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To cite this article: Sarah Sharma (2010) TAXI CAB PUBLICS AND THE
PRODUCTION OF BROWN SPACE AFTER 9/11, Cultural Studies, 24:2, 183-199, DOI:
10.1080/09502380903541605
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Sarah Sharma
I use the taxi cab and the daily life of the brown taxi driver as a vehicle to
navigate the new micro-politics of brown in public space. Within the popular
imaginary I locate two dominating configurations of the taxi post-9/11 which
work together to create Brown Space. The taxi figures prominently in the dark
corners of the Right as a roving terrorist cell while it is elevated to an idealized
public sphere on wheels in the bright sensibility of the liberal imagination. In the
first account the driver needs to be eradicated and in the second account the
embodied driver is strangely absent. Between this deviant brown and an
unacknowledged brown there emerges yet another post-9/11 proclamation of
civic life a renewed public space free of brown.
We need to thank god for those people that do it, that do it everyday to
fight those enemies who drive taxis during the day and kill at night.
(Senator Conrad Burns, August 25, 2006)
Since 9/11 people treat me differently, when people are drunk they just
say it outright do you know Osama, how come you look like Osama, go
back home terrorist. In the day time Ive noticed that people give orders
now. Like, they dont talk to me like Im a human, they dont treat me
like a human but like an animal, go here, go there, turn. (Sam, a Toronto
city taxi driver, March 2007)
Republican Senator Conrad Burns (19892007) had no apology for his taxi as
terrorist statement made at a fundraiser in Belgrade, Montana. In fact, Laura
Bush took center stage right after him telling the crowd Senator Burns was
a wonderful leader for Montana. Neither were there any significant accounts
Cultural Studies Vol. 24, No. 2 March 2010, pp. 183199
ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online 2010 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09502380903541605
184 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
from the major news networks reporting that Burns, the longest running
senator in Montanas history, was a fear mongering racist or classist. At best,
he was presented as foolish in his choice of words. Senator Conrad Burns had
merely stirred up some controversy in these difficult times by singling out taxi
drivers. But Burns continued to make this statement, with slight variations,
two more times that week. In a campaign stop in Butte, Montana he
exclaimed, This campaign is about the next generation; it is if we have a safe
world and a secure world where our kids can go to bed at night and not worry
about a guy that drives a taxicab in the daytime and kills at night. The
campaign maintained Burns was only pointing out that terrorists could be
anywhere. A public statement issued in his defense by a campaign spokes-
person read, The point is there are terrorists that live amongst us. Not only
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here, but in Britain and the entire world. Whether they are taxi drivers or
investment bankers, the fact remains that this is a new type of enemy. There
has yet to be a single report of an investment banker pulled away from a
spreadsheet to meet the same violent fate innocent taxi drivers have endured
post-9/11.
In Toronto, New York City, Washington DC, San Antonio, Sydney,
Melbourne, and London, taxi drivers are victims of 9/11 revenge attacks. This
occurs on top of already arduous and poor working conditions of long hours,
deteriorating health, alienation, and a hardly manageable income. Across these
urban centers the majority of cab drivers are South Asian, Middle Eastern,
Russian, or North African. The public face of the city taxi driver is unarguably
brown. Acts of violence range from the drunken slur you look like Osama to
cab drivers pulled out of their cabs, dragged onto the sidewalk, and killed. In
London seven days after 9/11 three men in their mid-twenties dragged an
asylum seeking taxi driver from Afghanistan out of his vehicle, smashed a
bottle over his head, and kicked his body until he was paralyzed. During the
attack he was taunted with racial slurs implicating him to 9/11 (Dodd 2001
p. 2). In the San Francisco Bay Area over a three month period in the fall of
2003 two Sikh taxi drivers were shot and killed (Jayadev 2003). This time it
was turbans that had signified Taliban. In Melbourne 2004, The Victoria Taxi
Directorate with the help of the Ministry of Labor introduced a new policy
that would allow taxi drivers to conceal their name tags from their fares if they
were feeling under threat (Masanauskas 2004). Like New York and Toronto
over 60 percent of Melbourne taxi drivers are Muslim and face regular racial
taunts regarding their apparent essentialist terrorist proclivities.
