To Begin from “Race-Connected Practices in the Lives of People”

I am honored for the chance to share my gratitude for Dr. Bobby M. Wilson, his critical scholarship on race, place, and capitalism, his deep place-based commitments, and his generous thinking and doing.

I never got the chance to talk with Dr. Wilson in person. I nearly reached out several times over the years; after first reading America’s Johannesburg (2000a), after the two-part AAG panel in DC (2019) celebrating his scholarship, and after teaching his work in my graduate seminar. I even wrote a draft email during my time at Delta State, where I felt the power of his analysis most prominently — where a newcomer could see and feel the legacy of struggle and ongoing contradictions at times similar to the ones he illuminated in Birmingham, but I never had the courage to hit “send.” Despite this, I am grateful to have his ideas to return to.

Marlene Ramos introduced me to America’s Johannesburg (2000a) in 2017. She had been advised to read it by her mentor, Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore. My path to Dr. Wilson resonates with what Willie Wright expressed at the 2019 panel, how often we must “meander our way to whatever kind of scholar we are going to be.” This has been especially true for scholars doing work where race — and specifically for Dr. Wilson, Black people’s experiences, actions, and ontologies — is a central way of seeing and understanding the world, not merely a variable to count or a trauma to prove, in disciplines that have become comfortable seeing and doing otherwise.

The first and only time I got to hear Dr. Wilson speak was at the previously mentioned 2019 panel “Reframing Marxism and Race: The Scholarship of Bobby Wilson.” A group of nearly 100(?) of us convened in a crowded room meant for 40 spilling over into the hallways and huddling close to hear the two-part panel. The first centered Dr. Wilson’s influence on mostly junior scholars, and the second featured Drs. Joe Darden and Ruth Wilson Gilmore who spoke to the great significance of Dr. Wilson’s work. I imagine many of us remember that panel vividly; it still stands out as my favorite experience from AAG.

While the panel commemorated the many ways in which Dr. Wilson pushed the discipline and paved the way for Black Geographies with those sitting beside him that day, I was incredibly touched by Dr. Wilson’s presence with everyone in the room, that his family joined him that day, how humbly he spoke about his groundbreaking work, jokingly saying “it didn’t take a rocket scientist” to see what he saw and wrote about in Birmingham. Within that room, there was a different AAG atmosphere, a different temporal register among the panelists and all of us, a generous invitation to listen and think deeply. And imagine — to be a fly on the wall at those past AAGs, with Drs. Wilson, Gilmore, Darden, the late Dr. Clyde Woods — all discussing, debating, laughing together long into the night!

I will conclude with a focus on Dr. Wilson’s scholarship, which analyzes and grounds racial capitalism across multiple scales and comes through a great commitment to a place and people. This second part feels rare in an institution which takes every opportunity to build walls between us as scholars from the places in which we live and where we make life. The fact that he returned to Birmingham and spent his decades-long career in Alabama speaks volumes to his commitments. When reading America’s Johannesburg (2000a), I marvel at the rigor of his study, made visible in the historical detail and archival attention, spanning the antebellum period to the New Deal, and setting the groundwork for his simultaneously published book Race and Place in Birmingham (2000b). Throughout, he distinguishes the centrality of what he calls “race-connected practices” to the transformation of place and capitalism. He resists an essentialist understanding of race to emphasize historical and geographical specificity and to empirically show how material and ideological practices are transformed over time and through particular places...