Abstract
The embrace of racial capitalism by sociologists over the past few years marks an important turn in how we think about and understand urban inequality. Racial disparities across a range of socioeconomic outcomes have typically been treated as an (un)intended consequence of capitalism—the continued plight of the precariat’s struggle. Interventions aimed at addressing social inequalities tend to focus on class dynamics, often diluting or historicizing the impact of colonialism and White Supremacy. However, while the concept has been invoked to discuss various aspects of urban life, its analytical utility, origins, historical contingencies, and theoretical abstractions are still being debated. Regardless of where one stands within this debate, Sarah Mayorga’s new book, Urban Specters, serves as a timely exemplar for community and urban sociology to uncover the contours of (racial) capitalism.
With the City of Cincinnati as its backdrop, Urban Specters dives into the guiding logics of residents across two neighborhoods and how they make sense of their everyday experiences. Perceptions among the residents of Riverside and Carthage yielded differential but codependent understandings of not only their own material lives, but those of their neighbors. The focus on two neighborhoods provides the comparative context to understand local dynamics within a broader political economy of place. In drawing from a mid-size Rust Belt city, the book provides insights applicable to both smaller and larger urban areas. By employing a novel mailer recruitment strategy, Mayorga gained access to 117 residents within these two neighborhoods (and surrounding communities), reminding us that conceptions of community may not necessarily follow statistical geographic boundaries. She cleverly uses the concept of specters to denote these everyday descriptions as partial recognitions of material life—what residents see and what they don’t. The routineness of these processes reinforces particular narratives about racialized spaces and structural exclusion rendering inequalities not only as organic or natural, but also ubiquitous. Residents themselves make sense of these harms through a variety of vignettes—frames Mayorga uses to situate and interpret their own circumstances.
Although both Riverside and Carthage were historically home to White, working-class households, years of (under)development reshaped those demographics. Riverside remains a predominantly White, working-class neighborhood, but Carthage has become multiracial. Mayorga poses local ideologies as relational processes within broader political-economic functions (exploitation, dispossession, and dehumanization). For example, she uses the concept of trash talk to denote how residents attempt to relocate their own neighborhood’s territorial stigma. As these neighborhoods experienced (under)development, housing assistance, drugs, and renting were tied to the influx of Black and Brown households. Long-standing residents of Riverside would situate these dynamics within the boundaries of their own community, while still drawing parallels to Carthage as a multiracial neighborhood lacking community and social support. Trash talk framed a symbolic boundary for residents to legitimate urban and racial inequality.
The book does not only focus on structural exclusion or marginality. To fully capture the ethos of racial capitalism’s more radical invocation, Mayorga describes residents’ practices of collective care for and with one another to subvert everyday harms. However, the salience of antiblackness undermined residents’ quest for survival. For instance, in Chapter 5, Mayorga discusses how the norm of respectability interacted with conceptions of antiblackness. Behavioral expectations of middle-classness structured class performances as signals of worthiness and distinction. Residents enacted these performances to gain material and emotional resources from their White middle-class peers and institutions. Moreover, adherence to these expectations, like the visibility of individuals with negative social constructions (e.g., drug addicts or unhoused peoples) or residential neglect (e.g., property and neighborhood conditions), produced bonding capital for antiblackness by normalizing where and how people lived across the two neighborhoods. Mayorga notes that although “antiblackness as a norm is dehumanizing and leads to disconnection for Black people . . . it can also lead to connections among nonblack people” (p. 139).
For Diego, a Latino homeowner in Carthage in his fifties, respectability conditions his view of how to be a “good Latino.” Jenny, a White working-class subsidized housing resident in Riverside in her thirties, relied upon her former middle-class Whiteness to gain resources from the local church by distancing herself from her poor neighbors of color. Mayorga astutely notes how respectability intersects with notions of antiblackness not only as a bodily performance of the actor, but social acceptance by the audience. Social acceptance structures racialized (and gendered) visions of care and moral judgments of social value. These logics often intersected with housing tenures (homeowner versus renter) to produce different perceptions of residents’ care for their homes and neighborhoods and rationalizations for their socioeconomic statuses. Yet, in some cases, residents were able to draw upon their proximity to Whiteness and middle-classness to garner not only financial support, but also empathy and reassurance.
Community and urban sociology, both historically and today, tethers structural and individual conceptions of urban inequality. Urban Specters reminds us how even when residents themselves invoke racist and classist understandings of their material lives, they rarely identify the “the government policies, economic realities, and business decisions that led to these circumstances” (p. 155). Much like the residents themselves, we often “present them as less relevant than the cultural traits of the poor people currently occupying these spaces” (p. 155). Thus, disinvestment is justified as a natural process. Nevertheless, Mayorga illuminates how renters built relationships of care and reciprocity to address both concerns about safety and (over)policing. By deconstructing residents’ perceptions of neighborhoods as places of “despair” and hope,” the book poses racial capitalism as a relational process structured by oppressive forces and resistance efforts.
While Mayorga positions these logics clearly across housing tenures, the interviews themselves largely draw from homeowners and renters. The book would have benefited from the views of landlords and other development actors. Landlords occupy a particular position within the selection of tenants and the management of residential properties, often playing a significant role in determining who belongs and how they should live. As local power brokers, their inclusion would have provided a more complex network of relationships dependent upon different ownership logics. While Mayorga frames how under(development) structured contemporary neighborhood conditions across these two cases, ongoing political shifts and policy decisions become backstage. Similarly, while highlighting the abolition possibilities employed by residents, the politics and institutions needed to get us there are somewhat elusive. Nevertheless, Mayorga provides us with an imaginative path forward.
Urban Specters presents a novel use of racial capitalism to understand the (im)material conditions of urban life. Proponents of the racial capitalism framework will benefit from its rich analysis while appreciating its reflexivity. Critics will find interest in its theoretical delineations and historical contingencies of the region’s (under)development. A wide audience will find the book engaging, accessible, and insightful. It pushes us all to not only think about what is, but what could be and how we get there.