The Urbanism of Racial Capitalism: Toward a History of “Blight”

From the early twentieth century into the present, “blight” has named a threatening condition in the American city.¹ In the contexts of city planning, real estate development, municipal governance, and mass media alike, “blight” was discovered in both the industrializing pre–World War II city and the deindustrializing post–World War II city; “blight” has referred to both overcrowded working-class neighborhoods and abandoned working-class neighborhoods; and the definition of “blight” has been both explicitly racist and seemingly race-neutral. Underlying and unifying each of these differences is an understanding of “blight” as a public danger eliciting immediate and drastic action to protect real estate values and securitize endangered cities—at least on behalf of the city’s propertied, privileged, and entitled residents (see fig. 1).

While “blight” has been analyzed in relation to capitalist urbanism and has more recently begun to be examined in relation to racial bias and racism, it has yet to be considered in the context of racial capitalism: a context in which racial difference is structured into and constitutive of political, social, and economic orders.² To situate “blight” within the urbanism of racial capitalism, then, is not only to critique its deployment in the development of the American city but also to critique the dominant ways in which that deployment has been historicized. This essay offers one way into those critiques.³

“Blight,” Race, and Racial Capitalism

Historicizations of “blight” have emerged in the context of histories of urban decline, development, and renewal in the American city.⁴ These accounts often begin with Jacob Riis and early twentieth-century tenement reform in New York and then turn to “blight” as the slum’s predecessor, anticipation, or incipient form.⁵ These accounts complicate the seeming sensorial obviousness of “blight” routinely noted in projects to prevent or remove it.⁶ At the same time, however, these accounts have tended to ignore or downplay the intersection of “blight,” capitalist urban development, and race.

In the most extensive historical discussion of “blight” to date—the chapter “Inventing Blight” in Downtown: Its Rise and Fall—Robert M. Fogelson leaves a reference to race until the last paragraph of the chapter, where he writes: “Redevelopment agencies . . . would do whatever was necessary, even dispossess hundreds of thousands of low-income families. . . . That many of these people were members of racial and ethnic minorities . . . made no difference.”⁷ To understand race as an organizing principle of capitalism, however, is to understand that the racial identity of families dispossessed by “blight removal” did make a difference—or, more precisely, that the racialized systems in which these families existed was the difference that exposed them to dispossession. That is, in the context of racial capitalism, “blight” elicits understanding as an urban phenomenon inscribed in racialized political, economic, and social systems and their correlates of white privilege and antiblack racism.

Figure 1.

“Blight Is . . .” Detroit Blight Removal Task Force Plan, 13.

Accounts of “blight” often point to the relationship between “blight” and urban development in the capitalist city. Mark Gelfand, in his history of federal involvement in the American city, writes that “the root causes of slums and blight were deeply embedded in the nation’s political, economic, and social systems.”⁸ Colin Gordon, in an essay that historicizes changing definitions of “blight,” writes that the designation of an area as “blighted” has been “driven not by objective urban conditions, but by the prospect of private investment.”⁹ David Harvey has described urban planning as focused on development, with the planner thereby working either “to stimulate investment or to manage and ‘rationalize’ devaluation with techniques of ‘planned shrinkage,’ urban renewal, and the production of ‘planning blight’ (which amounts to nothing more than earmarking certain areas for devaluation).”¹⁰

It is crucial to address the implication of business interests, urban planners, municipal authorities, and the systems in which the preceding operate in the definition and removal of “blight”; at the same time, this addressing is incomplete without analysis of the racialization of those systems. When race, racism...