Yeah, But…. Or, Economists do Postwar Metropolitan Segregation

Leah Boustan, an economist at Princeton and the National Bureau of Economic Research, published an Op-Ed in the New York Times last weekend that distilled the essence of her new book, Competition in the Promised Land: Black Migrants in Northern Cities and Labor Markets, described thusly by Princeton University Press:

Traditionally, the Great Black Migration has been lauded as a path to general black economic progress. Leah Boustan challenges this view, arguing instead that the migration produced winners and losers within the black community. Boustan shows that migrants themselves gained tremendously, more than doubling their earnings by moving North. But these new arrivals competed with existing black workers, limiting black–white wage convergence in Northern labor markets and slowing black economic growth. Furthermore, many white households responded to the black migration by relocating to the suburbs. White flight was motivated not only by neighborhood racial change but also by the desire on the part of white residents to avoid participating in the local public services and fiscal obligations of increasingly diverse cities.

I’m going to offer two caveats for my analysis right off the bat: First, the whole book is ambitious in scope, and proposes a provocative thesis that migration was less clearly a Good Thing for the interests of Black advancement (reading the blurb, one might approach the book asking “compared to what?” but….). And second, it’s quite difficult to express complex research findings in short form. The book seems highly worth reading, among other reasons because of the kind of media traction it’s getting through, well, NYT Op-Eds.

That said, I found the article to be flawed in its basic assumptions about the definition and nature of racism in American urban areas, particularly as related to metropolitan real estate markets in the 20th century, and not very informed about the historiography of that phenomenon.

Contemporary Segregation from the Side of the Privileged (Update)

Note: This post has been updated with the correct name for the land use institute cited–it is the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Alana Semuels has a cool piece on The Atlantic today, approaching metropolitan segregation as a problem of self-segregation of the white and affluent rather than of exclusion of the poor and black or brown. Obviously, there are still plenty of practices that exclude the poor (exclusionary zoning, the retreat from enforcing affordable housing requirements, a housing market spatially organized and segmented by price) and racial minorities (steering, differential service by realtors, good old fashioned community prejudice).

Nonetheless,  approaching the phenomenon as one driven by the desire of the affluent for a separate society, and supported by public policies, helps us to understand that this self-segregation is not simply individuals pursuing the rewards of success. It is a distribution of resources and advantages toward what University of Minnesota researchers Edward G. Goetz, Tony Damiano, and Jason Hicks, in a working paper presented to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, call  “Racially Concentrated Areas of Affluence.” That distribution inevitably and inherently impacts “Racially Concentrated Areas of Poverty” through fiscal impact, uneven development, educational inequity, and, less quantitatively, a diminished understanding of shared fate and mutual obligation among parts of the metro area.

For scholars, and particularly those seeking to apply scholarly theory to policy, taking RCAAs seriously might be very necessary to reverse the tendency of policy interventions to normalize white/affluent segregation and focus intervention on the deficiencies of the minority poor. Semuels writes:

Public policy has “focused on the concentration of poverty and residential segregation. This has problematized non-white and high-poverty neighborhoods,” said Goetz, the director of the Center for Urban and Rural Affairs at the University of Minnesota, when presenting his findings at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “It’s shielded the other end of the spectrum from scrutiny—to the point where we think segregation of whites is normal.”

Indeed, one of the things I try to uncover in my research is the historical production of that segregation, and the political and cultural work that has enabled and protected it as a sociospatial production. I’ve been looking at Atlanta, and specifically north Fulton County, to make that case, so I was interested to see that Semuels includes a table of data for representative metro areas studied by Goetz, Damiano, and Hicks.

Edward G. Goetz, Tony Damiano, Jason Hicks (University of Minnesota): American Urban Inequality: Racially Concentrated Affluence

Compared to other metro areas, Atlanta seems to have fewer “Racially Concentrated Areas of Affluence.” But, based on my research on the growing political power of affluent north suburbanites in the recent past, and the connections of their real estate-based affluence and their political agenda to white privilege, this report drastically understates the influence of affluent whites in near-RCAAs over politics in metro Atlanta counties and in the state. One would suspect that the low number of RCAAs recognized in the study is a result of many areas in the East Cobb/North Fulton/Buckhead/North DeKalb/Gwinnett area having nonwhite populations that exceed a certain threshold. Perhaps normalizing the definitions of RCAA against the composition of the metro area might show Atlanta to have a greater proportion of areas that are more affluent and much whiter than the rest of the metro area. In any case, political dynamics engendered by the creation and preservation of RCAAs are a major driver of politics in metro Atlanta and in Georgia.