The taxi-terrorist rant is a popular one of Islamophobic bloggers and
terrorist watch groups such as Jihad Watch, Muslim Monitor and Dhimmi Watch.
The taxi-terrorist articulation is also uttered by conservative politicians and by
right-wing news sources such as WorldNetDaily.com and Investors Business Daily.
While none are bastions of news credibility, the importance of these sources
lies in how such fantastical constructions temporarily fix and define the
TA X I C A B P U B L I C S 185
features, behaviors, and spatial practices of brown. While the culture and
politics of the cities where drivers have endured this violence are tied to
different immigration histories and socio-economic contexts, what binds them
is that they are all urban centers where the majority of taxis are driven by a
reserve labor force of immigrant populations from South Asia, the Middle
East, and North Africa. The significance of the taxi-terrorist articulation is
therefore not tied to a particular city or even the specific paths of migration of
the driver. Instead the significance of the taxi-terrorist lies in a very specific
spatio-temporality after 9/11 living and laboring in civic space as a fear
inducing brown body.
Senator Burns was not simply implying that terrorists could be anywhere,
he was tapping into a latent public anxiety that immigrant taxi drivers were
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everywhere. As a vehicle that roams urban space and connects private space to
public space, the taxi is an important site in public discussions between
journalists, artists, bloggers, politicians, and urban planners over the politics of
civic space. The taxi figures prominently in debates over who has the right to
the city (Mitchell 2003). The yellow cab has for decades worked as an iconic
image of the Manhattan streetscape. Across other major cities, the taxi links
local space to global space as it transports between airports, hotels, shopping
centers, and business districts. It services the elderly and the infirmed, the too
drunk to drive, and those not wanting to walk alone. It is a public space of
transit; moving capital, serving safety, giving tours, and providing local
knowledge. The taxi is absolutely integral to the daily life of any urban fabric,
but it also incites fear. As soon as the skyline became a target, it seems too that
the yellow car on the ground became an icon that unsettled and disturbed.
Out of this dual construction of the taxi cab, I introduce the concept of
Brown Space as a means of understanding the particular spatial politics of brown
as an identificatory strategy after 9/11 (Silva 2010). On the one hand, the
taxi is configured as a roving terrorist cell while on the other hand continues to
figure in the popular imaginary as a public sphere on wheels. One imaginary
of the taxi is rooted in the dark corners of the conservative right. Here, the
taxi becomes Brown Space, a site where the knowledge of brown is produced
and then disciplined. The other vision of the taxi is promulgated by architects,
television producers, and journalists. Here, the taxi figures romantically and
prominently within the urban fabric but the embodied taxi driver is strangely
absent. The missing driver works to distinguish public space from Brown Space.
In both instances, an idealized civic space is one without brown.
Brown is either subject to strategic elimination because of its all too visible
presence or is discursively rendered invisible. That there are plans and
attempts to eliminate brown, on the one hand, and a discursive eliding, on the
other, means that the more usual tension between invisibility and visibility that
plagues others does not have the same material reality for the brown taxi
driver in the post-9/11 urban fabric. The brown taxi driver is not Ralph
186 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
Ellisons Invisible Man who is seen through and seen past as if they do not
exist. The fact of the matter is that the brown taxi driver is now completely
visible and cannot take advantage of invisibility or anonymity in the city.
Further, the brown taxi driver is not invisible in the same way as the Latina
nannies, dog-walkers, Mexican gardeners, and Sri Lankan cooks that Saskia
Sassen locates as globalizations growing under class (Sassen 1998). It is
specifically in the discourse of the taxi as public space, as we will see later,
where the taxi driver is absent. It is not because their labor is invisible or
because they really do go unseen but because this form of brown is simply too
difficult to contend with. Such dangerous animations of public space, where
labor and the material conditions in which one labors are ignored, provides
fertile ground for the production of Brown Space.
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not just the other to normalized social order but a particular type of brown is
under extensive scrutiny after 9/11.
