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  • Bobby Wilson: Understanding the Political Economy of the US South
  • Joshua Inwood (bio)

Without engaging Bobby Wilson’s work, you cannot understand the last fifty years of life in the United States, and specifically the American South. More precisely, you cannot understand racial capital, class differences, race and the unfolding geographies of racism, the role of money and capital in the civil rights struggle, or the constant need for capital to find new markets without understanding Bobby Wilson’s work on race in the United States. While there are myriad examples on which to draw, I am not sure that there is a better example than Chapter Four: Capital Restructuring and the Transformation of Race in his book America’s Johannesburg: Industrialization and Transformation in Birmingham (2000).

In seven pages of direct prose, Bobby Wilson lays out the fundamental connections between race and capital, engages in economic theory to explain why history alone is not enough to understand the way race and capital co-constitute each other, and he also lays out the foundations on which to understand how racial capital operates. He writes: “A critical theory of race requires sensitivity to how capitalist development and restructuring transform the geography of places along racial lines” (Wilson 2000, 34). Bobby explains how race and capital relate to each other, and most geographically significant explains how race is written into the making of place and space. For its time, this work was (and remains) transformative for how we come to understand the centrality of geography to the broader project of racial capital. Because race lies at the center of geography, geography is central to understanding how race and racism operate in various settings. Most importantly, Bobby Wilson’s work opened space for a whole new generation of geographers of the American South to reinterpret the region and the region’s central role in the broader economic development of the region and nation.

Take, for instance, his insights about the notoriously brutal segregationist Eugene “Bull” Connor, who was the commissioner for public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, and who attacked civil rights protestors during the 1950s and 1960s. Bobby often pointed out (including in his book on Birmingham) that it was the industrialists in Birmingham who put Connor in charge of the city. In the 1930s, they brought him in to destroy the city’s labor movement and keep Birmingham’s steel mills from unionizing. This insight meant that it was imperative to see the civil rights and labor rights movements in the region as central to how the region came to deal with the unfolding civil rights struggles and is central to understanding how capital was able to reconstitute itself in the wake of the post-civil rights era in the 1970s. Bobby writes that the South’s racial regimes [End Page 195] were able to reconstitute themselves through the “southernization of the old American dream — to make and keep a log of money” (Wilson 2000, 227). Bobby Wilson’s insights lay the groundwork to understand how the region’s economic power had long relied on racism and anti-labor politics, and these politics made the region attractive to capital. This work ties into the longer trajectory of scholars like Robyn Kelley, who have written extensively about the intersections of race and capital and the reality that capitalism requires racism to survive (Kelley 2017). Bobby Wilson opened the door to understanding the spatiality of this reality. As he wrote in 2002:

We [the broader social sciences] must situate race not only in a historical context but also in a historical-geographical context. We must expose the skeletons of places and plant the flesh of black experience on those bones as well. Social practices are not only historically specific but geographically or place-specific

(37).

In short, his insights are foundational to understanding a near quarter-century intellectual engagement with the American South and the realities of race in the region and nation. Anyone who works in the region or in the United States owes Bobby Wilson a debt of gratitude for his work.

But Bobby was more than a set of philosophical ideas or books and articles — he was a kind and generous...

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