As I’ve written in the Journal of Urban Affairs, one of the most important political issues in Georgia, particularly since the 1990s, has been the attempt by residents of north Fulton to separate themselves from the rest of the county. At stake are the property values residents enjoy as a consequence of the area’s status as a predominantly white area. The principal threat residents have identified to that property have been reforms to the property tax system that rectified systemic and illegal undertaxation of affluent areas. Because acknowledging that sort of advantage is difficult, residents reimagined the higher taxes imposed by correction of the tax appraisal system to be the result of wasteful spending, chiefly by governments in Atlanta and Fulton County, governments run by Black elected officials and supported by either majority- or near-majority-Black electorates. The incorporation of new cities has served to put white electorates and white officials in charge of decisions affecting property owned by affluent whites. The use of the state legislature to manipulate legislative districts and redistrict the county commission has reduced the ability of Black residents to influence decisions affecting Fulton County. The county legislative delegations for Fulton and DeKalb county have disproportionate representation of RCAA areas, because Republicans in the legislature have created district boundaries that cross county lines. Although Republicans from RCAAs have been aggressively fighting a voter fraud problem that exists largely in their imaginations, some of them multiply their influence by voting in two or three legislative delegations.

Elsewhere, there is a second wave of city incorporation efforts in north DeKalb County, which would also be the beneficiary of a controversial charter school law that would, in practice, help affluent parents avoid enrolling their children in the county’s diverse public schools. And the process may be reaching a peak in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana, with the effort to incorporate a city called St. George along with a new school district carved out of the existing Parish district. Frontline covered that one, and I’ll have more to say about that in the future.

I would expect that the terminology of RCAA/RCAP will become a useful, if occasionally too rigid, schema for writing the history of post-civil rights metro areas.

Segregation, Policing, and St. Louis

I’ve been horrified by the recent events in the segregated and disadvantaged St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri. A half century after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the essential civil liberty of being in public space is far from secure for Black people in particular and racial minorities in general, who can be killed by the police while unarmed on a public street (women face a different set of restrictions on their ability to be in public that are privately enforced but sanctioned by state inaction against sexual violence).

I’m preparing to teach a course on race in America as an interdisciplinary study, and the social psychology of implicit bias and threat perception are highly salient to this question. One internet commenter has poignantly noted that Black men appear to possess a magical ability to convince white police officers and vigilantes that they are holding deadly weapons. Perhaps many of these white agents of public safety harbor genuine animus against Black people (it’s possible). Yet, another possibility, not a mutually exclusive one, exists: that whites’ responses to Black people in public represent a convergence of the psychological phenomenon of implicit bias through the ideological constructs of self-defense by armed force promoted by the gun industry.

The habitus of whites in America–the everyday conditions under which most white people live, and the ideas they draw from those conditions, constitute a pedagogy about race and danger that, despite the growing disrepute of racial supremacy in public speech, is nonetheless powerful. It affects whites’ support of policing, and it sustains their support for harsh sentencing and longer incarceration when they are made aware that Black people are disproportionately incarcerated.

These and other social science perspectives on race are valuable; integrated, they point to what Barbara Reskin calls a “race discrimination system” in which the interaction of diffuse parts of society–institutions, ideologies, and accumulated legacies of past discrimination–produce emergent and ongoing racial disparities. It’s important to understand racism as something alive that is being reproduced every day rather than as something inert and dead that is being eroded slowly and gradually.

I of course want to think about how a series of systemic moments link across space and across time. That is, I want to do history with this. George Lipsitz has a useful term, the “public pedagogy” to describe how the spaces created by racial segregation channel opportunity, embed existing prejudices, and create the conditions under which today’s “color-blind” or “laissez-faire” racism can flourish as whites identify the local social and economic traumas of systemic racism with the presumed cultural attributes of Black or other nonwhite people. Lipsitz’s book How Racism Takes Place is a lucid and compelling account of this process across time, and how interventions in urban planning, the law, and ideological production, among other factors, have sustained a public pedagogy that puts over the lesson with stunning effectiveness that Black people are dangerous and must be contained. Coincidentally, Lipsitz writes a great deal about St. Louis in parts of this book, and it’s all very urgent in light of current events.

