The United States, like most western industrial democratic experiments, underwent an iteration of the intensive land redevelopment process often known as “urban renewal” in the postwar period. Under the auspices of liberal progress, massive amounts of civic space were reconfigured to address “urban blight,” facilitate the growth of highway systems, and to enable faster connective networks. Roanoke is no exception and the city’s current spatial configuration discloses a significant history of violent dispossession against Black residents which includes the destruction of homes, businesses, cemeteries, churches, and more. A study of urban renewal can help underscore several major features of contemporary capitalism which index its contradictory tendencies toward both change and stasis.
The 1949 Housing Act licensed Roanoke’s municipal order to declare vast areas of Northeast Roanoke as “blighted” in 1955 which authorized the city to execute eminent domain. In return for their homes and spaces of community, most Black residents were offered very little and subsequently many who were previously debt-free were forced to take out loans in order to acquire new housing. Urban renewal would spread to Gainsboro and its famous Henry Street by the 1970’s. It is no accident that Black communities which had established vibrant lifeworlds with self-sufficient institutions and networks of mutual aid and collaborative practice had to be displaced in order for a particular vision of liberal progress to be enforced. While the space of this article does not allow for a larger history to be told, it should be noted that urban renewal and Black dispossession and mistreatment in Roanoke has a much longer and deeper set of stories which are best told by those who have experienced it. Still, a brief meditation on Roanoke’s history of urban renewal can offer several important notes of clarity with regard to contemporary capitalism.
Capitalist accumulation can often be aptly characterized by its boundary-making projects, in both literal/physical as well as social terms. In a global sense, national borders militantly separate different segments of the world’s division of labor as generated by capitalist modes of production. America’s cities, notably including Roanoke, remain highly segregated and partitioned along lines of race and class. Workplace hierarchies generate great social and economic distances, including vicious disparities along lines of sex and/or gender, between classes of employees as an integral feature of contemporary labor politics. So, it makes sense to speak about capital’s rigid, sharp, and uneven spaces, but we should also take note of capital’s tendency to produce smooth spaces when it can facilitate further accumulation.
Racialized inequality and segregation remain the central fixture of the American political economy, but in smoothing the spaces which were once partitioned, a new round of accumulation was enabled which destroyed communities and subjected Black Americans to what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls “predatory inclusion.” While the world’s laborers are prevented from movement by militarized borders, multi-national capital floats freely along the globe’s smoothed surface, taking advantage of free export zones and devalued labor while dispossessing local residents and grabbing up land. All the above are carried out under an ideological justification of “progress” which has roots in the colonial imaginations which western liberal democratic projects remain entangled with and haunted by.
Capital is ultimately rather flexible; it produces both smooth and uneven spaces. It freezes the movement of some while enabling others. However, some things remain constant such as the tendency toward further accumulation as well as the deep sentiments of anti-Blackness which remain consistently part of capitalism’s ongoing history of dispossession and violence. When we speak of capital’s smooth spaces, we should also remember that capitalism is always, among other things, Racial Capitalism.
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