Poroi

Throgmorton, James A

James A. Throgmorton 54 Poroi, 4, 1, March, 2005 
Race from 
Berlin to Louisville 
An Introduction 
James A. Throgmorton 
Poroi, 4, 1, March, 2005 
 
     
 
1 
 
Not long ago I made a keynote speech at a conference in Louisville, 
Kentucky about sustainability (Throgmorton, 2004a).  In brief, I 
argued that there is a reciprocal relationship between city making 
and story telling.  To make the Louisville region more sustainable, 
the people of that city would have to make narrative and physical 
space for diverse storytellers.  Their shared urban narratives would 
need to be locally grounded and include black Louisvillians.  From 
this point of view, the city’s new Muhammad Ali Center could act 
as a powerful trope in persuasive stories about making Louisville a 
more sustainable place. 
 
 
2 
 
After I had finished, one of the conference’s participants, an older 
man from Europe, came up to me and asked with some surprise, 
“Tell me, is it true that race and racism are still issues in America?”  
Another participant, a young man from Germany, told me he had 
been watching the African-Americans in the audience.  He thought 
they looked uncomfortable when hearing my words. 
 
 
3 
 
Do race and racism still matter in the United States?  Much rides 
on how we define the two terms.  
 
4 
 
In a recent study of race, real estate, and uneven development in 
the Kansas City (Missouri) region, sociologist Kevin Gotham 
(2002) claims that there are no timeless and universal standards 
for what constitutes race and racism.  Rather he says, “Racial 
groups are socially and politically constructed and exist as the 
outcome of diverse historical practices . . . that are continually 
subject to challenge over definition and meaning” (p. 13).  If that is 
true, the specific meanings and manifestations of racism are “not 
only historically contingent, but are also always changing as social 
conditions, state activity, and social movements confront it” (p. 
11).  Consequently Gotham uses racialization as a frame for 
understanding racial residential segregation in Kansas City.  By 
this, he means, “the way in which racial categories sort people, 
society distribute resources along racial lines, and state policy 
 
James A. Throgmorton 55 Poroi, 4, 1, March, 2005 
shapes and is shaped by the racial contours of society” (p. 12). 
 
5 
 
If race and racism are socially constructed, and if the meanings of 
specific racisms and racial identities depend on historical and 
political contexts where they appear, we could expect race and 
racism to vary from one time or place to the next.  Much could be 
learned, therefore, by studying changes in specific places and by 
comparing places for their meanings of racial distinctions and 
racisms.  Here Christine Gerhardt  works from American Studies to 
examine race and racism in Berlin (Germany), while Leslie Hahner 
comes from Communication Studies to study race and racism in 
Louisville (USA).  Apparently disparate, these studies are 
instructive in juxtaposition. 
 
 
6 
 
In “What Was Left of Berlin Looked Bleaker Every Day,” Gerhardt 
analyzes the urban spatiality of Berlin – what she calls “Germany’s 
most ‘American’ city (p. 1) – as it has been imagined in American 
literature since the fall of the Wall ( die Mauer).  She accomplishes 
this by focusing on three American texts published since 1989.  
Each foregrounds issues of racial and ethnic differences.  The texts 
differ considerably, but Gerhardt shows how Berlin emerges in all 
three as an imaginative site where Americans can explore 
troublesome aspects of America’s cultural history.  Particularly 
they can explore issues related to race, without risking their own 
positive sense of American identity.  As Gerhardt says, these 
writers “view . . . the new Berlin as a space where Germany’s 
multiple histories of racial conflict and oppression converge.”  This 
“creates a city whose apparently unresolved legacies contrast 
sharply with America’s ideal of its own national history as a 
continuous progression toward increasing liberation and equality” 
(p. 24).  Yet these texts can, she concludes, also “be read as 
imaginative memorials to an almost mythical, pre-1989 city that 
seemed to embody and confirm American democratic ideals – and 
as memorials to a time in U. S. history when American culture was 
as much a part of Berlin’s urban realities as Berlin was part of 
America’s self-identity” (p. 24). 
 