Another historian whose work should get significant attention as a way of understanding the tragedy in Ferguson is Colin Gordon, whose book Mapping Decline shows the spatial reallocation of real estate wealth and insurance coverage in metro St. Louis in the post-WWII Era, and exposes the evolving pedagogy of place that informed and grew out of bureaucratic decisions made by planners, urban renewal experts, bankers, and insurance agents. These processes seem dry and technical, but they sustained, with profound consequences, the idea that Black people’s presence in St. Louis’s neighborhoods was dangerous to the personal and economic safety of whites and the health of the body politic, and needed to be contained by mapping the metropolitan area and delineating whose bodies would be welcome and whose would not. These decisions drove white flight but they also determined that more affluent Black St. Louisans would run on a treadmill of property, acquiring suburban residence as white neighbors left, taking access to credit and insurance, as well as social esteem with them. One of Gordon’s interviewees would call the transition of University City and Ferguson among other close-in suburbs “Ghetto spillover,” which dramatically misconstrues the social agency involved, placing, as so often happens, blame for the area’s perceived decline on the people most directly affected by it.

You can see some of those maps here.

 

Irregularly Recurring Quote of the Day

From Clarissa Rile Hayward’s How Americans Make Race: Stories, Institutions, Spaces (Cambridge, 2013):

By the later decades of the century, NAREB’s narrative of Americans as a home-owning people–a people whose good is served by state support for private, profit-driven development–functioned as a frame to many ordinary stories. When prospective home buyers considered moving to Wexner’s New Albany, they did not tell themselves “I plan to take advantage of public subsidies for private housing for the privileged, which I endorse as legitimate,” but instead, “It’s in my interest to move here,” and “I like this place.” (167)

Hayward’s most insightful observations in a work that is provocative throughout are that, contrary to some PoMo ideas that identities are fluid narrative constructions, certain narratives, rooted in individual and group interests, can be materialized and institutionalized so that even when elements of the narrative become “bad stories” that (if we’re being optimistic about society) violate contemporary ethical norms (“blacks lower property values and should be excluded”) or are internally incoherent (“the private market built the suburbs without help from the government”), they continue to frame the stories the privileged tell about their situations, thus depoliticizing what are in fact highly political decisions about the allocation of resources.

Chapter 5, “White Fences,” from which this quote is drawn, is really an impressive piece of scholarship, integrating a critical legal analysis of private school subsidy jurisprudence, a takedown of public choice theory, and a cogent set of thought experiments that demonstrate that public schools in elite suburbs are the functional, moral, and political equivalent of “segregation academies” though of course are unrecognized as such.

Coates: “The Ghetto is Public Policy”

From Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic,: describing Beryl Satter’s book Family Properties:

But the most affecting aspect of the book is the demonstration of the ghetto not as a product of a violent music, super-predators, or declining respect for marriage, but of policy and power.

Both the piece and the book worth a look.

 

Voting Rights Challenge to Metro Atlanta Municipal Incorporations Dismissed (and the right wing notices!)

A three judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of the voting rights suit Lowery v. Deal on February 4. This decision was not unexpected, but skirts many questions about the suit, the historical context of racial (and “post-racial”) conflict under which the cities in question incorporated, the ethics of allowing residents of a small privileged locality to decide unilaterally to incorporate without regard to the effects on the metro area as a whole, and the proper interpretation of vote dilution in a metropolitan context.

“Creative Class” as Euphemism

Courtesy of Creative Loafing Atlanta, a repost of an Atlantic Cities post by Richard Florida making the observation that Atlanta’s “creative” and “service” classes exist in stark separation from one another.

Atlantic Cities

This reminds me of something else I’ve seen, but I can’t quite put my finger on it…..

Oh, yeah. That.

Want to keep with the pretty colors theme? A student sent me this just today:

Map Eric Fisher

The Creative Class enterprise reminds me of the kinds of epicyclical sub-orbits that geocentric astronomers used to explain “retrograde motion” in planets they assumed were revolving around the earth. It’s got more moving parts than it needs, and makes things far more complicated than they need to be because it puts the wrong object at the center. A “creative class economy” is a historical product of educational outcomes and of a harmonious relationship between financial capital and certain forms of human, social, and cultural capital that make those kinds of capital pay for the people who possess them. Given what we know about differential access to that financial, human, social, and cultural capital in Atlanta, and the overlays of place, race, and opportunity structures, who would expect a pattern any different from the one Florida observed?

