Geography – Unsettled Feeling & Critical Insight

January 15, 2020January 15, 2020

The Crucible of Chamblee: Buford Highway, the International Village, and the Neoliberal Racial Imaginary at the End of the Twentieth Century (part II)

by Owen Griffis Clow

Part II

Strip mall signage featuring English, Spanish, and Chinese, Chamblee, Georgia. Photograph: Kate Medley. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.

In my previous essay, I offered a brief local history of Chamblee, Georgia, and highlighted two events of the 1990s: a 1992 Chamblee City Council meeting and the city’s subsequent adoption (and the ultimate failure) of a “revitalization” project known as the International Village. These events, I argued, reflected the city’s turn to probusiness interests to counter negative press attention resulting from the city’s own racist reaction to its new immigrant population—a story that hardly accords with the one told by the area’s tourist boosters, who tend to represent the historical development of the Buford Highway Corridor as a story of harmonious cooperation and judicious support from local authorities. ¹ But the story of Chamblee and its “international” rebranding also points up the limits of the racial imaginary in America at the turn of the twenty-first century. This essay uses some of the events in Chamblee’s recent past as a case study to explore how the constraints of the neoliberal racial imaginary have colored the city’s recent history and to posit a relationship between racial capitalism and the historical construction of this imaginary. Ultimately, the recent history of Chamblee suggests a shift in how local authorities understood race: Chamblee’s outward embrace of its multiethnic immigrant population is not simply the transition from racism to the absence of racism; rather, it is the transition from traditional white supremacy to a neoliberal racial imaginary.

Let me pause for a moment to explain what I mean by “the neoliberal racial imaginary.”² I know this term sounds like academic nonsense. Instinctively, I’m inclined to agree with this assessment. But I also want to suggest that we are all intimately familiar with the neoliberal racial imaginary itself, even if the term seems like self-aggrandizing academic jargon, and that the term is useful as it explains a phenomenon which continues to describe social relations in America. Let us break “the neoliberal racial imaginary” down into its component parts. By “neoliberal,” I refer to an ideological turn in the latter half of the twentieth century which insisted that enjoyment of the rights and privileges of liberal democratic society were (or ought to be) predicated on meritocracy, competition, individual achievement, and the philosophy of “colorblindness.” Neoliberalism is neither the product nor province of any one party; it is a philosophy of politics that is attached umbilically to capitalism, and one which finds purchase through the political enshrinement of unequal market relations, deregulation, and rampant privatization. And by “racial imaginary” I simply mean the way that Americans, under neoliberalism, imagine the real-life manifestations of American racial ideology.³ How does “race” circumscribe our social relations? How do we evaluate “racial diversity” in a community? What does “racial harmony” mean? Is it possible? How might we imagine it?

The neoliberal racial imaginary underlies the common-sense logic of contemporary American racial capitalism. In his discipline-defining book Black Marxism, Black Studies theorist Cedric Robinson claimed that

the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, [and] so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.

The term “racial capitalism,” he explains, refers to this development and allows it to function as “a historical agency.”⁴ As an analytic tool, racial capitalism suggests that the development of a particular ideology of race in America was intimately connected to the development of America’s dominant mode of economic self-conception. While Robinson’s original articulation reframes how we think of the historical development of these two concepts, legal scholar Nancy Leong posits a process-oriented definition: “the process of deriving social and economic value from racial identity.”⁵ I am particularly interested in Leong’s description because it focuses on value: racial capitalism is an extractive process, reliant upon, in historian Walter Johnson’s words, “the elaboration, reproduction, and exploitation of notions of racial difference.”⁶Thus, the neoliberal racial imaginary, in my conception, is the product of this extractive process; it is the utopian vision of the world produced by the logic of racial capitalism.

You’ve made it through the abstract discussion of theory—dense, I admit, but necessary. But how does this relate to Chamblee?

