invocation of McLuhan’s immortal dictum led me to consider just how exactly AOC was conceptualizing “the medium” in this instance. Is it really, as much of the online reaction seems to suggest, all about the dress?

For the past year I have been teaching a course titled Media and Consumer Culture, and some of the most interesting case studies that have come up in class discussions are from the world of fashion. Students are particularly interested in the symbolic exchange value of designer brands and in the world of fashion more broadly as a salient but oft-overlooked aspect of the media-consumer-culture continuum (students have also evinced a strong interest in sustainable or eco-fashion initiatives). In this case, however, AOC’s dress is not a consumer good, but rather a one-off fashion item. It would be another thing altogether if we were discussing a commercially-available mass-produced article of clothing that was branded with “tax the rich,” and it is likely that not nearly as many people would be talking about it at all.

So clearly the “medium” in this case cannot be separated from the public persona of AOC herself and the particular context of the Met Gala. First, regarding AOC’s personal “brand,” she has become the face of what constitutes the “radical” or “progressive” arm of what passes for leftist politics in the United States. In this sense, the “tax the rich” message is decidedly “on brand” for the political identity that AOC has established for herself. It goes without saying that most people’s intrinsic reaction to the Gala dress will inherently be colored by any preconceptions they hold regarding AOC.

Beyond the predictable ad hominem attacks directed toward AOC, many critical comments focused on the affluent and extravagant context of the Met Gala itself. The Gala is designed as a spectacle, both for the elite attendees and for the general public via the circulation of images in the media (in some sense the mediated aura of the gala and attendant commentary has become an annual event in its own right). The mediated nature of the highly publicized event thus affords a prime opportunity for an image event, something that AOC obviously understands and is likely alluding to in her citation of “the medium is the message.” The complete picture of the Gala as “medium” is therefore entangled with its extended mediation through social media images, shares, and comments.

I think the notion of “medium” in relation to the AOC Gala dress is legitimately complicated and entangled with issues of media spectacle, political celebrity, and modes of online discourse. The divisive reactions to both the dress and its wearer displayed the sort of performative indignation that characterizes the contemporary attention economy, and the debates over whether AOC was being righteous or hypocritical by wearing the dress at the event eluded engagement with the “tax the rich” message. The larger and looming question seems to be: just what is the appropriate medium and channel for addressing class inequality?

Some online commentators asserted that the copious amount of social media discourse that the dress generated proved that AOC’s message had succeeded in its ultimate goal of bringing attention to wealth disparity and taxation policy. This is a dubious proposition: as I already mentioned, the vast amount of online chatter that the dress prompted stayed focused on the surface level or “optics” of the spectacle. But the notion that the virality of the dress images serves as self-evident proof of the message’s success offers another potent parallel to McLuhan’s legacy. The continued circulation of McLuhan’s adage -- independent of its original meaning or explanatory context -- is a testament to its own truth: the aphorism, the sound bite, the fragment, the meme, etc., is the primary unit of informational currency in the electronic age.

The medium is the message.

Trump and the rhetoric of urban order

I rarely weigh in on national politics on this blog, and this post is not intended as an endorsement or a denunciation of any candidate. Although this post responds to recent remarks made by Donald Trump, I'm not interested in joining the pile-on critiquing his overall rhetorical style or campaign message, which seems overly easy and even superfluous at this point. Rather I want to focus on Trump's comments at the first one-on-one presidential debate last week regarding "law and order" and the "stop and frisk" program. These are topics I've thought and written about in regards to the use of "urban disorder" rhetoric in U.S. policy and policing practices. Trump's positioning himself as the "law and order candidate" and his appeals based on unruly "inner city" conditions recalls previous campaign rhetoric such as Nixon's 1968 campaign (see the above video). Furthermore, his support of "stop and frisk" policing directly ties his statements to a history of U.S. urban policies based on an order/disorder dichotomy.

Discourses based on a dichotomy of order and disorder have long been applied to urban spaces. In his classic historical survey of urban settlements, The City in History (1961), Lewis Mumford traced the development from early, “organically” developed Greek cities to more structured Hellenistic cities. Mumford describes this process as a transition “from supple ‘disorder’ to regimented elegance” (p. 190). A 2016 opera titled A Marvelous Order centers on the ideological struggle between urbanist Jane Jacobs and mayor Robert Moses in 1960s New York City. This battle of wills between Jacobs and Moses is seen by many to be emblematic of a historical opposition between urban planning schemes designed to order and regiment city spaces and populations, and the disorderly and unplanned activities and interactions that have long been characteristic of city life.

Cities and citizens have been “ordered” not only through planning schemes and infrastructure, but also through public policies and discourses. One aspect of my research focuses on how the term “disorder” has been employed across various discourses and analyses of U.S. cities, and how these discourses have influenced or supported policies of urban development. Through employing the language of disorder, these discourses have functioned pathologically to conceptualize certain citizens, spaces, and practices as either harmful or beneficial. 

Writers such as George Simmel, Robert Park, and Louis Wirth wrote about the turn-of-the-century American metropolis as a site of sensory overload and radical diversity. Disorder in these accounts was variously understood as criminal behavior, unregulated or unruly spaces, and perceived failures of integration and communication among different ethnic groups. Park in particular was concerned with broader problems posed by isolated ethnic enclaves and the weakening of social ties among city dwellers, as evinced in his analyses of immigrants and African Americans in U.S. cities. The sociology and criminology of the period was concerned with diagnosing and remedying the causes of disorder, and this diagnostic approach developed into the “social pathology” perspective. 

