Contested Terrain: Black Nonprofits and the Struggle Against Racial Displacement in the Neoliberal Urban South

• In Event: Resistance and Disruption II

Abstract

Gentrification scholarship on the displacement of predominantly Black neighborhoods across the U.S. has overwhelmingly focused on the structural and cultural drivers of racial turnover. While sociologists have demonstrated neoliberal practices of privatization, welfare deregulation, and racialized exclusion are substantial catalysts of Black displacement, academics have seldom explored how Black nonprofits resist these ongoing issues. Instead, most Black urban activism literature focus on class division, historical narratives, and working-class norms during periodic episodes of Black mobilization. On the contrary, my study examines how Black-led nonprofits navigate racialized and classed power relations to institutionalized opposition to neoliberal practices of gentrification that have long been shown to disproportionately displaced low-income Black residents.
Drawing on one year of participant observation and 30 in-depth interviews, I analyze how three Black-led nonprofits endeavor to sustain marginal Black residents in Southwest Atlanta – the last standing predominantly Black region in Atlanta, Georgia. My project focuses on Atlanta because it epitomizes the often-overlooked cities in the urban South that are undergoing racial turnover despite rich histories of Black dominance. I discovered that reframing classist public discourse, the management of Black social stigmas and mastery of capitalist logics influenced the capacity for Black-led nonprofits to establish, scale, and sustain affordable housing and economic relief for low-income Black residents battling displacement. My overall analysis argues how different magnitudes of assimilating to mainstream white corporate environments and embracing Black placemaking shaped the level of power that Black nonprofits were able to acquire in opposing wealth extraction via housing speculation, the criminalization of poverty, and welfare disinvestments.

Author

• Akilah Favors, University of California-Berkeley