Racial capitalism and anti-Blackness beyond the urban core

ABSTRACT

In this brief essay, I respond to Henry-Louis Taylor Jr.’s “The urban process and city building under racial capitalism.” First, I discuss the limits of situating the urban process as one squarely focused on city-building. Although a salient feature of the urban process, the urban here relates to processes of geographically expansive racialized urbanization versus one solely focused on Black marginality within cities. Second, I expand upon this distinction by underscoring how anti-Blackness extends beyond the urban core. Lastly, I offer a brief contrast between the thematic concepts of dispossession versus displacement used within our complementary frameworks. I end with a few remarks regarding the differences presented here as they relate to ongoing and future resistance efforts, arguing that anti-Blackness has always been confronted with Black people making space and place.

KEYWORDS:

• Racial capitalism
• urbanization
• displacement
• resistance

This article responds to:

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”

Introduction

My engagement with racial capitalism as a concept surfaced during the ongoing cries to put an end to state-sponsored violence against Black people and places. The images of Black trauma and death became disturbingly mainstream and normalized. During my initial years of graduate school, I closely followed the aftermath of Trayvon Martin’s killing. Trayvon Martin was killed in Sanford, Florida. He was fatally shot on February 26, 2012, in a gated community by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer. Trayvon Martin’s death and the subsequent trial of George Zimmerman sparked a significant amount of national and international attention and debate about issues related to race, self-defense laws, and gun control. Activists and advocates invoked racial capitalism as a way to underscore the particular manifestations of state violence upon racialized communities. However, what was most notable to me in reflecting on this historic event was the place in which Trayvon Martin lost his life. He wasn’t in public housing or in the iconic ghetto. He was merely walking in a gated community under local surveillance by someone who deemed him out of place. Race serves as particular marker of belonging, valuation, and humanization.

Thinking through the ways in which urban scholars dilute the significance of race from any critical understanding of how communities come to be, I employed racial capitalism as a way to think through how capitalism structured processes of dispossession and displacement by embedding mechanisms of race, racialization and racism within their everyday operation. I do not see these as unique from the past, rather, what Hartman (2008) conceives of as the afterlife of slavery—“the skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” overdetermined by slavery’s “racial calculus and … political arithmetic” (p. 6). Urban processes like gentrification, suburbanization, and poverty (de)concentration all rely upon particular social and property relations. Thus, people and places embody a series of spatial practices that further determine who belongs and who doesn’t and how the state should respond. Similar to Issar’s (2021) critique of neoliberalism, I invoked racial capitalism as a corrective to Marxist geographers, like David Harvey, as an attempt to situate contemporary urban processes within a longue durée framework to highlight how these spatial practices operate across time and space. Employing racial capitalism is not only a theoretical technique, but also a political choice.

Taylor Jr.’s (2023) thoughts on my piece come at a critical time in my own thinking about racial capitalism. In some ways, I agree with his assessment of the framework itself. As Taylor Jr. argues, in explicating the racial character of the urban process, the framework is somewhat incomplete, particularly as it relates to questions of agency and articulating possible forms of resistance. The effort to describe such a process must include space for revolutionary movements—a critical part of the urban process for Black and other marginalized groups. Even in the direst situations, anti-Blackness has been met with Black people making space and place for themselves resulting in diverse forms of expression (e.g., Hunter et al., 2016; Kelley, 2022). In previous and subsequent work (e.g., Clark et al., 2018; Dantzler, 2022; Dantzler & Reynolds, 2020), I briefly take up this tension to highlight the ways in which groups like the civil rights movement and Black Lives Matter inspire different imaginaries about our collective urban futures. My engagement with racial capitalism stems from a passion to understand not only what was or what is, but also what could be. In many ways, both Taylor Jr. and I are seeking to manifest such liberatory realities by intentionally positioning the role of race, racialization and racism in (re)producing the urban while highlighting the quest to subvert or overcome the consequences of historical and contemporary racialized uneven development. Such feats push us closer to a dialectics of liberation reminding us that scholarship is a political project.