The other problem with creative class analysis is that it’s not only too complicated, it’s also too simple, and indeed, circular. If an analysis starts with the human capacity for creativity, which is universal and whose sum is theoretically limitless, it seems quite easy to make the places that are low on the creative class rankings look more like those that are high. Just have more creativity. Corporate lawyers in Buckhead, rap videographers in Bankhead, it’s essentially the same (except for the pay, the benefits, and the life expectancy), and the more the merrier!

But centering the region’s history of racial division in our analysis actually forces us to consider the stickiness of these forms of capital in places, and how the material and social preconditions of a functioning creative class economy are contingent on a distribution of resources that white people in the region have for generations chosen to construe as a zero-sum competition. I’m currently teaching Kevin Kruse’s White Flight to my “Making Modern Atlanta” class, and two things about this Atlantic Cities piece strike me as remarkable: First, the highest ranking “service class” areas include the West End, Adamsville, and Lakewood Heights (all primary points of origin for white flight in the 1950s and 1960s), along with longstanding black ghettoes like Vine City and working-class suburbs like College Park that have passed racial tipping points. Second (and hold onto your hats when I tell you), some of the highest ranking “creative class” areas include Sandy Springs, a major receiver of white flight and white inmigration during the boom of the 1990s, along with the Midtown and Druid Hills communities near Georgia Tech and Emory, and the historically wealthy section of Buckhead, which even though it sits within the city limits of Atlanta remains the whitest part of Fulton County. I suppose a third thing that strikes me is that Florida apparently doesn’t consider any of the racial dimensions of Atlanta’s social divisions noteworthy.

Atlanta as a region needs a lot of things. But it doesn’t need paeans to the curative properties of creativity when generations of stratification organized by race and through place pervade the entire opportunity structure of the region. It needs political movements for equity. If a lucrative economy in possum skinning or tightrope walking emerged tomorrow, you’d probably find its practitioners settling in Buckhead and Sandy Springs, and paying out for Kaplan Possum Prep courses and summer circus camp to ensure the next generation’s advantage.

And  even in the favored precincts of the creative economy, things aren’t looking so rosy these days.

Big News for the Fulton County Commission

I’ve been offline with respect to this blog for a while, completing an article on the historical relationship of color-blind racial ideology and political geography in metro Atlanta, arguing that the contemporary movement for secession in north Fulton County is part of a long series of maneuvers to manipulate political geography to favor the interests of north Fulton residents and limit the ability of African American voters and officials in the rest of the county to influence them.

One of the things I like about the kind of history I practice is that it tends to blur the distinction between past and present as objects of inquiry. It’s exciting when the history you write is still unfolding. A major event in that unfolding just happened in a recent state legislative hearing in Atlanta, with the introduction of HB 171, a bill sponsored by six north Fulton County Republicans to redistrict and reapportion the Fulton County Commission. The commission, as Bill Pendered reports in the Saporta Report (invaluable for coverage of metro Atlanta and the General Assembly), now has two at-large seats (including the chair) and five district seats. One seat lies entirely in the city of Atlanta, while two cover south Fulton County, one covers the Buckhead area in north Atlanta and parts of north Fulton, and the fifth covers far north Fulton County. The new districting would eliminate the second at-large district, extend the Buckhead district south to Midtown, and divide North Fulton among two Commission districts.

Courtesy GA Legislative and Congressional Reapportionment Office, 2013

There are some legitimate reasons for eliminating the second at-large seat; creating a sixth district would make all of the districts somewhat smaller and, in principle, more responsive. It would also eliminate an at-large seat could be considered redundant, since the commission chair currently answers to all of the voters. In the abstract, redistricting Fulton County is a fine idea.

