Reconstructing Race and Racism in the American South

• In Event: Community and Urban Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6: Race and Place

Abstract

Place reputations are important because they structure the worlds of the people who live and work in the worlds they reference. Whether they are accurate or not is largely beside the point—as Suttles reminds us, “where these cognitive models may not be correct, they are at least determinate” (1972:4). As a result, it is important that we understand how they operate, the channels they move through, and how they get massaged, repurposed, and sold to the public. The American South’s reputation for racism is a particularly interesting case because it is effective across a scale far vaster than any individual could comprehend by “checking” on their own. If someone tells you a neighborhood in your city is dangerous, or racist, or hip, you could conceivably drive across down to look for yourself and decide whether the reputation is earned. But when an entire region is deemed to be a particular way, people can’t just go visit the entire territory. And yet, we still use reputations as heuristics, because otherwise we’re moving without maps—as Murray Jay Siskind from DeLillo’s White Noise notes, “For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set” (1985:66). For everywhere else, reputations will have to do. As such, the purveyors of those reputations, and the strategies they undertake to manage them, become very important—only more so when the reputation is a stigmatized one, like that for racism. With this in mind, drawing from interviews and archival material (based on six months of research in Atlanta and ongoing research in New Orleans), the paper identifies three ideal-typical narratives deployed by these figures to manage the stigmatized reputation of their cities and the larger American South: temporal distinction, appeal to exceptionalism, and historicization of the present.

Author

• Jeffrey Nathaniel Parker, University of New Orleans