The work of knowing brown is regulatory and disciplinary working to
produce what Jack Bratich points to as part of the New Normal, in this case
here the new normalized civic space post-9/11. Brown is understood as an
indistinguishable figure or, as Bratich terms, an invisible network where
terrorists lurk. As such, not knowing what brown is exactly becomes an
important political weapon for the state (Bratich 2006). In fact, the normalized
society works best when there are unknown unknowns running amok because
it calls upon everyday citizens to know. Mark Andrejevic (2005) argues
individuals in a risk society or era responsibilization are encouraged to
internalize government strategies. The cab becomes vulnerable to what
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just that there is a constitutive outside, but rather that this outside can better
police brown by producing Brown Space while simultaneously maintaining a
public ideal free from the threat of brown.
In a point of divergence from Stuart Hall, Brown Space does not quite
correspond to his theorizing of diasporic space as a marked out space for a sub-
cultural identity within a hegemonic order (Hall & Jefferson 1976). The
Toronto taxi drivers I interviewed identified particular areas where people
from their diasporic communities would take rest. Sikh taxi drivers discussed
one particular house close to Torontos International Airport where they took
their breaks. Another referred to a taxi stand north of the city where Iranian
taxi drivers would stand around and stretch. While there are spaces of
congregation for drivers demarcated by the communities they identify with,
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of the cabs perceived social threats. In Toronto, the Ontario Coalition for
Poverty has been organizing with the Toronto Coalition of Concerned Taxi
Drivers for the past five years to fight the extensive ticketing, random checks,
and bi-law infractions that taxi drivers face when they pull over to catch fares
or park for a few minutes to use a toilet. In New York City, for example, the
taxi has a well documented history of regulation as a site of extensive
immigrant labor well before it was conceived of us a potential terrorist threat.
Biju Mathew in Taxi! Cabs and Capitalism in New York City explains Giulianis
Quality of Life reforms as they targeted taxi drivers (Mathew 2005). In fact, taxi
drivers were first publicly declared taxi terrorists well before September 11
by Mayor Rudy Giuliani in response to a one day taxi strike on May 13, 1998
in New York City. The taxi drivers job action was provoked by Giulianis
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reform which targeted the conduct of taxi drivers during a time of urban
renewal and the return of the white middle class to the city.1 Terrorist was
just one of the many labels Giuliani used to refer to the drivers they were
also described as rapists, racists, and uncivilized men who urinate in the street.
Mathew relays how the initiation of a NYPD Taxi Unit and Operation Refusal
was a means of disciplining and punishing taxi drivers public conduct (2005,
p. 129). Operation Refusal referred to a policy by Guiliani and the Taxi and
Limousine Commission that would automatically suspend taxi drivers who
refused service to any fare. According to Guiliani, South Asian taxi drivers had
been refusing African American fares. This complicated issue of US race
relations became a means to fine and dismiss taxi drivers for other imagined
offenses. Matthew maintains that New York Citys urban renewal manipulated
race relations as a mode of managing class relations. In the post-9/11 urban
fabric there emerges another opportunity to control the acceptable publicness
of brown and this time it occurs via lateral control.
The taxi is unsettling as an intimate and mobile space of human encounter
driven by the foreigner. It becomes especially threatening because routes and
paths cannot be predetermined. As WorldNetDaily, a conservative Christian
news service, covers, If theyre (taxi-drivers) not suspects themselves, they
pick up suspects at airports and take them to safehouses here. It is a Jihadi
Network (May 11, 2007). This sentiment is also captured by statements made
by a civilian soldier blogging in Luton, UK,
transportation patterns, know where people are going, know who is using
taxis (sic) and which locations are most vulnerable. In the Muslim world,
they are very good at handoff and messenger relay systems.3
Being mobile and adept at message relay becomes part of the Muslims
essential identity. Immigrant taxi drivers are not taxi drivers because of specific
economic and immigration stipulations that restrict access to other forms of
work or careers they are already qualified for. No, they are understood here as
taxi drivers because they are essentially both a mobile people and innately
terrorists. In other words, mobility and having too much access to the public
becomes an unruly and deviant characteristic of brown that must be quelled.
