“The Street is the Message”

The streets are “media” in ways that hold racial implications. In this chapter, I examine two functions of the streets in the context of urbanity and race: (1) the streets reflect practices of wider institutional racism (“the white control of mobility”); and (2) the same streets are sites where the resistance to such oppressions is located and also structured. Thus, this chapter proceeds by putting together disciplinary areas as diverse as black studies and materialist media studies to rethink the relation between urban geography, race, and media. It then moves into applying these areas of study to discussions that reveal the meaningfulness of the city street in relation to institutional racism as well as the meaningfulness of the city street for those who challenge said racism.