 
7 
 
In “From the Louisville Lip to the Champ,” Leslie Hahner 
investigates how the figure of Muhammad Ali and stories of his 
past are being used to advance efforts to redevelop downtown 
Louisville, especially through the proposed Muhammad Ali 
Center.  How, she asks, did a boxer from the segregated black 
section of Louisville become the city’s beloved humanitarian son?  
Ali grew up with “polite racism” in a city divided by race.  How did 
he move from “the Louisville Lip” to “The Champ,” and how do 
 
James A. Throgmorton 56 Poroi, 4, 1, March, 2005 
these moves tie to the new Ali Center?  In Hahner’s view, the 
Center uses stories of the past for current purposes.  “As a material 
place, the Ali Center is important for what it indicates about 
networks of relations in Louisville” (p. 9).  Thus “linking the Ali 
Center to downtown redevelopment has let Louisville cover over 
several sticky issues:  its economic strife, its history of racism, and 
the earlier legacy of urban planning in the downtown area” (p. 19).  
The Center’s “discursive construction of the Ali history elides 
elements of his past and the city’s to articulate ideas of social, 
economic, and urban ‘development’” (p. 3). 
 
8 
 
If Hahner is right, Louisville remains a site of polite racism.  But 
this differs from the earlier version, for it now provides a place to 
celebrate the city’s most famous son.  He turns out to be black, but 
only in a way that focuses attention on the individual, advances the 
city elite’s economic development interests, and selectively forgets 
the actual historical context in which Muhammad Al learned to 
fight.  It also ignores the actual condition of blacks in present day 
Louisville, especially in its west end. 
 
 
9 
 
If Gerhardt is right, Cold War Berlin figured (for Louisvillians and 
other Americans) as a place where, unlike Louisville and other 
parts of the USA, “American’s democratic vision of increasing 
racial and ethnic equality was always on the verge of being 
realized” (p. 11).  But post-1989 Berlin figures as a place of fear that 
Berlin’s racist past might reemerge.  “Contrasting sharply with the 
‘lost’ city of the 1980s,” Gerhardt says, “the changed post-wall 
Berlin emerges as a ghost town dominated by sites that embody the 
return of racial and ethnic tensions and outright oppression” (p. 
23). 
 
 
10 
 
To juxtapose Hahner’s story about Louisville with Gerhardt’s about 
Berlin is to provoke a couple of surprising linkages.  These shed 
light on the racialized nature of action in the USA (or at least 
Louisville) today.  As Hahner reveals, the Ali Center is being 
designed to focus visitors’ attention on the values and turning 
points of Ali’s life.  It tells a story of personal growth for the 
individual and respect for shared humanity.  As Jerry Abramson, 
the newly elected mayor of a newly unified Louisville and Jefferson 
County Metro Government, said at a reception in June 2003, “This 
building and plaza will come to symbolize many things, including 
Muhammad Ali’s ability to bring people together and create unity 
and celebrate diversity.”  “Above all, the Ali Center building will be 
a welcoming place,” says the Ali Center’s web site (2004).  “From 
the moment the visitor first sees the structure, he or she will be 
 
James A. Throgmorton 57 Poroi, 4, 1, March, 2005 
welcomed in a warm and embracing manner.” 
 
11 
 
Thousands of miles away, in Berlin, though, is another museum in 
another formerly divided city.  Daniel Libeskind’s new Jewish 
Museum was built inside former West Berlin, just two or three 
blocks from the Berlin Wall.  Much like the new Ali Center in 
Louisville, it concerns people who have not always been met in a 
“warm and embracing manner.”  Strikingly unlike the Ali Center, 
however, it focuses not on an individual but on an entire group.  
Reflecting a brilliant application of “deconstructive” design 
principles, Libeskind’s museum seeks to help Berliners come to 
terms with their problematic past, and do so in a way that enables 
the diverse people of a rapidly changing Berlin to thrive. 
 
