经济学人470:城市里的种族隔离

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　　文艺；书评；

　　Segregation¹ in cities

　　城市里的种族隔离

　　Living in black and white

　　黑白时代

　　How different races inhabit cities

　　不同的种族如何共居于城市

　　Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities. By Carl Nightingale.

　　《种族隔离：城市分裂的全球史》，卡尔·南丁格尔著。

　　Carl Nightingale'S history of segregation claims to be a detailed² account of how cities were, for millennia³, divided along racial lines. But it is really a history of how colonialism affected⁴ the construction, governance and policing of great urban areas.

　　卡尔·南丁格尔的这本著作讲述了种族隔离的历史，并据称详细描绘了几千年来，城市是如何在种族界限中分裂的。但事实上，它也是一段有关殖民主义如何影响大城市的建设、政府管治和政策制定的真实历史。

　　For the past 500 years white Europeans have often used their economic and military power to build and rebuild urban landscapes in order to grab the safest, healthiest and nicest parts for themselves. Even in places where colonial rule is now a distant memory, many urban environments cannot be understood without recalling their foundation as a fortified⁶ enclave for Europeans bent⁷ on procuring⁸ commodities or opening markets. Calcutta (now Kolkata) was set up in 1690 by a member of Britain's East India Company, in defiance⁹ of the local Muslim overlord. It later vied with London as the biggest metropolis¹⁰ in the British empire.

　　在过去的500年，为便于强取豪夺最安全、最健康、最好的地区，欧洲白人殖民者往往动用经济和军事力量来建造或改建当地城市的风貌。甚至现在，某些地区的人们觉得殖民统治是一段遥远的记忆。但是，如果要完全明白很多城市的环境，我们就不得不追溯至这些城市被创立的时期。满脑子只想着采购商品、开拓市场的欧洲人将这些城市隔离为巩固飞地。加尔各答（印度城市，原为Calcutta ，现为 Kolkata），由不列颠东印度公司1690年创立，目的在于挑战当地穆斯林霸主。随后，加尔各答开始与伦敦竞争大英帝国的最大大都会的头衔。

　　Both colonialism itself and the divided cities it spawned¹¹ reached their zenith on the eve of the first world war. As Europeans migrated in large numbers to far-flung corners of their expanding empires, the need to keep them comfortable, both physically¹² and psychologically, meant that other groups were treated with ever greater ruthlessness. Mr Nightingale shows how the roots of apartheid in South Africa, for example, are to be found much earlier than the 1948 election victory of the National Party; they lie in the colonial project which led to the creation of Johannesburg half a century earlier with white and non-white areas. This was made much more explicit¹³ after 1948—and this shocked a world where racial ideologies¹⁴ and colonialism were being challenged and dismantled¹⁵. But segregationist¹⁶ zeal¹⁷ did not flare¹⁸ in a vacuum; it built on an existing system of allocating¹⁹ space which reflected the needs of an imperial elite²⁰.

　　第一次世界大战前夕，殖民统治和割裂的城市均发展到鼎盛时期。当时，大批迁徙至版图不断扩大的大英帝国的偏远地区的欧洲人，他们需要物质上和精神上都有舒服的状态，这意味着他们变本加厉的无情对待其他种族。书中，南丁格尔先生道出为何人们认为南非种族隔离制度的起源比1948年国民党大选成功得更早。其实，隔离制度早就存在于隔离计划中。早在半个世纪以前，割裂为白人区和非白人区的约翰尼斯堡（位于南非东北部）的创建，就是拜隔离制度所赐。1948年后，种族隔离制度更加毫不遮掩地暴露出来——这让世界为之震惊，因为当时的种族主义和殖民主义的观点都受到挑战，有的也被废除。但是，人们对种族隔离的热情并非空穴来风。隔离制度存在于空间已经被分配的现存体系中，而且反映着帝国精英的需求。

　　Those needs were complex and shifting. After their defeat of the Boers in 1902, the British masters of South Africa wanted labour for the gold mines that had given birth to Johannesburg; but they also wanted to attract white, English-speaking immigrants, and to promise them a life in which other races featured only as house servants. Ever more ingenious forms of separation emerged, including the foundation of present-day Soweto beside an urban sewage farm. In Cape⁵ Town, a new effort to divide, aimed at keeping Europeans healthy, began after the arrival of bubonic plague at the start of the 20th century. The scourge²¹ had been spreading westward²² from China's ports; in many cities, infectious diseases were the catalysts²³ for grand segregationist projects, and were underpinned²⁴ by racist²⁵ ideologies.

