CONTESTING URBAN FREEWAY STORIES: RACIAL POLITICS AND THE O. J. CHASE

Abstract

This article first considers how the O. J. Simpson freeway chase, the popular film Speed and television programmes such as Cops help construct the space of the automobile and freeway as a shelter from racially marked urban dangers, supporting deeply racialized politics in the United States. This politics is exemplified by the success of large capital interests in aligning themselves with the white working and middle class to form what Thomas and Mary Edsall call a top-down coalition or what might be seen in Gramscian terms as a hegemonic bloc. Significant to enabling this coalition was the postwar subsidization of the suburban white life-style, including the construction of interstate freeways. The other side of white suburban security was the entrenchment of poor people of colour in central cities, and the second section of this article describes the role freeway construction played in this entrenchment. Freeway and suburban segregation also creates the distancing which allows the distorted narratives of the inner city described in the first section to become widely accepted. The third part of the article returns to the O. J. Simpson chase, this time to consider both the possibilities and limits the freeway can create for public expressions. While the freeways may make older forms of face-to-face contact more difficult and increase the segregation of communication between different socioeconomic groups, its highly monitored nature also enables expressions which trouble the dominant view of the city. Still, the ability of these momentary voices of dissonance to inspire a strong challenge to this dominant view and its corresponding politics is questionable.