Read on Twitter
Excited to share this new work I did with @louise_seamster, which was published last week! (
) https://twitter.com/societyandspace/status/1327267542663122956
) https://twitter.com/societyandspace/status/1327267542663122956
This article has a long origin story which you can read more about in this post by @louise_seamster, but I call it the “prequel” to the article Louise and I got published in Environmental Sociology this summer, “What is Environmental Racism For?” https://twitter.com/louise_seamster/status/1286068595638796299
https://twitter.com/louise_seamster/status/1286068595638796299
In What is Environmental Racism For?, @louise_seamster and I argue for more theoretical work towards explaining the purpose and mechanisms of environmental racism, connected to broader processes of local development.
We highlight an unincorporated Black community called Tamina, TX to show how environ. racism is part of the standard model of local white development. Tamina predates the white places around it, including The Woodlands, by 140 yrs, yet is fighting for water and sanitation.
Most public narratives of Tamina, and the many Black-founded places in my research, place blame on Black leadership for “dysfunctional governance” as a way to explain stark “underdevelopment” and lack of resources.
We see this narrative in any place run by Black people—it was used for Michigan’s emergency manager law, which stripped half the Black pop. of its govt and control of finances and infrastructure, as @louise_seamster studies in Flint and Benton Harbor. https://tinyurl.com/y4k9jq64
But we focus on Black-founded places rather than white-founded, majority Black places b/c the former pose unique threats to white development. Black-founded places aren’t as influenced by white spatial imaginaries. So they are big targets for what we call creative extraction.
Creative extraction describes how white towns catalyze their development with resources from beyond their borders, often in Black places. This occurs through three mechanisms: theft of resources (land + finance), gradual erosion (environ. + infras.), and political exclusion.
What this looked like was The Woodlands using HUD Model Communities funding in the 1970s to build a unincorporated luxury resort city by stealing Tamina’s land and dumping its construction waste in an illegal dump near Tamina’s historic cemetery (which they can no longer use).
Creative extraction also looks like the City of Shenandoah working with state government officials to literally redraw Tamina’s longstanding water boundary, cutting and moving its water line to make way for Shenandoah’s new strip mall.
And creative extraction looks like Shenandoah using its extraterritorial jurisdiction (ETJ) power to erase Tamina by passing zoning laws that render their homes incompatible with local development, exploiting that ETJ residents can’t vote or participate in city politics.
This may feel resonant with work like Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa—similar model, diff. scale. We argue that the social contract/commonwealth concept of the “town” is a myth. The more accurate model is Mills’ racial contract + Robinson’s racial capitalism.
Put simply, there is no independent development, especially under capitalism. There is only relational development. White development “successes” are premised on the taking or degrading of resources from marginalized places like Tamina, or Indigenous lands, or Latinx colonias.
This is important for a number of reasons that I’ll let you read about in the article, but one of the most important takeaways is that “equitable development” does not exist.
We can’t argue for equitable development given current definitions of “development.” We’d have to completely change the definition in the US and much of the world to stop these awful, but very ordinary outcomes.
Anyway, thanks for reading! We’d love your thoughts on the article. Also, we’d be remiss if we didn’t shout out some of the Black place scholars who inspire our work— @FreeBlackTX, @Karla_Slocum, @zfelice, and @manthonyhunter.
AND scholars like @wahgraphy who write about extractive development from Indigenous lands, and @ProfessorJepson who’s written about the politics of infrastructure in Latinx colonias, and @GeogPavi who is writing a book about intimate politics of race and waste. Read them all!
