When Democracy Disappears: Emergency Management in Benton Harbor

In this case study, I look at Benton Harbor, Michigan’s tenure under a state-appointed “emergency manager,” with extensive local powers replacing all local elected government, and a single imperative to balance the city’s budget. The law, ostensibly race-neutral, wound up targeting almost all of Michigan’s cities with significant black population. The law ultimately disenfranchised half the state’s black population but only two percent of whites, as well as the majority of local black officials. This law invalidates a basic civil right and prerequisite for urban political theory: electoral democracy. Who holds power in the urban regime when the state takes over?Drawing on 44 interviews, observations and archival research, I argue that a white urban regime governs without elected representation in this majority-black city. Emergency management, which shut out black officials, allowed this white urban regime to consolidate its influence, showing the deeper disenfranchisement inherent to this law. While posited as restoring “order” to troubled management, the process of emergency management in fact prolongs political crisis. But the ideological framing of emergency management as “neutral,” and black politics as “corrupt” or “self-interested,” provides the logic to blame black governance for structural disinvestment and white-led extraction. (Note: this is the version that was accepted pre-copyediting. It will be updated once the final version comes out in Du Bois Review later this year. There are typos.)