The problem, of course, as J. Morgan Kousser ably demonstrates in a legal history of voting rights and racially-driven redistricting, lies in the fact that districts are drawn not to serve abstract principles but real-world political interests. This graphic of the current commission district, which includes the headshots of the current commissioners, might offer a bit of perspective:

Map and Portraits from Fulton County Commission

If the concern were for making the commissioners more responsive and accountable, why stop at eliminating only the at-large District 2? Why not make all seven seats district-based and have the members elect a chair? The answer of course is political advantage. In effect, the bill trades a seat elected by a majority-minority county (now held by Democrat Robb Pitts) for a district election with white supermajority in the electorate. Since the geography of all of the Commission districts would change, there is no single “new district” being created. But the percentages of African Americans of voting age in each of the three proposed northern districts ranges from 10.7 to 15.4%, while the percentage of Hispanics of voting age in each ranges from 7.9 to 10.2%. The proposed district with the largest share of minorities of voting age would be the new District 2, covering Roswell and  Milton and parts of Alpharetta. While a quarter of this district’s voting age population would be a member of these two minority groups, minorities would be well overmatched by a solidly Republican white electorate. And, while the new District 3 would essentially extend the current District 4 southward, it would do so as Pendered notes, only to “10th Street. Tenth Street is at, or near, the historic – and often unremarked in public – dividing line between the county’s black and white communities.”

To put this in a context of electoral math, 71% of the voting power on the Commission, and 60% of the district-based vote, is currently held by black Democrats. Fulton County gave about 67% of its vote to Barack Obama in the 2012 election. In other words, the current commission apportionment, even with two at-large seats, only moderately inflates the power of voters who favored a black moderate Democrat in a presidential election over a corporate Republican with an arch-conservative running mate. It’s a very rough proxy for local voting preferences, but I think it works OK for quick-and-dirty analytical purposes (and, at risk of making a racially reductive argument, see illustration 2 above).

The redistricting plan, however, would split the district-based votes 50-50, and ensure that north Fulton Republicans would control no less than 42% of the overall commission votes–and 57% if they could win the chair. If we use countywide Romney-voting as our yardstick, north Fulton Republicans win under the new deal even if they lose. And, although it would be difficult for white north Fulton Republicans to win a countywide race for commission chair, it wouldn’t be impossible. A Republican has chaired the commission as recently as Karen Handel’s tenure (which ended in 2007, shortly before an unsuccessful primary run for governor and a now-infamous tenure with the Susan G. Komen Foundation), and with three absolutely secure seats in Buckhead and north Fulton, the party would be able to concentrate its funding on one must-win countywide race, rather than two.

It’s not a coincidence that HB 347, another bill being sponsored by virtually the same group of north Fulton House Republicans, seeks to reorganize the Fulton County Board of Elections. Whereas the County Commission now appoints the election commissioners, under proposed legislation, the Fulton County delegation of the legislature would appoint two Democrats, two Republicans, and a commission chair chosen by the House and Senate members of the Fulton County legislative delegation. North Fulton party activists like Hans von Spakovsky, who chaired the Fulton GOP in the 1990s before working for the George W. Bush Justice Department, were instrumental in devising vote-suppression strategies like voter ID laws and stoking fears of widespread vote fraud to justify tightening access to the ballot. Given the demographic balance of Fulton County, it’s difficult to imagine that Republican electoral strategies would not involve significant efforts to shrink the electorate.

These legislative proposals, if successful, would constitute a strong Republican play for power in Fulton County, and one to which observers of urban and metropolitan affairs in the rest of the country should pay attention. They signal another instance in a changing relationship between local governments and the states. While policy historians have devoted valuable attention to the relationship between city hall and Washington, D.C. during the relatively brief heyday of liberal social policy, the consequences of federal retreat from urban policy have more recently come into focus. When it comes to taxation, social services, political representation, transportation, schooling, and any number of other significant metropolitan policy issues, the state houses, and partisan politics at the state level, are becoming more and more consequential.

In Georgia and elsewhere, efforts to undercut the power of urban centers and black voters living in them is old news. The state’s County Unit System prevailed until the 1960s, promoting a “rule of the rustics” in which tiny rural communities routinely undercut state support for infrastructure in Atlanta, hamstrung efforts to secure home rule for the city, and gerrymandered legislative districts to keep black candidates out of state and federal office. Yet, this situation is something quite different–the use of state power as a tool in an intrametropolitan conflict. Unlike the era of rustic rule, this redistricting attack on black Democratic political strength originates within Fulton County’s own legislative delegation. The state House and Senate members who represent Fulton County constituents are supporting a plan that runs contrary to the apparent political preferences of a healthy majority of the county’s voters.