　　这些需求复杂且变化不定。继1902年大败波尔人后，英国南非的统治者希望为金矿的发展增加开发过约翰尼斯堡的劳动力，但他们也想吸引讲英语的白色人种移民前来。所以统治者承诺移民能过上一种把其他种族当做家仆来使唤的尊贵生活。不同隔离形式“推陈出新”的出现，比如现今的索维托（南非城市）就建在城市污水处理厂旁。二十世纪初黑死病肆虐开普敦后（Cape Town，南非西南部港市），为了让欧洲人保持健康，人们开始采用一项新的隔离方法。这场瘟疫爆发始于中国港口，并不断扩散；在很多城市，传染病成为庞大种族隔离运动的催化剂，并沦为种族主义者的“合法工具”。

　　Mr Nightingale, a professor at the State University of New York in Buffalo²⁶, makes a fair case for studying the emergence²⁷ of colonial cities as a single phenomenon. More contentious²⁸ is his argument that modern Chicago presents a comparable example of rich white people forcing racial minorities, especially blacks, to live separately and badly.

　　居住在布法罗（Buffalo，纽约州第二大城市）的纽约州立大学教授南丁格尔先生，为了保证公平，把殖民城市的出现当做一个简单的现象来研究。更容易引起争论的是，他认为现代的芝加哥市提供了一个可比案例——富裕的白色人种逼迫少数人种，尤其是黑人，住在环境恶劣的隔离地区里。

　　Even when black people were enfranchised²⁹ and began asserting their civil rights in the 1960s, politics in Chicago was manipulated in ways whose end-result was not so different from apartheid, he argues. One early factor was the emergence of a property market that was distorted by covenants³⁰ which specified³¹ the race of the purchaser. The Supreme³² Court allowed the practice in 1926, but struck it down in 1948. Later, so-called urban-renewal projects were used to move black communities to less desirable locations, Mr Nightingale says. Poor areas were cleared to build highways that would enable rich commuters to travel more easily between offices and their suburban³³ homes.

　　他认为，甚至在20世纪60年代黑人得到解放时，他们开始强烈要求拥有自己的民主权利，但芝加哥的政治却被人们以不同方式操控，最终黑人得到的结果也与种族隔离制度相差无几。其中，一个早期的因素是房地产市场的兴起。当时有条款详细规定购房者的种族，房产市场因此被扭曲。最高法院在1926年允许这种做法，直到1948年才废除它。南丁格尔先生说，之后的所谓“城区重建项目”成为把黑人社区搬迁至更糟糕地区的借口。贫民区被拆除只是为了建高速公路，以便让富有的上班族可以更方便地乘车往返于办公室和乡村的住房。

　　Mr Nightingale is right to point out that segregation can exist without a formal regime. But he surely underestimates the difference between a country like the United States, where the disadvantaged have legal and political tools at their disposal, and apartheid South Africa where no such tools were available. So powerful is his belief in a handful of “master narratives” that he sometimes shoehorns facts to fit his theories. The demons³⁴ which haunt his universe are imperial elites³⁵, property markets (which he imagines as a causal④agency, not an instrument) and racial ideologies. All of these factors, he believes, operate in a “top-down” and often co-ordinated way to advance the interests of the powerful and marginalise weaker groups.

　　南丁格尔先生提出一个好的观点，即把殖民城市的出现当作一个独立的现象来研究。不过显而易见的是，他低估了国与国的不同，比如美国，弱势群体有自主的法律和政治工具，但在种族隔离严重的南非，没有这样的工具。南丁格尔先生对少数“主人公视角”的故事深信不疑，以至于在某些情况下，他试图用部分事实牵强附会地证明自创的理论。让他着魔的是帝国精英、房地产市场（他将其视为一个有因果关系的中介，非一项工具）和激进的意识形态。他坚信，这些因素，一起创造了一个“自上而下”、协调一致的途径，以提高权势群体利益或削减弱势群体的利益。

　　But not everything can be explained in those terms. For example, the violence which erupted on the streets of Northern Ireland in 1969, and entrenched³⁶ segregation, may have had its roots in imperial policy, but it clearly had a local momentum³⁷ of its own. It is nonsense to suggest, as he does, that the Protestant mobs that attacked Catholic areas in the early days of the troubles were “cheered on” by “right-wing British politicians” in London.