In this brief essay, I respond to Taylor Jr.’s critique of my 2021 article. First, I take up the tension around the urban process as one squarely focused on city-building. Although a salient feature of the urban process, the “urban” here relates to processes of urbanization versus one solely focused on Black marginality within U.S. cities. Second, I expand upon this distinction by underscoring anti-Blackness beyond the urban core. Lastly, I offer a brief contrast between the thematic concepts used within our frameworks. I end with a few remarks regarding the differences presented here as they relate to ongoing and future resistance efforts.

Urbanizing racial capitalism

While the use of racial capitalism has been widespread across other disciplines, its application in urban studies has been seldom until recent years. Having read and engaged with several Marxist geographers and scholars of political economy, I have been increasingly frustrated with how race/racialization/racism (among other systems of differentiation) were relegated as a byproduct of capital accumulation rather than central features structuring it. The term itself has transversed geographic boundaries from activism and advocacy efforts in South Africa to contemporary fights for racial justice around the globe (see Levenson & Paret, 2023). Its application holds great promise not only for understanding the subjugation of racialized subjects, but broader worldmaking efforts that draw upon historical and contemporary movements around the world. Invoking racial capitalism as an urban process allows us the opportunity to rethink our urban futures.

In his corrective measure, Taylor Jr. proposes three themes to situate the urban process and city building under racial capitalism: accumulation, dispossession, and the racial struggle. In doing so, he argues that exploitation will breed resistance through the racial struggle. Scholars of urban history can easily draw such inferences looking at conflicts within American cities over the 19th and 20th centuries (e.g., Hunter, 2013; Rodriguez, 2021; Sugrue, 2014). Even today, grassroot organizations and local communities are fighting against the development of “Cop City” in the Atlanta region. Designed on the site of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm in DeKalb County’s South River Forest, this $90 million police training facility will be one of the largest militarized police training centers in the U.S. Yet, regardless of protest efforts and growing concerns around policing, and its environmental impact, the Atlanta City Council approved funding through taxpayer dollars and funds from the Atlanta Police Foundation. Indeed, the fight for the city, and city building, is a racial struggle.

However, my attention to Harvey’s (1978) analysis of the urban process was an attempt to understand it from a disposition that did not center or confine processes of capital accumulation to the city, but urbanization processes that bind particular valuation strategies to both people and places. In my reading of his article, the laborer embodied a particular ethos of ownership over their production that did not align with my own understanding of Black, or rather American history. Moreover, through my reading of other work within this space (e.g., Du Bois, 1935, Gilmore, 2007; McKittrick, 2006; Robinson, 2000), it was apparent that Black people weren’t marginal to urbanization processes; rather central to their operation. To underscore the role of Black subjugation in creating the urban form, I sought out to highlight how people and places are subjectively valued for the sake of capital accumulation (Dantzler, 2021). This framework helps center uneven development as a racialization process in and of itself.

I take the “urban” seriously not only as a way to describe city dynamics, but urbanization more broadly. Drawing from the settler city framework may have unintentionally obscured this description. While I am interested in what cities are doing within their geographical and juridical boundaries, they do not operate in isolation. Similar to Hugill (2017), I would argue that the production and governance of urban environments differ in milieus where colonial settlers have (re)settled. To this end, while the city may be the crucible of urban processes, these processes draw upon other geographic spaces to centralize its impact on specific urban landscapes for the benefit of particular individuals and communities. For example, the growth of the suburbs in the mid to late 20th century occurred through the devaluation of city spaces and the dehumanization of communities of color. Taylor Jr. argues that the urban process within the settler city changed, especially after Whites gained hegemonic domination over Indigenous population and their territories. Yet, to render the colonization process as complete risks rendering the ongoing efforts of Indigenous people as obsolete or historic, and Black resistance as an episodic response to exploitation and expropriation. Indeed, there is some tension here (see Mays, 2023a, 2023b). In many ways, Indigenous erasure and Black subjugation have been a precondition for urbanization processes. Yet, the agents, modalities, and forms here increasingly become important in deconstructing the urban process.