Understanding why this has happened requires a bit of discussion about how it has happened. Some aspects of this situation are unique to Georgia. The era of rustic rule in Georgia valorized the county boss and demonized urban governments. State legislatures in Georgia were thus historically stingy about granting home rule power to the cities; preserving control for the rural-dominated General Assembly over Atlanta’s affairs was a check on racial moderation and other forms of urban degeneracy real and imagined. The consequence of this tight grasp of power was that the legislature was potentially overburdened with consideration of any and all changes to local laws and policies. The compromise that emerged was the “local courtesy” system, in which legislation pertaining to local affairs is largely handled by the delegation of the affected county, which is effectively a gatekeeper to the whole Assembly. Georgia has 159 counties, by far the largest in proportion to state population in the nation. Insofar as most of the counties remain small, rural, and homogenous, the system works reasonably well. But it breaks down miserably for heavily urbanized, diverse, and internally differentiated counties like Fulton. In these settings, and particularly in the Atlanta metro area where suburban settlement spans several counties, control of a legislative delegation is a matter of immense importance and potentially of intense conflict.

After the dismantlement of the County Unit System in 1966 led to reapportionment of the legislature, significant numbers of black Democrats joined the larger Fulton County delegation, and were, until 2005, successful in stopping efforts to incorporate cities in the north Fulton areas of Sandy Springs, Johns Creek, and Milton, which were major goals of north Fulton residents (mostly Republicans) who had come to resent the use of their taxes to fund both public works and social services in the rest of the county. The Fulton delegation was also successful in preventing any consideration of legislation to amend the state constitution to allow north Fulton to secede (the number of 159 counties is a constitutional provision).

As north Fulton’s affluence made it a key territory for the state Republican Party, and the priorities of north Fulton Republicans increasingly revolved around secession, it was inevitable that the growing supermajority of Republicans would seek to remove the local courtesy roadblock by the tried and true method of gerrymandering—redistricting the northern Atlanta suburbs so that more seats crossed Fulton County’s borders with Cobb, Cherokee, Gwinnett, or Forsyth–all prime territory for suburban Republicanism. Thus, the 2013 legislative session opened with a Fulton delegation tilted by 13-12 toward the GOP in the House, 7-4 in the Senate, and Lynne Riley, an active member of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, newly elected as its chair.

Redistricting the Fulton County Commission is an example of the kind of change that would typically require preclearance from the Justice Department under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, because Fulton County is a “covered jurisdiction”; the county’s history of racial vote suppression subjects it to federal review of any changes in its voting procedures, and it would not require a particularly loose interpretation of the VRA to attribute this redistricting to an effort to diminish minority power. It so happens that current Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens is a cosigner for Shelby County v. Holder, a suit pending before the United States Supreme Court that would invalidate Section 5 and free previously covered jurisdictions to change their voting procedures at will, with the burden falling on minority voters to prove an adverse effect on their voting rights after the fact. Before becoming the AG, Olens was the chair of the county commission in Cobb County, the catchbasin for tens of thousands of whites who fled Atlanta as the city desegregated in the 1960s and 1970s. Olens is thus firmly within the orbit of suburban Georgia Republicans for whom districting and voting are particularly salient.

So, the dominoes appear to be lining up for a series of interlinked efforts at protecting white north Fulton voters’ power. First, redistrict to create a virtually un-losable seat for another Republican on the Fulton County Commission. Then, wait for the Roberts Court to invalidate Section 5 of the VRA so that the new districting can take effect. Third, stack the Fulton County Election Commission with operatives committed to tightening minority access to the ballot, and, ultimately, bet the house on that one key race for Commission chair. Some of these dominoes seem pretty likely to fall (including, unfortunately, the demise of Section 5 at the hands of the Supremes), and others more farfetched (actually winning that commission chair election). And, from the point of view of north Fulton residents, encouraging a racially polarized campaign for the commission chair entails substantial risk. It could spark a backlash at the ballot box in the form of high turnout from south Fulton, and could result in the election of a commission chair with political debts to south Fulton (and grudges against north Fulton). Wouldn’t this reproduce the sort of polarized and dysfunctional government, dominated by the south and oppressive toward the north, that the north Fulton cohort have been bemoaning all along?

