In his book, “Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001,” Kyle Riismandel, a senior university lecturer in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers-Newark, argues that suburbanites of this era engaged in “productive victimization,” using their imagined and real fears as a means to hoard power and exert local control. It’s a phenomenon he observed growing up in the suburbs of Wanaque, New Jersey — 30 miles away from New York City, 12 miles away from Newark, “but in many ways a world away” — later, at graduate school in D.C., and now, from his home back in the New Jersey suburb of Montclair.
Over those three decades, cultural and political phenomena served to make suburbanites feel less like they were living in a bucolic paradise, and more like in a land constantly under assault — with threats ranging from toxic waste and cancerous household products; to burglaries and kidnappings; to satanic cults and explicit music. Riismandel traces the reaction to these perceived threats, through the weaponization of the environmental movement as a means to offload hazards to poorer communities, the rise of NIMBYs who feared overdevelopment in their backyards, and the advent of vigilantism as a response to crime and disorder. The book captures what Riismandel identifies as a growing anxiety that undergirded white suburban life. “Things aren’t necessarily happening” to suburbanites of the time, he says, “but there’s always a sense they they will.” [...]
This continued production of threat — even without the materiality or the reality of the threat being so big — is in part because it allows people to do things. It’s facilitated by the broader political culture of the rightward turn of the Reagan era and the New Right, saying, you should be scared; that we need more cops on the street. But also in response, you can exert more control as a homeowner, or as a parent, and you can police streets more effectively, or more privately. You can do all these things that allow you to work with, or even replace, the police or the state. [...]
Part of the privilege of living in the suburbs is controlling local space, not being victimized by an actual crime. That you might be victimized by the threat of crime, and the idea of crime, but that you should be able to live free from that fear. This is why I call it the suburban crisis, because it's really just a crisis of privilege. It is not the “urban crisis,” which is, you know, deeply-rooted and systemic and structural, that we see elucidated by a number of scholars, most famously, Thomas Sugrue’s book. They're quite different. One is one of systemic racism and disinvestment. Another is one of privilege and expectation.
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