In his infamous report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” then Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1965) applied the social pathology perspective to theorize race relations in U.S. urban communities. Family structure was prioritized in Moynihan’s analysis, claiming that at “the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family” (p. 6). Moynihan emphasized incidences of unmarried and divorced women, “illegitimate” births, and the number of women-headed households to support his claim that “the family structure of lower class Negroes is highly unstable” (p. 7). Throughout the report, Moynihan refers to a “tangle of pathology” in which black women and children are ensnared, leading to the dissolution of families and thus the increase of violence and disorder in urban centers.

The Moynihan report has been cited as an important influence on the domestic programs enacted under President Lyndon Johnson, initiatives collectively known as The Great Society project. These programs focused on poverty and racial injustice, and also involved urban renewal and redevelopment efforts. Johnson outlined his vision of the Great Society in his 1964 commencement address at the University of Michigan. The Great Society, Johnson said, “demands an end to poverty and racial injustice,” and “is a challenge constantly renewed.” Johnson placed the state of urban America at the forefront of his Great Society vision, saying “our societies will never be great until our cities are great.”

In response to the urban race riots that occurred in several U.S. cities throughout the 1960s, President Johnson commissioned a working committee called the National Commission on Civil Disorders. The commission is also known as the Kerner commission, after Otto Kerner, chair of the commission and then governor of Illinois. Johnson directed the commission members to answer three questions in relation to the riots (Kerner, 1967, p. 1): What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again? In their report, the authors referred to the riots that occurred in Detroit during the summer of 1967, stating that the riots “again brought racial disorders to American cities, and with them shock, fear, and bewilderment to the Nation” (p. 1). One of the report’s best-known statements is that the nation “is moving toward two societies, one black, one white,” and that the recent race riots had “quickened the movement and deepened the division” (p. 1). 

In the recommendations section of the Kerner report, the authors dedicate a section to the issue of housing. In addition to calling for provisions for affordable housing in cities, the authors recommend against the further building of high-density “slum” housing projects. The building of such housing projects represent further attempts to impose rational order onto what were seen as chaotic and disorderly spaces, as seen in the modernist urban planning schemes of the 20th century. This philosophy of architecture and urban design is exemplified by the work of modernist designer Le Corbusier. The architect of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing project built in St. Louis in the 1950s was directly inspired by Le Corbusier’s architectural style and philosophy. 

While the modernist housing aspirations embodied in the Pruitt-Igoe project ended with collapsed walls and broken windows, students of urban life in America were soon preoccupied with broken windows of another sort. The broken windows theory of urban disorder was a significant influence on urban sociology and criminology for decades, and the implications of its approach to disorder can be seen today. In an article titled “The Urban Unease” (1968), J.Q. Wilson reacted to the U.S. urban riots of the 1960s with a view of cities rooted in the tensions between order and disorder.

Wilson eventually developed these ideas of neighborhood disorder into the broken windows theory, first outlined in an article written with collaborator George Kelling (1982). The authors encapsulate the broken windows perspective by stating “if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken” (p. 2, emphasis in original). As with broken windows that go unrepaired, the authors argue, “’untended’ behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls” (p. 3). Wilson and Kelling are not exclusively interested physical manifestations of disorder such as litter, graffiti, and buildings in disrepair, but present a larger argument that visible disorder (whether stemming from the built environment or from individuals inhabiting it), if left unchecked, will spread throughout a neighborhood.

Wilson and Kelling’s broken windows article proved very influential, and is credited with inspiring the implementation of policing practices implemented in cities throughout the United States. These policing programs have been referred to as “broken windows policing,” “zero tolerance policing,” and also, using Wilson and Kelling’s preferred term, “order maintenance policing”. In the 1990s, order maintenance policies based on broken windows theory were implemented by the New York City Police Department under police commissioner William Bratton and mayor Rudolph Giuliani. These policies were adopted as part of the city’s broader “Quality of Life” initiatives. During this period crime rates in the city decreased, and New York gained a reputation as one of the safest large cities in the country. In a 1998 address titled “The Next Phase of Quality of Life: Creating a More Civil Society,” mayor Giuliani praised the benefits of broken windows theory and zero tolerance policing, saying “broken windows theory works”. Describing the theory as the view that “the little things matter,” Giuliani called broken windows theory “an integral part of our law enforcement strategy”.

Trump's deployment of disorder discourses, and his appeals to the virtues of stop and frisk policing, recalls this history in starkly similar ways. A recent Trump campaign mailer includes a close up of Hillary Clinton's face juxtaposed against images of urban disorder: a brick building with boarded-up windows, and a pile of detritus including splinters of wood and chunks of concrete. The reverse side bears the message: "Donald Trump will strengthen our communities and protect our families. The first step is rebuilding, revitalizing, and reigniting our cities - like yours." In light of the epidemic violence in the historically segregated areas of Chicago (which Mr. Trump is correct to emphasize), and the recent and ongoing protests against police violence in cities such as Ferguson and across the country, these appeals should be considered within the context of the history of disorder discourses in U.S. urban policy. Much of the strain between vulnerable urban populations and police officers evident today can be seen as the legacy of policing practices instituted under the support of these discourses. With the urban unrest of the 1960s being evoked in political rhetoric and recalled in televised images of protests, we should consider carefully what is being promoted with calls to "reignite" our cities.