Co-Sponsors:
American Studies Program
Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
Institute on Advancing Just Societies
Program in African and African American Studies
Sociology Department
Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality
Stanford Ethnography Lab
Brandi T. Summers, Columbia University
How to Kill a (Black) City: Urbicide and the Power Geometries of Place in Oakland, CA
In this talk, I discuss how the destruction and disinvestment of Black Oakland via urban renewal policies of the post-WWII era (Negro Removal), the War on Poverty, War on Drugs, and most recently, the subprime mortgage crisis constituted a form of Black urbicide in Oakland—the forcible and intentional unmaking of Black urban spaces. In other words, it is through a set of processes and practices that we come to see how the state and private industry (capital) slowly but methodically chip away at the Black city. Black urbicide ignores, or even tries to cover up existing forms of urbanism that do not conform to the dominant (or ruling) political economies of race that structure the functioning of the city. This encompasses the current existence and aftermath of eviction and evisceration experienced by Black Americans in cities that had large and majority Black populations. By centering the role of urbicide in the state’s strategies to modernize Oakland, I provide a framework to read the city through racist policies that have driven the development and underdevelopment of so many other US cities and metropolitan regions. Ultimately, I account for what is at stake when thinking meaningfully about Black geographies; identifying struggles that Black people in Oakland face in response to intentional disappearance of Black space and a Black sense of place.