“The Ghetto is a Gold Mine”: The Racialized Temporality of Betterment

International Labor and Working-Class History ◽

10.1017/s0147547919000024 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 95 ◽

pp. 76-94

Author(s):

Marisa Solomon

Keyword(s):

Historically Black ◽

Gold Mine ◽

Coffee Shop ◽

Community Revitalization ◽

Racial Capitalism ◽

Black Neighborhood ◽

Material Conditions ◽

Material Index

AbstractGentrification makes trash a discursive and material index of degeneration, mobilizing projects to “clean” and “better” neighborhoods and people. This ethnographic article explores how trash's movements and labor reveal the spatialized and temporalized racial histories of neighborhood transformation in the historically black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy), Brooklyn and the gentrified town of Norfolk, Virginia. Foregrounding the objects and people whose value(s) are called into question as the context around them changes, I draw on two key interlocutors whose scavenging is conditioned by the “betterment”—community revitalization and “clean up”—programs that seek to displace them. As Sal “saves” Bed-Stuy by directing the flow of the dismembered ghetto, Superfly redirects coffee shop ephemera to black barbershops. By attending to how trash moves, Sal's and Superfly's labor make visible the material conditions of gentrification and point to how race and time are spatialized under racial capitalism.

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Ontological Captivity

differences ◽

10.1215/10407391-9479702 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 32 (3) ◽

pp. 85-113

Author(s):

Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

Keyword(s):

The Body ◽

Color Line ◽

Ontological Difference ◽

Detention Center ◽

Racial Capitalism ◽

Penal Colony ◽

Political Critique ◽

Conditions Of Possibility ◽

Material Conditions ◽

Broad Understanding

Departing from where Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Martin Heidegger’s gender-neutral Dasein left off, this article argues for “ontological captivity” as a critical analytic for questioning Being under conditions of racial capitalism. Based on a broad understanding of the Black Radical tradition, the author argues for the importance of connecting the analysis of ontological difference with the political critique of concrete historical and material conditions that structurally link what it means to be human to overlapping and mutually reinforcing technologies of capture. From the slave ship, the plantation, the reservation, the prison, the detention center, the penal colony, and the concentration camp to the ways in which injurious signifiers fix the body and arrest its mobility, ontological difference should be unthinkable outside a confrontation with its material conditions of possibility and impossibility. These are the material conditions that, from W. E. B. Du Bois’s analysis of the “color-line” to Calvin Warren’s analytic of “onticide,” from Lewis Gordon’s “antiblackness” to Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s “coloniality of being,” and from Hortense Spillers’s “being for the captor” to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s “ontological plasticization,” call for a political rather than an ethical interrogation of Being.

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The Chosen Ones

10.1525/california/9780520288348.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Nikki Jones

Keyword(s):

Historically Black ◽

Black Men ◽

Gender Ideologies ◽

Black Neighborhood ◽

Feminist Scholar ◽

Neighborhood Politics

In The Chosen Ones, sociologist and feminist scholar Nikki Jones shares the compelling story of a group of Black men living in San Francisco's historically Black neighborhood, the Fillmore. Against all odds, these men work to atone for past crimes by reaching out to other Black men, young and old, with the hope of guiding them towards a better life. Yet despite their genuine efforts, they struggle to find a new place in their old neighborhood. With a poignant yet hopeful voice, Jones illustrates how neighborhood politics, everyday interactions with the police, and conservative Black gender ideologies shape the men’s ability to make good and forgive themselves—and how the double-edged sword of community shapes the work of redemption.

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Pushing Back on Displacement: Community-Based Redevelopment through Historically Black Churches

Societies ◽

10.3390/soc11010010 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

pp. 10

Author(s):

Branden Born ◽

Rachel Berney ◽

Olivia Baker ◽

Mark R. Jones ◽

Donald King ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Historically Black ◽

Urban Areas ◽

Black Churches ◽

Metropolitan Region ◽

Community Based ◽

Black Neighborhood ◽

Communities Of Color ◽

History Of ◽

Common Problems ◽

Policy Strategies

Gentrification and subsequent displacement are common problems in cities, and result in the removal of poor communities and communities of color from urban areas as they move to cheaper locations in the metropolitan region. Here we describe a community-based approach to redevelopment by historic Black churches that seeks to counter such displacement and cultural removal. We explain the history of a historically Black neighborhood in Seattle and the founding and rationale for a church-led project called the Nehemiah Initiative. Our perspective is that of participants in the work of the Nehemiah Initiative and as faculty and students from a local university partner supporting it. We conclude with policy strategies that can be used to support such redevelopment in Seattle, with understanding that some may be broadly applicable to other cities.

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