I think that’s the entire point.

Lynne Riley, the current chair of the Fulton County legislative delegation, is a north Fulton Republican who served as a County Commissioner from 2004 to 2010. As a protege of Karen Handel, she was committed to shrinking the scope of Fulton County government. And, at the same time as she was serving as a Fulton County Commissioner, Riley served as a member of the Milton County Legislative Advisory Commission convened in 2007 by state House members Jan Jones and Mark Burkhalter to advance the cause of county secession. It strains credulity to imagine that this effort is a good faith effort to fix county government. The proposal is virtually guaranteed to worsen polarization on the commission, and its chief sponsor was working to dismantle the county even as she was cashing a paycheck as one of its commissioners. Rather, it seems that north Fulton Republicans are making a short play to control the county and hedging with a longer game: if it doesn’t work out, it will only prove that the county is irredeemable, and that north Fulton demands for secession are justified.

After all, Riley’s Fulton delegation is also floating HR 275, another attempt to amend the state constitution to allow the secession of north Fulton, which doesn’t suggest a strong commitment to the success of county reorganization. If reforming Fulton County government fails on the terms that most of the public would recognize, i doubt most north Fulton Republicans would mind.

Let me say this again: when it comes to redistricting Fulton County as an ostensible good government measure, FAILURE, NOT SUCCESS, IS THE GOAL. 

And if my account sounds conspiratorial, you could take House Speaker Pro Tem (and another co-sponsor of both HB 171 and HR 275) Jan Jones’s word for it:

“My goal is not to re-create Milton County. My goal is to end Fulton County and bring government closer to the people,” she said. “But it will take convincing.”

The great thing about redistricting is that it can dramatically reduce the amount of convincing your side needs to do.

What’s Race Got to Do With It?

The campaign to split Fulton County in Georgia is, to say the least, fraught with racial implications. More to the point, the controversy illustrates competing frames of understanding about what is and isn’t racial or racist.

Reaction to a 2011 voting rights lawsuit filed by the Rev. Joseph Lowery and members of the state legislature’s Black Caucus illustrates this dynamic quite clearly. Lowery v. Deal demanded the disincorporation of several recently-formed northern suburbs, including Sandy Springs, and injunction against legislative action to create Milton County. The politics of the suit–impeding the creation of Milton County by returning the cities to an unincorporated status where they would receive services from Fulton County– were, in my view, somewhat at odds with the core legal claim of the suit–that the cities were majority-white and thus diluted minority voting strength in violation of the Voting Right Act.

Judge Timothy Batten, Sr.’s dismissal of the suit in March 2012 could be critiqued on many fronts (and check back here for more on that), but certainly validated the position of advocates for the new cities; as State Representative (and Sandy Springs City Attorney) Wendell Willard argued when the suit was filed, creating new cities was only a positive in terms of democratic participation, giving all residents another, closer set of officials to vote for.

“They claim a dilution of voting power, but in fact there hasn’t been any dilution. The people who live in these cities still have the ability to vote, as they have in presidential elections, state elections, county elections – now we’ve added for them the benefit of voting in a local election.”

No one was being denied anything, and certainly not because of race.

Nonetheless, resolving the fairness of the cities’ incorporations only accentuates the larger issue: that the incorporated cities are in a much stronger position to work to split the county. This was a fact recognized by all observers of the suit, and for a matter that was not about race, race had an odd way of popping up in discussions of the suit on the web in 2011.

White supremacist sites, including one operated by author Paul Kersey under the charming name “Stuff Black People Don’t Like” [No Links to Bigots Policy] was quite happy to frame the suit and the larger controversy as battles in open racial conflict. Kersey optimistically argued that pro-Milton County forces were striking back against “BRA” (an imaginary state of affairs called “Black Ruled America”).

South Fulton is full of Black people whose mere existence is predicated on the redistribution of tax dollars collected from the North Fulton residents…. Tired of playing Atlas for Fulton County’s Black residents, the largely white residents of Sandy Springs, Johns Creek, and Dunwoody have decided to finally shrug.

