I was almost laughing, despite being adrenalized, because the muggers used such a classic script and played it like so many of the dress rehearsals at the dojo. Indeed, the gun and knife defense seminars had prepared me well for the language, the sight of a gun and the body movements. However, I was completely unprepared for the post mugging moment-of-truth.
    Walking up to my apartment I reviewed the incident, realizing with a surprise that I had stayed calm enough to ask questions, gauge distance; then, I wondered if I should call the police. The fact that they took my phone momentarily annulled that question but another deeper ‘logic’ announced itself with disturbing clarity. “What’s the point?” I thought to myself. “What am I going to say? Um, yes officer it was a black male with a gun. It’ll be a useless drop in the bucket, a drop that will vanish without distinction because it would be all too similar to hundreds of other cases in Detroit.” Within a few minutes my roommate came home and insisted that I call the police, which I did.
    The next day, I asked my students if my thought, my reason for not calling the police was racist. Only a few answered yes, partly, I think, because they didn’t want to accuse their just-mugged-teacher of racism. My own answer to that question, however, is a resounding “Yes!” The thought was absolutely racist, but one that demonstrates the power of ‘naturalizing narratives’ and the intersection of structural and cultural discourses.
    Most broadly, I began by naturalizing Detroit and armed robbery, understanding the latter as the inevitable consequence of living here, indeed even an occasion that marks one’s official entry to ‘Detroit-ness’––a perverse loss of virginity. Criminality here takes on spatial dimensions as inherent to deindustrialized urban centers generally, and Detroit specifically. Spatial logic, however, is a deliberate political construction, as Thomas Sugrue’s text so wonderfully demonstrates. The contradictory drives of New Deal policy toward home ownership and public housing framed an intense race conflict that ultimately led to the containment of Black urban residents in specific areas. Such strategic segregation of Black citizens into dilapidated housing in turn “proved” that Blacks could not be trusted to take care of their homes, that they would ruin whatever neighborhood they entered. Racist structural policies fed cultural “scientific” (observable) proof of Black ‘moral’ inferiority, which fueled policies; no origins, no simple cause-effect relationships, only circles of political violence. Indeed, my thoughts after the mugging made much the same logical circle, relegating the incident as merely the lived observation of an already given criminality.
    “The delinquent is to be distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him” (Foucault 219-from the Reader). Spatializing criminality simultaneously racializes it because criminal acts-deviance-delinquency are understood more broadly as the inevitable outcome of one’s ‘biography.’ At a very crass level this can be stated as “what else will a poor black urban youth do?” Rap culture, ‘gangsterism’ and such are prominent cultural discourses, often taking the form of ‘biographies’ that themselves ascribe race and place to criminality; that these ‘biographies’ are historically situated in segregationist political practices is conveniently absent. The intersection of the cultural and structural is precisely in the biography, which is then ‘naturalized’ (and demonized) as the cause of criminality.

My initial thought, to not call the police, performed an a-historical conflation of race-space and biography, melting all three into the mugger as a ‘natural’, inevitable product.