Gentrification and the Black Church: examining racialized displacement and surveillance in Alexandria, Virginia
Topics: Black Geographies
, Urban Geography
, Cultural Geography
Keywords: Black geographies, suburban displacement, racial banishment, Washington, D.C.
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 26
Authors:
Jordan Ashlee McCray, University of Kentucky
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Abstract
In this paper I explore the impacts of suburban gentrification on Black communities in Alexandria, Virginia, a Washington, D.C. suburb, through the lens of Black churches. Drawing from interviews with Baptist church leaders in Alexandria, I find that Black churches and their congregants navigate increased economic and social pressures perpetrated through gentrification in varied ways. The closing of section 8 housing, rising costs of living, and changes to the physical and racial landscape of Alexandria has led to the out-migration of African American Alexandrians (through both voluntary movement and forced displacement), as well as the disruption of churches as centers of communal and racial belonging, and increased feelings of racialized surveillance by Black Alexandrians and church-goers in the city. I ground this argument in critical urbanist literature that centers settler colonialism as the foundation for the ongoing dispossession of Black people and communities, and that recognizes gentrification beyond solely a by-product of urban economic development, but as one that is intentionally anti-Black as a continuation of colonial logics of control and erasure (McKittrick 2017, Roy 2019). Black churches as Black spaces of belonging and care are crucial sites through which to examine these processes given the long-standing stabilizing role of these institutions throughout systemic crises of racialized violence, exploitation, and dispossession from the plantation to today.
Gentrification and the Black Church: examining racialized displacement and surveillance in Alexandria, Virginia
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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