New Jersey Online: Affective Histories in Newark’s Digital Archives

This article examines how Newark’s affective histories and narratives of racial violence are being reproduced in the city’s digital archives. This article examines two digital archives, Old Newark and the Newark Public Library’s My Newark Story, to explore how emotion is used by individuals and institutions to narrate Newark’s 1967 riots and the city’s subsequent waves of white flight, immigration, and systemic neglect. The article argues that while Old Newark serves as a space for former white Newarkers to express feelings of nostalgia, loss, and displacement that often cast themselves as the victims of diaspora and marginalization, My Newark Story functions as a corrective project that resists the centering of whiteness and feelings of victimization that have haunted Newark’s history.

White Fear, White Flight, the Rules of Racial Standing and Whiteness as Property: Why Two Critical Race Theory Constructs are Better Than One

Despite earning the highest grade point average (GPA) in her graduating class at the recently integrated Cleveland High School (CHS) in Cleveland, Mississippi, Ms. Jasmine Shepard, an African-American female, was named “co-valedictorian” with Ms. Heather Bouse, a White female, who had a lower GPA. Utilizing Derrick Bell’s rules of racial standing theory and Cheryl Harris’ analytical construct whiteness as property, this article examines Ms. Shepard’s lawsuit against the Cleveland School District. In addition to explaining how White flight was deployed as a policy distraction to justify the inequitable treatment of Ms. Jasmine Shepard, this article posits that the specter of Ms. Shepard becoming Cleveland High School’s first Black valedictorian triggered area Whites’ fear of losing the property value of their whiteness.

“Raw Power”: Protopunk Transformations of the Blues

Punk’s musical style can be considered as beginning with the transformations to blues resources explored mostly by white baby boomers invested in the sixties counterculture, especially in the northern Midwest, such as the Stooges and the MC5. Their approaches to the blues were a response to the changing stakes of musical expressions of whiteness and Blackness during the 1960s, connected to the social upheaval surrounding so-called white flight to the suburbs and the Second Great Migration of African Americans from the South. Some similar approaches to the blues were also cultivated in New York among musicians such as the Velvet Underground. Their music emphasized riffs, limited harmonic movement, and other features which are described in this chapter as the “Raw Power” approach to punk. But despite punk’s deep musical roots in the blues, the discourse around punk served to obscure these connections.

Buffalo at the Crossroads

This book is a diverse set of twelve cutting-edge chapters that highlight the outsized importance of Buffalo, New York, within the story of American urbanism. The chapters consider the history of Buffalo's built environment in light of contemporary developments and in relationship to the evolving interplay between nature, industry, and architecture. The chapters examine Buffalo's architectural heritage in rich context: the Second Industrial Revolution; the City Beautiful movement; world's fairs; grain, railroad, and shipping industries; urban renewal and so-called white flight; and the larger networks of labor and production that set the city's economic fate. The book pays attention to currents that connect contemporary architectural work in Buffalo to the legacies established by its esteemed architectural founders: Richardson, Olmsted, Adler, Sullivan, Bethune, Wright, Saarinen, and others. The book is a compelling introduction to Buffalo's architecture and developed landscape that frames discussion about the city.