Another way of quelling browns presence is by marking out the conduct
of brown as inappropriate. This can be seen in the recent conservative
consternation over the installment of footbaths to accommodate drivers long
hours and religious needs at Kansas City airport. WorldNetDaily reported that
police in Kansas were concerned that footbaths would result in groups of
Muslim men loitering on airport property (May 11, 2007). Kansas City airport
officials responded by denying that the footbaths were explicitly for the
Muslim drivers. Their public statement does not however respond to the
accusation that police were concerned about Muslim taxi loiterers. Of course
somewhere in the conservative public dialogue one could now expect a taxi
terrorist link. Investors Business Daily claimed the footbaths were themselves a
sanctioning of terrorism. The last line of their article reads Whats next,
prayer rug cleaning, and box cutter dispensers (Investors Business Daily May 3,
2007). Celebrity news personalities, such as Dennis Miller and Bill OReilly,
responded to the footbath discussions with commentary on appropriate
public conduct (May 10, 2007). The production of Brown Space does not always
depend on a direct terrorist articulation. Miller and OReilly remain silent
about the terrorist accusation and instead stake bigoted claims over the taxi
drivers rights in civic space. Miller and OReilly demonize otherness in such a
192 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
way that is directed towards ridding space of certain types of publicness, ones
that the taxi drivers presence might entail.
Miller: Everybodys got to try to fit into the collective a little here. And
all this bringing your little specialties into the overview is starting to get
real boring with me. If youre a cabdriver, drive the guy who has hailed
you at some point.
OReilly: All right. I think youre right on the enough is enough. And I
think the point about, look, youre here, this is our country. Fit in. You
want to wash your feet, do it at home like everyone else, except . . .
Miller: Amen. The last 10 cab rides Ive had in New York the guy hadnt
washed anything.
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notion of the taxi as a public sphere on the road. The cabs from various US
urban centers are fitted with hidden cameras and a driver who asks pointed
and personal questions. In general, the taxi is often romanticized and
sometimes operates as a vehicle for a nostalgic public. The taxi continues to
be upheld as an emblem of thriving public space where people intersect,
cross paths, and share in the life of a city. But it is a pacified space, devoid
of brown.
In 2007 ABC Primetime aired an investigative expose Taxicab
Confessions: Racism on the Road What would you do if your cab driver
was saying hateful and racist things? The conclusion of the episode revealed
that the riding publics in New Jersey and Georgia would not intervene in
racist tirades from the drivers but often join in. The show featured two
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drivers one black and one white. This racial binary simplifies race relations
in the United States to a matter of stereotyping. The racial comments made
by the drivers referred to Jews, Chinese, Arabs, and African-Americans.
These were old binaries and essentialisms, not unimportant but a sort of well
established racism that the public would no longer be shocked by. It was as if
9/11 had never happened and America could return to racism as usual, not
this murky one that hardly even passes for racism. This feature on racism
today, in failing to contend with the material realities of taxi drivers post-
9/11, is indicative of how the dual strategic identification and denial of
brown is not seen as a form of racism but as necessary and justifiable to the
security of the social order.
In another popular use of the taxi as a mobile public, the taxi is promoted
as a site at which consumer desire might be transformed. Taxis in Toronto,
London, Sydney, and New York are increasingly equipped with interactive
screens in the backseat providing coupons to customers if they partake in
consumer trivia. External advertisements on the taxi transmit messages across
the city to target audiences that are upper class and high spenders who are
otherwise media elusive.4 Ubiquitous Media Corporation brands their own
initiative as the Intelligent Use of Space with genuinely engaged drivers who
will go the extra mile for the brand they are advertising. Here, the taxi is
understood as another public space to colonize and a spectacle to enhance
through privatization and media saturation. The taxi driver is imagined in the
service of commercial institutions rather than the public. It is no wonder then
that the response to the media saturation of the taxi is met by Habermasian like
laments of the structural transformation of the cab. Andrew Friedman, author
of The World is Flat, writes of cab drivers on their cellphones, in an op-ed in the
New York Times The Taxi Driver, I guess the era of foreign correspondents
quoting taxi drivers is over. The taxi driver is too busy to give you a quote
(Friedman 2006). It turns out that Friedman was perhaps more disgruntled
over the fact that he could not concentrate on his own work with the cab
driver talking on the phone:
194 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
After the car started to roll, I saw he had a movie playing on the screen in
the dashboard on the flat panel that usually displays the GPS road map.