　　但这些规则并不能解释所有的事情。比如，1969年北爱尔兰大街上爆发的暴力事件和人们心中根深蒂固的隔离制度等发生的根源，也许在帝国政策中能找到，但毫无疑问的是，隔离制度肯定会受到当地势力的扶持。南丁格尔先生认为，在新教暴民袭击天主教区这样的麻烦事发生的早期，伦敦的右翼政治家本应该在旁煽风点火。这完全是废话（因为这种事件本来就受到当地势力的扶持）。

　　Another gripe is that the book promises an account of “70 centuries of city-splitting” but fails to deliver on that, despite a perfunctory opening chapter which looks, among other things, at sacred space in prehistoric³⁸ and pre-modern times. To state the obvious, Western imperialists were not the only dividers of cities. In traditional empires—Ottoman or tsarist, for example—cities were split because society itself was rigidly³⁹ divided, although not always physically, into ethnically⁴⁰ or religiously based communities where the individual's everyday life was controlled by the leader of his or her group, who in turn delivered the group's loyalty⁴¹ to the sultan or emperor. The elites of each group had a stake in enforcing separation. A comprehensive look at urban segregation would have teased out the difference between traditional and modern separation.

　　让我不满的另一点是，此书承诺要描述出“城市分裂的70个世纪”，却没有对此进一步阐述，除了看起来敷衍了事的开篇章节：讲述的是在史前时期和前现代时期，发生在神圣空间里的其他事情。而显而易见的是——西方帝国主义者并非分裂城市的罪魁祸首。传统意义上的帝国——比如土耳其帝国与俄罗斯帝国，遭遇城市分裂的原因在于它们的社会已经界限分明。尽管这种分裂并不总是表现在物质上，而是表现在个体参加以种族和宗教为区分基础的群体，他（她）的日常生活被所在群体的领导者所控制，该领导者进而把这种忠诚度延伸到苏丹（某些伊斯兰国家统治者的称号）或国家统治者身上。这些群体的精英阶层都是隔离政策实施的既得利益者。如果全面看待城市种族隔离，我们本应能理清传统式隔离和现代式隔离间的不同。

　　Mr Nightingale's view of how power works makes his own task harder. He struggles to deal with the fact that the white elite in both Britain and South Africa were willing to make tactical concessions⁴² to non-whites when it suited them; the white workers who went on strike (under the slogan “Workers Unite for a White South Africa”) to stop black workers being promoted in the mines in the early 1920s were brutally⁴³ suppressed.

　　此外，南丁格尔先生对权力如何运作的观点让他的写作任务变得难上加难。他无法处理这样的事实——当情况有利时，英国和南非的白人精英都愿意对非白人做出策略性的让步；20世纪20年代初，为了阻止黑人工人升职，一些罢工抗议的白人（打着“工人们联合起来，打造一个白色南非”的口号）劳工也受到了残忍的打压。

　　In the present day, too, a “top-down” view of power has limits. Take Northern Ireland, where over 90% of a vast public housing stock is segregated⁴⁴ by religion. Government officials in London and Belfast would love to change that, but it seems beyond their capacity to challenge the forces that keep most streets “pure”. Urban division in this case is a measure of government weakness, not ruthless strength. Segregation is not always something imposed by those who hold political power over the weak and vulnerable.

　　即使在当今，“自上而下”的权力观也有局限性。以北爱尔兰为例， 90%以上的庞大公共住房资源以宗教为界限隔离。伦敦和贝尔法斯特的官员很希望改变它，但他们似乎无法挑战各种希望保持街道“纯正”的势力。在这一点上，城市的隔离体现出政府的脆弱性，而不是表现铁腕政治。隔离制度并不总是握有权力的强者对弱者的压迫。

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