In his imagination, then, the battle over Milton County is the Fort Sumter of a war of redemption:

The push of that domino – the first domino – will come when DWL [note: Disingenuous White Liberal] residents of the Northside attempted [sic] to form their own county. The Department of Justice will attempt to intervene, thereby showing that white people have only one role and one duty in BRA: to continue working and paying taxes to support Black people’s proliferation (and, increasingly, other non-white minorities)….Once the push comes, the legitimacy of BRA will end. The salvation of Real America ironically begins in the same city where the dream of the Confederacy was burned to the ground.

Yikes! More mainstream conservatives like “lineholder” at Red State had a more difficult time explaining why they deeply opposed the suit and its aims in non-racial terms. This required some explaining away of basic social facts, like how exactly most of Fulton County’s white people and money ended up north of the Chattahoochie River, without recourse to any explanation that involved racial animosity.

The theory of “white flight” originates from the 1950s and 1960s. It contends that financial institutions owned or operated primarily by white people were willing to lend housing funds to white people seeking to live in the suburbs but refused to do the same for black people.This led to redlining, mortgage discrimination, racially-restrictive covenants, and environmental racism, “all of which deny black people their chance to obtain the American dream”.

It’s a good thing none of those things happened in reality, just “in theory!”

Rhetorically of course this use of the “theory of white flight” is analogous to the way that religious conservatives refer to the “theory” of evolution: as an unfounded and wrong explanation for uncomfortable facts, rather than as a set of explanatory statements based on extensive research and evidence (somehow I don’t think that Kevin Kruse is terribly worried about being cast as Red State’s Charles Darwin on this issue, or as Race Traitor Number One at SBPDL)

And, much like creationists imagine the diversity of life to have been created in its present state, “lineholder” seems to think that North Fulton communities simply look the way they do… well, just because. Questioning why and how segregation and spatial stratification developed is just a step away from dystopic outcomes:

What implications might the “white flight” theory have for other white citizens in this country? Does it mean a white person has to gain permission before they move from a certain area?

It’s interesting that while the economic and racial polarization of Fulton County is dogmatically regarded as Not About Race, “lineholder” is quite willing to interpret the suit in terms of its potential negative impacts on white people. There’s a long tradition of this in America, as W.E.B. DuBois shows us. Of course, denying the historical reality of white flight in Atlanta and elsewhere as a generative moment of contemporary conservatism is a tough delusion to maintain. The Council of Conservative Citizens [NLTBP] at least dropped the pretense, writing on March 30, 2011 of Lowery v. Deal that

White people have fled Atlanta for obvious reasons. Parts of the majority black city now resemble the third world. Now a collection of “white flight” communities outside Atlanta want to secede from Fulton and Dekab counties and form a new Milton County. The black legislative caucus of Georgia filed a lawsuit demanding that the city charters of several “white flight” communities be dissolved. They claim that the majority white cities violate their “voting rights.”… Atlanta is a crime ridden cesspool. Instead of trying to improve the black community, race hustling black lawmakers want to outlaw white flight.

Despite all that is repugnant in these statements, I have to at least respect the honesty on display.

The contrast between these rhetorical framings of pro-Milton/anti-Lowery positions illustrates a difficult analytical and methodological challenge for scholars. While the nakedly white supremacist position is definitely out there in the public, and no doubt a greater-than-zero share of the pro-Milton crowd shares it, it’s extremely difficult to demonstrate that naked bigotry is driving the mainstream Republican position, and irresponsible to attribute the views of one segment of a broad coalition to all of its members. What, in other words, is the linkage between a declaration like this from Stuff Black People Don’t Like

Though it might not seem that obvious yet, the coming political war in Fulton County is the start of a series of clashes around the nation, as white people begin to slowly understand the burden of high taxation goes directly to pay for public jobs and services that go toward their dispossession.

and state Representative Jan Jones’s pledge to

reduce the thumbprint … of Fulton County on your lives and your pocketbooks such that in a very few years, Atlanta and south Fulton will not fight us on recreating Milton County because Fulton County will be insignificant,” she said. “We will begin that process next year.”

As I’ve written here, contemporary libertarian, objectivist, and other conservative objections to big government and the public sector do not exist in a historical or spatial vacuum. As ideas, they are rooted in particular social spaces and bear the imprint of the history of those places. That means that in Atlanta’s postwar history, discussions about shrinking the public sector have never existed independently of the politics of white resentment over the ways that minorities, when enfranchised and empowered, have sought to use the public sector as a means of securing economic or social security.