The suburbs, the city, and the Plantationcene

Evolution

In the 1700's I was Choctaw
Thickets and insects churring
Sights of burial mounds
Mosquito bites on soft tender skin

In the 1800's I was colonized
A white blanket thrown over me
Warm with old Maxims
Barren dirt roads and blood red fields

In the 1900's I was fire
The incandescent protest loud in the streets
Redlining and high-rises on the horizon
Memories of blazing crosses and choruses of gunshots

In the 2000's I am drained
Once a city of lights
Devoid of life
A dormant volcano waiting to erupt again

Jackson, MS

My project explored the concept of Urban areas, specifically Jackson, MS, as a site of phobic expression through an analysis of necro politics. I am thinking through the legacies of slavery and what it means for those condemned as Black or a slave to have no law and power system at their disposal. The political environment in Jackson, MS, from slavery to segregation to neo-segregation is not progress, as Anthony Farley would say. And my poem shows that if that shift in the rubrics of oppression is not progress, then we have never moved forward from 1890, let alone 1790. Thus, if segregation, let alone slavery, never ended, then what is happening right now in Jackson—the water crisis, police brutality, government overreach—is not new and has been happening all over. If Blackness is spatial, then what fills the gaps of geography that Blackness exists within is anti-Blackness, as it is the spatio-temporal dimension that continually posits Blackness in opposition to the world. The poem was inspired growing up outside of Jackson, MS, and seeing the appositional dichotomy between the Suburban and Urban, where the Suburbs were designated as White utopias and the “Urban” areas as Black ghettos. I argue that the mass racialized shift from the plantation to urban areas and the white flight that incurred that led to the development of the suburbs was due to the phobic relationship with Blackness, where words like “violence”, “ghetto”, and “crime” were utilized to create a racial geography. Within this new geospatial arrangement, mass labor was needed, and this is where the Black labor forces, who often time, due to redlining, segregation, and other housing discrimination practices, were not able to live in the suburbs, were still needed to work there, creating an inverse relationship with how white workers flock to the cities to work, and Black workers flock to the suburbs to fill in the exploited labor. This creates an uneven labor and racial dynamic that, in some ways, replicates the plantation logics that we saw in the 18th and 19th centuries. Ultimately, as the poem implicitly and explicitly expresses, this problem is one of redlining. It’s one of de jure and de facto to segregation. It’s one of gentrification and white flight. It’s one of over-policing and mass incarceration. It’s one of structural poverty. It’s one of financial destabilization and exclusion. The problem with Jackson is the problem with America. It’s a problem of the manifestations of antiblackness

Researcher: Christian Gines