Under Construction @ Keele 2017 Under Construction @ Keele Vol. III (3) | Page 15

persists, now finding purchase in more subtle forms of racial patronization emanating
from Western liberal discourse and its international institutions.’ 14 These effects are
not just international now, but also local. And while the ‘purchase’ they are finding is
not the explicit politics of colonialism (with the clear hegemonic categories and brutal
exploitation of one class over another), it is still a form of domination: a subtle racial
domination strengthened and naturalised in the discourse of western liberalism.
Again Schindler writes:
[N]on-capital spaces in postcolonial countries is strikingly accurate for
Flint: it is the space of the rejected, the marginal […] it has no role to
play in the creation of the economic conditions of capital’s expanded
reproduction.
The
relationship
here
is
not
one
of
extraction/appropriation, rather it is one defined in terms of exclusion
and rejection. 15
However, the operation of Third World dynamics in “First World” spaces like Flint
presents not only a danger but also a unique opportunity: while racial and
neighborhood boundaries divide, they also provide the capacity for a project that
recalls and instrumentalises the international human rights norms of dignity, rights
and self-determination. This will be explored in more depth in the concluding
thoughts.
Section II: Spatial Invisibility and Race
As Black communities in particular are pushed to the margins of Flint and corralled
into spaces of greater toxicity, narratives begin to develop about these communities
that justify their peripheral existence. In other words, there is a double consequence:
first, minority communities are left with no choice but to reside in areas where health
hazards are greater, and second, as these communities develop health problems,
crime and poverty, the subtle justification of ghettoisation is established in discourse.
John Reynolds, “Third World Approaches to International Law and the Ghosts of Apartheid,” in The
Challenges of Human Rights: Past, Present and Future, ed. David Keane and Yvonne McDermott
(Cheltenham: Elgar, 2012), 217.
15
Schindler, “Understanding Urban Processes,” 798.
14