Taylor Jr. also divorces the urban process from city building as a corrective measure. By situating the urban process as an exploration of “ideology, culture, governance, population growth, economic shifts, technological advancement, and the down-on-ground activities of varied populations,” he separates city building into a physical process. The actual construction of the city thus grows out of these symbolic forms of cocreation with the built environment being used as a tool for continued accumulation. As a prolific urban planning and community development scholar, it is not surprising Taylor Jr. draws such a distinction. However, in reducing the city-building process to the actual building of the urban metropolis, Taylor Jr.’s reframing does not capture the variety, or scale, of such processes. That is, in many cases, the urban core is situated as the focal point of urbanization. This frame obscures the temporality of contemporary North American cities, many of which have shifted to more regional or metropolitan foci or other strategies such a shrinking and polynucleated cities. Moreover, it offers little utility for understanding regional differences (Robinson, 2014; also see; Hackworth, 2019).

Anti-Blackness beyond the urban core

The urban process is just that: a process-one not confined to city limits, or even metro areas, but one involving both symbolic and physical constructions of value for people and places resulting in different forms of racialized uneven development (see Dantzler & Peron, 2023). The underdevelopment of racialized neighborhoods is a quintessential feature here. Situating dispossession as a central theme may offer a more expansive understanding, but the model of dispossession is not the only feature of capital extraction. The growth of American ghettos existed alongside the expansion of suburban communities, changes in state welfare regimes, and the creation of new political institutions and financial instruments. Displacement here does not mean removal from physical space, but rather dislocation from the means of capital accumulation. In many ways, scholars have drawn out the notion of “cities within the city” to denote micro-spatial practices that exist within city spaces (Iveson, 2013; Mayorga et al., 2022). However, many of these exploitative processes exist beyond, or in tandem, with city dynamics. For example, scholars have also highlighted the limitations of Black mobility through community resistance and antagonistic state power in middle-class, suburban communities (Clergé, 2019; Hackworth, 2019; Pattillo, 2013). Taylor Jr. argues that displacement is embedded within the dispossession model. This is one point of contention between he and I.

Taylor Jr. argues, “displacement and dispossession are not conflated, but displacement is included in the dispossession model because they are interactive forces that occur simultaneously, or displacement will result from dispossession.” As Summers (2023) notes, displacement is always incomplete, leaving room for disruption. Beyond the physical forms of displacement, its symbolic forms create space through which residents can reclaim space while also generating public conversations about dispossession in the city. To that end, displacement serves as a form of placemaking/taking by inviting “reimagining, resistance, and contestation” (Summers, 2023, p. 3). In this regard, Taylor Jr.’s approach focuses on the act of displacement rather than the condition of displaceability (see Yiftachel, 2020). By focusing on the means of economic production and hyper-exploitation, Taylor Jr’s framework situates racial capitalism as an external force shaping the livelihoods of Black urban denizens. Yet, he conflates displacement as a complete process rather than a boundless embodied process—one that requires economic and juridical considerations of where one can be. A more nuanced understanding of displacement helps extend the theoretical applicability of racial capitalism by denoting the “pluriversal” understanding of urban change outside of U.S. cities (Yiftachel, 2020; also see; Melgaço & Xavier Pinto Coelho, 2022). Moreover, questions surrounding the scale and pace of urban change are coupled with considerations of valuation alongside hierarchies attending to geographic understandings of race and ethnicity (Rucks-Ahidiana, 2022). The agents and ideologies within racial capitalism provide the basis for understanding exploitative processes.