I noticed this because between his talking on the phone and the movie, I
could barely concentrate. I, alas, was in the back seat trying to finish a
column on my laptop.
space makes intelligible the production of truth claims and knowledge about a
given population. Because the taxi eludes this form of ordering, one effective
way of ordering the taxi in public life occurs by way of backseat dialogue that
slips easily into public interrogations. The interior space of the cab becomes
subject to producing the truth of brown through interaction. When the state
and its media lapdogs (McChesney 2002) consistently maintain that the
enemy lies amongst us and is a shadowy figure murky and muddy as the
color brown they delegate to the public the work of finding and knowing this
faceless figure. Again, referring back to Bratich (2006) and Andrejevic (2005),
lateral surveillance is carried out as a form of sanctioned behavior under the
auspices of protecting of the nation.
A common backseat dialogue that works to fix the spectrum of brown
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People have always asked me where Im from. It is the first question you
get when you are a driver. When I first came they wanted to know about
the Gulf War, what kind of education I had, and if I was trying to get a
real job. Sometimes they were really asking to make sure I wasnt going
to try working, trying to take a job or something. Now (since 9/11) they
want to know if I have some relationship or something to say about the
whole thing (9/11).
People come up to the cab window and look in and look at the driver
from the passenger side. If they think you look like suspicious like if you
have a beard or you are wearing a hat (a taqiya), turban, there is
196 C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S
something with Arabic or even Hindi writing in the cab they look at it,
look at you, then they just pretend that they had a question to ask you and
then they walk to the next cab. No one used to stop and ask me questions
before.
With Adams example, we see that the spectrum of brown gathers the
taqiya, the turban, beards, and Arabic and Hindi characters. Adam adds, I
know some (drivers) have less things laying around the cab that would make
people ask questions, they dont want to deal with this for a ride. Similar to
the strategy in Melbourne of hiding your name tag, in New York City it has
become much more common for taxi drivers to place patriotic paraphernalia
somewhere in their car to negate the potential for harassment. Driving with a
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sticker of an eagle or flag signifies their love of freedom and therefore their
normality in the United States. A taxi driver in Melbourne profiled in the
Herald Sun explained how he speaks English as clearly as possible the instant
someone enters the cab (December 16, 2004). Sikh taxi drivers find
themselves in a terrible bind. Their turban is precisely the reason why many
drive cabs in the first place. Other forms of labor would require them to cut
their beards or request the removal of turbans.
Answering questions, providing information, and creating a comfortable
ride is already part of the immaterial labor of driving a cab. As Judy, one of
approximately 10 women cab drivers in Toronto explains, I listen to public
radio all day, read the newspaper every time I am waiting for a fare or on my
break, and can discuss anything with my passengers. I meet people from all
over and I can learn about places Ive never been. This relationship is mutual
in the best of circumstances and the taxi does become a potential public space
and site of political dialogue. But in some instances these interactions are
understood by the driver as a significant part of good customer service. SB
another driver from Iran, explains, Im not interested really in the stock
market but I need to know these things because I drive these business people
all day. Partly, I want them to know I am paying attention and secondly I know
it helps for my tips to provide a good conversation.
Significantly, the drivers also revealed the cultivation of a similar
disposition of silence in recounting instances of racist tirades and participation
in otherwise intrusive dialogue. Silence, and remaining stoic, is justified in the
name of customer service. As Abraham, a driver who moved to Toronto from
Eritrea a few years ago states,
It is just part of the job. You answer the questions even if you arent
comfortable. You dont know what they will do, who they are, if you
become angry, it might be more difficult, and you just want to get
through the time, drop them off, and let it go.
TA X I C A B P U B L I C S 197
Acknowledgements
This essay was first presented at the 2008 Crossroads in Cultural Studies
Conference in Kingston, Jamaica. A big thanks to Kumarini Silva for her early
encouragement in fall of 2006 to expand my work on the taxi and for her
feedback and advice on earlier drafts over the last few years. More thanks go to
two anonymous reviewers who provided engaging criticism and direction and
another thank you to Jeremy Packer for his comments on earlier drafts.
Notes
1 For a good discussion of how these reforms effected black/white race
relations in NYC see Torres (2003).
2 (Marx Darkside June 28, 2004) http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/
002351.php#c26846.
3 Terrorist Internet Super Highway, Tuesday, September 05, 2006 1:36 PM.
4 http://www.ubiq-cab.com.
5 Two of the 7/07 London suicide bombers were characterized as having
measured, thick English accents.
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