 
12 
 
As architectural historian Peter Chametsky (2001) puts it, 
Libeskind wanted to design a building that would open up the 
unidirectional narrative of Berlin’s past to other perspectives.  It 
would embody a matrix of connections associating past and 
present, absence and presence, especially by extending the building 
directionally toward locations associated with the 200,000 or so 
Berlin Jews murdered or driven into exile by the Nazis.  The 
resulting building narrates, through architectural design, an 
intellectually and emotionally challenging story about the 
movement of Jewish people into and out of Berlin.  It tells of the 
massive loss of German Jewish culture.  It also registers the loss to 
German culture in general that the Holocaust produced.  In 
Libeskind’s own words, the task of designing and building the new 
Jewish Museum in Berlin “in all its ethical depth requires the 
incorporation of the void of Berlin back into itself, in order to 
disclose how the past continues to affect the present and to reveal 
how a hopeful horizon can be opened through the aporias of time” 
(quoted in Schneider 1999, p. 19). 
 
 
13 
 
The recent history of African-Americans in Louisville contains no 
void equivalent to the Holocaust.  Yet it does reveal how “the past 
continues to affect the present.”  Hence the act of designing the 
new Ali Center opens up the possibility of a “hopeful horizon.”  Still 
the Center’s designers have not taken up the challenge of showing 
how the past continues to affect the present in Louisville.  If they 
had, visitors to the Center could learn about the legacy of “polite 
racism” in Louisville, the transformation of race relations in the 
city, and the challenges that remain. 
 
 
14 
 
Visitors could learn that, in some important ways, Louisville is like 
Berlin.  In both places, people are being urged to forget old  
James A. Throgmorton 58 Poroi, 4, 1, March, 2005 
boundaries and divisions.  In contexts of economies that are highly 
competitive and global, both are being encouraged to respond to 
challenges of reunification by reinventing their local cultures and 
by becoming truly global cities.  As Gerhardt warns us, forgetting 
old boundaries might just be another way of letting the racist past 
sneak back.  As the past fifteen years in Berlin demonstrate, the 
collapse of old physical walls does not entail the disappearance of 
all socio-cultural walls.  Rather people in Berlin talk about “the 
Wall in the head” that still shapes the actions of many residents 
long after the Wall of concrete was torn down.  It may be, too, that 
many residents of Louisville still act with a “wall” in their heads 
(see Throgmorton, 2004b). 
 
15 
 
If Gerhardt and Hahner are right, Berlin and Louisville are both 
showing how race and racism still matter in the USA.  Both point to 
ongoing racialization.  The question at the start of this short essay 
is whether race and racism still matter in the United States.  When 
juxtaposed, the Gerhardt and Hahner essays evoke a subtly 
different question:  how do race and racism matter after the fall of 
the Wall and the end of the Cold War?  Or more specifically, now 
that Americans no longer concentrate on overcoming the Cold War 
divide between East and West:  how do race and racism figure in 
the contrast between “freedom loving nations” and ”terrorists?” 
 
 
 
 
 
© James A. Throgmorton, 2005.  
 
 
 References  
 
 
 
Chametsky, Peter.  2001.  “Rebuilding the Nation:  Norman 
Foster’s Reichstag Renovation and Daniel Libeskind’s 
Jewish Museum Berlin.”  Centropa, 1, 3, September, pp. 
245-264. 
 
 
 
 
Gotham, Kevin Fox.  2002.  Race, Real Estate, and Uneven 
Development:  The Kansas City Experience, 1900-2000.  
Albany: State University New York Press.  
 
 
 
Muhammad Ali Center.  2004.  http://www.alicenter. org. 
 
 
 
 
Schneider, Bernhard.  1999.  Daniel Libeskind Jewish Museum 
Berlin, John William Gabriel, tr.  Munich, Germany: Prestel.  
James A. Throgmorton 59 Poroi, 4, 1, March, 2005 
 
 
 
Throgmorton, James A.  2004a.  “Where Muhammad Ali Learned 
to Fight:  Making Narrative and Physical Space for African-
Americans in the Louisville City-Region.”  International 
Urban Planning and Environmental Association 
Symposium, Louisville, KY, September 4-8. 
 
 
 
 
Throgmorton, James A.  2004b.  “Where Was the Wall Then?  
Where Is It Now?”  Planning Theory and Practice, 5, 3, pp. 
349-365.  
                        
 


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