The urban process under racial capitalism: Race, anti-Blackness, and capital accumulation

ABSTRACT

This paper employs racial capitalism as a framework for understanding the urban process. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: (1) to center the racial character of the urban process within a broader political economy of racial capitalism and (2) to position capitalism and racism as mutually dependent systems of exploitation. The paper begins by discussing the omission of race and racism within urbanization processes. Here, the work of David Harvey is critiqued in order to highlight not only the contradictions of capitalism, but also those of Marxist scholars in understanding urban development. The paper then discusses the forms of racial capitalism through modalities of dispossession and displacement, the agents engaged in this process, and the competing ideologies that structure the urban political economy, particularly in the U.S. The paper ends with suggestions for future research to consider the constitutive nature of capitalism and racism in producing urbanization processes.

This article is referred to by:

The urban process and city building under racial capitalism: Reflections on Prentiss A. Dantzler’s “The urban process under racial capitalism: Race, anti-Blackness, and capital accumulation”

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the editors of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City. This paper benefitted from several scholars including Jason Hackworth, Junia Howell, Nene Igietseme, Elizabeth Korver-Glenn, and Elora Raymond. The author would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments.

Notes

1. Loughran (2015) argues that Du Bois’s urban theory offers a richer understanding of urban processes due to his focus on how the socially-constructed racial hierarchy of the United States shaped the material conditions of industrial cities. While classic urban sociological canon focuses on the Chicago School and its use of an ecological approach, Du Bois argues that racial stratification is a fundamental feature of the modern city and urbanization and urban migration.

2. The New World denotes the newly occupied lands of Indigenous people within present day North America.

3. While the focus here begins with Harvey’s (1978) article, these contradictions have been further explored in subsequent writings. As Roediger (2019) states, Harvey’s distinction rests upon understanding capitalism, which he argues is permeated with race and gender oppression. However, on the other hand, Harvey contends that capital can be examined without a need to examine those same categories. I agree with Roediger’s (2019) larger discussion that race has to be central in understanding the logic of capital.

4. In The Limits of Capital and The New Imperialism (2003), David Harvey notes his theory of “the spatial fix” – a process to explain the geographic structuring and restructuring of capital flows across loci of profitability. Situated in larger discussions of globalization, Harvey suggests capitalism has an insatiable thirst to resolve inner crises by geographic expansion and (re)structuring. In some ways, he likens this drive to that of a technological fix and economic growth. However, it is here too where such conceptualization fails to consider how such “fixes” incorporate devaluation processes dependent upon who occupies such spaces. As Gibbons (2016) notes, “the unbroken link between race and value has meant that no physical depreciation is necessary for the existence of a ‘rent gap’ in communities of color, but of course redlining practices, the withdrawal of resources, the practices of absentee landlords and the like have also been pivotal in placing capital’s spatial fix” (p. 874).

5. Within the case of the U.S., among other countries, Black people served as slaves – a dual form of exploited labor and property. Yet, even when Black people received their emancipation, racial hierarchies remained intact as they sought for their own civil rights. The Black experience within the U.S. is often historically contextualized upon segregated urban communities while other oppressed groups like Indigenous people are rendered invisible from urban spaces. As such, processes such as segregation and suburbanization align the Black experience with the urban as the epidemy of capitalist production.

6. For more information here, see Porter and Yiftachel’s (2019) special issue in Settler Colonial Studies.

7. The “right to the city” concept is attributed to the work of Henri Lefebvre (1996) noting that any particular revolution has to be an urban political movement making more practical the rights of urban dwellers and the users of local services.

8. Much of Glass’s (1964) argument around gentrification in London focuses on changing patterns of consumption. Part of the changes she articulated dealt with the simultaneous practices of stagnation, aggregation and expansion. Similar arguments were made in the Chicago School by early urban sociologist including Robert Park and Ernest W. Burgess conceptualizing “the city” through a human ecological perspective (see Park & Burgess, 2019; Korver-Glenn et al., 2021).

9. Other scholars such as Squires (1989) have argued about the ideology of privatism as the relationship between the public and private sectors in the 1960s, largely touted as cost saving mechanisms necessary to revitalize he city centers of America as a necessary approach for local and regional economic growth. The “privatized city” becomes the site of such partnerships through policy tools including tax breaks, low-interest loans and deregulation. See Squires (1989) for a detailed discussion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Prentiss A. Dantzler

Prentiss A. Dantzler is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. He has previously served as a Canada-U.S. Fulbright Scholar and as a Scholar-In-Residence at the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research sits at the nexus of urban poverty, housing policy, race relations, and community development. Dantzler’s research has appeared in several academic venues with recent work in Urban Studies, Housing Policy Debate, and Law and Inequality. He currently serves as a Deputy Editor for City and Community and on the governing board for the Urban Affairs Association. He has previously held faculty appointments at Georgia State University and Colorado College. He received his PhD in Public Affairs with a concentration in Community Development from Rutgers University-Camden. He also holds an MPA from West Chester University and a BS from Penn State University.