Centering his frame on Black socio-spatial units, Taylor Jr.’s themes of accumulation, dispossession, and racial struggle may allow for a more robust understanding of Black marginality. However, the scale of this marginality rests well outside the confines of urban neighborhoods. The problem of scale here is still not addressed. In providing a corrective measure, Taylor Jr.’s conceptualization of how the city-building process recreates the racial hierarchy as a neighborhood hierarchy reinforcing Black marginality’s connection to particular places and not a process of exploitation and dehumanization that follow racial subjects across different scales of geography. Levenson and Paret (2022) refer to the way in which the concept and study of racial capitalism circulates across countries and contexts of struggle. By divorcing the urban process strictly from the city, we can leave space for revolutionary efforts that cut across geographic boundaries.

In many ways, the rise, decline, and subsequent revival of urban centers required state governments, private actors, and communities at large to consider the “Negro Problem.” However, that problem is not confined to the past, nor is it solely within the ideologies of White (and other non-Black) individuals and communities. Pattillo (2010), among others (e.g., Clergé, 2019; Hackworth, 2019; Lacy, 2007), remind us that Black marginality is not confined to the segregated, marginalized, and underdeveloped neighborhoods. Housing values don’t just increase as a residential area becomes Whiter and more-class exclusive. The devaluation of Black people is placeless as it serves as a spectre of racial capitalism across different types of institutions including, but not limited to, housing, education, criminal justice, healthcare and employment. Racial capitalism bounds this placelessness to systems of valuation. To this end, the urban process under racial capitalism relies upon subjected valuations and extractive spatial practices (Rucks-Ahidiana, 2022). Thus, the racial hierarchy is normalized and situated as a part of everyday urban life (Dantzler et al., 2022).

While not exhaustive, my framework provides a guide for others to consider the racial character of urbanization. Taylor Jr.’s corrective measure more vividly helps us understand the hyperexploitation of Black Americans. However, around the world, Black people are deemed out of place (see Combs, 2022; Hackworth, 2023). Anti-Blackness is a precondition for the perpetuation of capitalism drawn from a particular understanding of a-spatiality that defines the treatment of enslaved Black people (Bledsoe & Wright, 2019) and their heirs. The urban here can be understood not only as an urban development strategy focused on urban neighborhoods or even a more focused set of planning activities, but a global expansion of capitalist practices that rest upon the a-spatiality and dehumanization of Black people (Bledsoe & Wright, 2019). The afterlife of slavery continues to shape and reshape processes of urbanization.

In coda

What does revolution look like under the auspices of racial capitalism? Both Taylor Jr. and I take aim at the particular role of Black Americans in creating the urban frontier across the United States. In our quest to highlight the particular ways in which the urban process embeds race/racialization/racism within its (re)production, we seek to think through potentialities of resistance efforts. However, as the urban planning scholar Elora Raymond reminded us at the 2022 annual meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, “Inclusion within empire is not freedom!” Calls for desegregation, the expansion of homeownership, and “diversity efforts” do not disrupt the logics of racial capitalism, rather, they reinforce the colonial project of endless American expansion. Of course, there is a politics of intervention. My goal in seeking such a framework rest not in drawing more racialized subjects into the capitalistic order. Rather, I am attempting to imagine something different.

To imagine a future of urban life requires a reconceptualization of social relations beyond that of private property logics and hierarchical neighborhood designations. As Bates (2023) argues, “We need to shelter and grow spaces that exist outside of markets, where we can value care work and relationships, celebrate the cultures and contributions of Black radical thinkers and doers, and heal our relationship with the earth” (p. 804). Only then will we be able to articulate a vision for the future divorced from the varieties of racial capitalism.

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Prentiss A. Dantzler

Prentiss A. Dantzler is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Faculty Advisor to the School of Cities at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on housing policy, neighborhood change, and residential mobility with a particular focus on urban poverty, social welfare policies, race and ethnic relations, and community development. Prentiss 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.