From Protest to Property: The Growth of Neoliberal Neighborhood Activism

• In Event: White Backlash and State Violence

Abstract

This paper joins recent work on the construction of a neoliberal regime of race and class relations after the 1960s. I show that elites in urban government and philanthropy helped create a field of neoliberal civic and political institutions in minority urban neighborhoods since the late 1960s. These neighborhood institutions developed a moderate, pro-capitalist, and later distinctively neoliberal racial justice praxis, which dissociated discourses of community control and racial empowerment from social democratic and radical programs and mass mobilization tactics. Using archived organizational documents and newspapers, I trace the development of these institutions in two neighborhoods from the late 1960s through the 1980s, and show that they produced moderate and later neoliberal racial justice discourses and practices, shaping public conversations about racial justice and related issues. I highlight the continual role of federal and urban policy, state repression, and philanthropy in driving these developments.

As of the late 1960s, urban neighborhoods contained racial and economic justice activism diverse with respect to ideology (including conservative, liberal, social democratic, and radical leftist tendencies) and strategy (including elite-centered advocacy, mass protest, and more militant practices). Since the late 1960s, government and philanthropic funding and the urgent service needs of neighborhood residents increasingly pulled neighborhood activists toward a focus on elite-funded service provision and property development. At the same time, state repression, and intense opposition from entrenched political interests, pushed activists away from social democratic or radical leftist programs and mass mobilization strategies—and diminished or destroyed most activist organizations which did not abandon these programs.

This transformation of the field of activism had crucial consequences for the production of racial and economic justice discourses and practices. Many groups which embraced service provision and community development continued to construct their work as racial justice practice, framing their goals and programs in discourses about community control and authenticity, popularized by the 1960s movements. At the same time, the destruction of social democratic and radical racial justice groups ensured that after the 1960s, no significant institutional actor in urban neighborhoods articulated competing definitions of community control, authenticity, and empowerment. By the 1980s, a neoliberal praxis, attaching discourses of community control to programs of property development and elite-funded service provision, emerged as the uncontested vision of racial justice in local public spheres.

Author

• James Evans Morone, Wake Forest University