Race and Rurality in the Global Economy


Book Description

Essays that examine globalization’s effects with an emphasis on the interplay of race and rurality as it occurs across diverse geographies and peoples. Issues of migration, environment, rurality, and the visceral “politics of place” and “space” have occupied center stage in recent electoral political struggles in the United States and Europe, suffused by an antiglobalization discourse that has come to resonate with Euro-American peoples. Race and Rurality in the Global Economysuggests that this present fractious global politics begs for closer attention to be paid to the deep-rooted conditions and outcomes of globalization and development. From multiple viewpoints the contributors to this volume propose ways of understanding the ongoing processes of globalization that configure peoples and places via a politics of rurality in a capitalist world economy, and through an optics of raciality that intersects with class, gender, identity, land, and environment. In tackling the dynamics of space and place, their essays address matters such as the heightened risks and multiple states of insecurity in the global economy; the new logics of expulsion and primitive accumulation dynamics shaping a new “savage sorting”; patterns of resistance and transformation in the face of globalization’s political and environmental changes; the steady decline in the livelihoods of people of color globally and their deepened vulnerabilities; and the complex reconstitution of systemic and lived racialization within these processes. This book is an invitation to ask whether our dystopia in present politics can be disentangled from the deepening sense of “white fragility” in the context of the historical power of globalization’s raced effects.




Race and American Political Development


Book Description

This volume explores how the study of race can transform our understandings of political development and how studying political development can inform our understandings of race and racialization.




The American Political Economy


Book Description

Drawing together leading scholars, the book provides a revealing new map of the US political economy in cross-national perspective.




Race, Racism and Development


Book Description

Race, Racism and Development places racism and constructions of race at the centre of an exploration of the dominant discourses, structures and practices of development. Combining insights from postcolonial and race critical theory with a political economy framework, it puts forward provocative theoretical analyses of the relationships between development, race, capital, embodiment and resistance in historical and contemporary contexts. Exposing how race is central to development policies and practices relating to human rights, security, good governance, HIV/AIDS, population control, NGOs, visual representations and the role of diasporas in development, the book raises compelling questions about contemporary imperialism and the possibilities for transnational political solidarity.




Colored Property


Book Description

Northern whites in the post–World War II era began to support the principle of civil rights, so why did many of them continue to oppose racial integration in their communities? Challenging conventional wisdom about the growth, prosperity, and racial exclusivity of American suburbs, David M. P. Freund argues that previous attempts to answer this question have overlooked a change in the racial thinking of whites and the role of suburban politics in effecting this change. In Colored Property, he shows how federal intervention spurred a dramatic shift in the language and logic of residential exclusion—away from invocations of a mythical racial hierarchy and toward talk of markets, property, and citizenship. Freund begins his exploration by tracing the emergence of a powerful public-private alliance that facilitated postwar suburban growth across the nation with federal programs that significantly favored whites. Then, showing how this national story played out in metropolitan Detroit, he visits zoning board and city council meetings, details the efforts of neighborhood “property improvement” associations, and reconstructs battles over race and housing to demonstrate how whites learned to view discrimination not as an act of racism but as a legitimate response to the needs of the market. Illuminating government’s powerful yet still-hidden role in the segregation of U.S. cities, Colored Property presents a dramatic new vision of metropolitan growth, segregation, and white identity in modern America.




Black and Tired


Book Description

African American scholar Anthony Bradley understands the growing interest in the intersections of theology and economics emerging in light of Christianity's commitment to loving the poor. Local and global disparities in human flourishing call for prudential judgments that wed good intentions with sound economic principles. This book tackles the issues of race, politics, contemporary culture, globalization, and education by wedding moral theology and economics. For readers who enjoy the writings of African-American intellectuals like Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, this book will be a breath of fresh air in terms of economics and public policy but is unique because it also explicitly applies Christian moral teachings to today's global concerns.




Race for Profit


Book Description

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST, 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion. Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers – as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.




Detroit


Book Description

Hub of the American auto industry and site of the celebrated Riverfront Renaissance, Detroit is also a city of extraordinary poverty, unemployment, and racial segregation. This duality in one of the mightiest industrial metropolises of twentieth-century North America is the focus of this study. Viewing the Motor City in light of sociology, geography, history, and planning, the authors examine the genesis of modern Detroit. They argue that the current situation of metropolitan Detroit—economic decentralization, chronic racial and class segregation, regional political fragmentation—is a logical result of trends that have gradually escalated throughout the post-World War II era. Examining its recent redevelopment policies and the ensuing political conflicts, Darden, Hill, Thomas, and Thomas, discuss where Detroit has been and where it is going. In the series Comparative American Cities, edited by Joe T. Darden.




Histories of Racial Capitalism


Book Description

The relationship between race and capitalism is one of the most enduring and controversial historical debates. The concept of racial capitalism offers a way out of this impasse. Racial capitalism is not simply a permutation, phase, or stage in the larger history of capitalism—since the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Americas, capitalism, in both material and ideological senses, has been racial, deriving social and economic value from racial classification and stratification. Although Cedric J. Robinson popularized the term, racial capitalism has remained undertheorized for nearly four decades. Histories of Racial Capitalism brings together for the first time distinguished and rising scholars to consider the utility of the concept across historical settings. These scholars offer dynamic accounts of the relationship between social relations of exploitation and the racial terms through which they were organized, justified, and contested. Deploying an eclectic array of methods, their works range from indigenous mortgage foreclosures to the legacies of Atlantic-world maroons, from imperial expansion in the continental United States and beyond to the racial politics of municipal debt in the New South, from the ethical complexities of Latinx banking to the postcolonial dilemmas of extraction in the Caribbean. Throughout, the contributors consider and challenge how some claims about the history and nature of capitalism are universalized while others remain marginalized. By theorizing and testing the concept of racial capitalism in different historical circumstances, this book shows its analytical and political power for today’s scholars and activists.




Race & Economics


Book Description

Walter E. Williams applies an economic analysis to the problems black Americans have faced in the past and still face in the present to show that that free-market resource allocation, as opposed to political allocation, is in the best interests of minorities. He debunks many common labor market myths and reveals how excessive government regulation and the minimum-wage law have imposed incalculable harm on the most disadvantaged members of our society.