Rumor Control, Neighborhood Surveillance, and the Affective Entitlements of Whiteness under Racial Liberalism

• In Event: Voluntary Associations and Civil Society: Legacies of Systemic Inequality

Abstract

In the postwar decades, Chicago’s Southwest Side underwent significant socio-spatial restructuring and an attendant reconfiguration of its racial geographies. As Black residents moved into neighborhoods whose racial exclusivity had long been secured through institutionalized and vigilante forms of white supremacist violence, many white residents perceived this transformation as a threat to the social privilege and economic security guaranteed by whiteness. While many civic associations responded to racial transition with overt anti-Black violence, the South Lynne Community Council in the West Englewood neighborhood sought to manage integration through efforts to prevent panic peddling by real estate speculators and curb white flight. Drawing on archival research of the council’s records, this paper demonstrates that the ostensibly neutral pillars of the council’s neighborhood stabilization agenda – property improvement and rumor control – became mechanisms for producing racial meanings and institutionalizing the surveillance of newly arrived Black residents. Efforts to disrupt blockbusting by controlling rumors about racial change and inspecting local properties, though framed as strategies for achieving “balanced integration,” fused property with race in ways that re-enshrined white affective entitlements and their drive to dictate the terms of Black residents’ mobility and everyday lives. The council’s work reveals how propertied expectations and affective entitlements to the economic value of whiteness have long shaped, and been reproduced by, racial liberal organizing for neighborhood stability and improvement. More broadly, it underscores how racial liberalism obscures the endurance and reproduction of racial property regimes even as it binds white affective entitlements to the surveillance of Black residents’ everyday lives. Situating the relationship between white propertied expectations and the surveillance of Blackness within the organizing logics of racial property regimes, the paper points to how this relationship is reproduced in contemporary forms of affective neighborhood governance.

Author

• Rea Zaimi, Georgia State University