Reckoning with Regionalism: Race, Place, and Power in Urban History

Abstract

The American city was built on White supremacy and racism—from north to south and east to west. Recent scholarship on race and place contributes to our understanding of how oppression manifests differently in certain places and contexts while remaining part of the same overarching system of racial segregation, a “national cancer” as the editors of The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North frame it in their introduction. The works under consideration here explore the complex ways people and power move throughout the United States in order to better see structures of oppression when we rethink the regionalism of racism and the stories we have grown to accept as part of American history. Our cities look the way they do because of this cancer, which has metastasized from north to south. The very foundation of the modern American metropolis is built on racism and violence; it is not an import from some place outside. To truly see our cities, we need to grapple with the pervasiveness of systematic oppression and the complex layers of racism upon which they are built. The process of reckoning with regionalism and racism may also provide pathways to envision more equitable cities in the future.