One might imagine a small, majority-white town in the American South responding to an influx of nonwhite immigration with well-worn fears of economic replacement or the foreclosure of potential job opportunities. But what was most striking about the comments at the Chamblee City Council meeting was not the overt racism, nor the xenophobia: it was the fact that the public anxiety about nonwhite immigrants were not typically rooted in the typical economic concerns of “job theft,” et cetera. The bulk of the issues expressed by the petitioners revolved around either the politics of visibility or the protection of access to their own property—issues which are economic in nature, but were not, in this instance, stated explicitly as such.⁷ Immigration historian Art Hansen records that “residents complained that Hispanic men frequently were rowdy, drank, and used drugs while waiting for work near a convenience store. An elderly white woman who lived behind [a Majik Market parking lot where day laborers often congregated complained that men used her yard as a bathroom.”⁸ “They’re just terrible filthy people,” said another petitioner. “I don’t want them in Chamblee.” The mayor, Johnson Brown, agreed, assuring the crowd that his city was “not going to have these people coming in here going to the bathroom wherever they please.”⁹

The increased visibility of nonwhite residents and racist accusations of their uncleanliness threatened the theretofore-white racial imaginary of Chamblee—a shared implicit belief among white residents that the city was effectively white space and ought to be policed accordingly. The national reaction against the overt racism of the City Council reflected the death of a racial imaginary now outdated in the ostensibly “post-racial” society of the 1990s. After all, would Mayor Brown and Councilman King have been compelled to deny their racism—a matter of public record—in a public forum were such views no longer palatable to the general American public?¹⁰ It also suggested the need for local government and residents to recalibrate that racial imaginary to a form more palatable to an American public increasingly aspiring towards a dream state of full racial colorblindness. With the help of the DeKalb Chamber of Commerce, Chamblee chose this option.

The problem of the International Village project is instructive to the overall contours of the neoliberal racial imaginary which came to supplant the preexisting model of overt white supremacy. Chamblee officials were swayed by the economic argument set forth by the DeKalb Chamber of Commerce, but recognized that support for the plan would require more than just political action to make the project viable. This entailed an effective “rebrand” of the city: Chamblee had to publicly shed its “good ol’ boy” politics—the public side of the old racial imaginary—and publicly embrace the new “face” of the city. Any self-conscious rebranding of a place necessarily involves the erasure or concealment of elements of the past—of historical memory—which no longer serve a useful role in the active construction of a place’s identity. This was the rhetorical strategy behind Atlanta’s “city too busy to hate” moniker in the 1960s—a label which intentionally obscured a long history of racial violence in the Atlanta area.¹¹ Chamblee’s superficial embrace of its immigrant communities followed this public-relations approach, and it is telling that the city’s advertising literature highlights the commercial productivity of the Buford Highway Corridor, pointing up the novel cultural mixture of the community only insofar as these immigrant cultures have produced entrepreneurs who make a lot of money.¹² And, in practice, Chamblee’s support for its immigrant communities was largely limited to boosterism: many sections of Buford Highway have no sidewalks, and the street is by far the most dangerous major road in the Atlanta area in terms of number of pedestrian deaths.¹³ In effect, this was a recalibration of Chamblee’s racial imaginary: from explicit white supremacy to a neoliberal model of colorblind multiculturalism in which nonwhite groups may gain true admission to the community through a kind of quasi-meritocratic display of commercial productivity.

Photograph: Wikimedia Commons user HispaFacts101. Licensed under Creative Commons Attirubtion-Share Alike 4.0 International. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en — Entryway to Plaza Fiesta, one of the Buford Highway Corridor’s larger commercial buildings. Photograph: Wikimedia Commons user HispaFacts101. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

I highlight the events in Chamblee at the end of the twentieth century—the city council meeting, the International Village project—as a means of demonstrating a shift in the racial imaginary of a city in the midst of rapid, dramatic demographic and economic changes. From 1992 to 1996, the City of Chamblee replaced one racial imaginary—the imaginary of overt white supremacy, of “good old boy” Southern racism and white aesthetic domination—with another: the ostensibly multiracial, colorblind, economically-prosperous neoliberal racial imaginary. This transition, of course, did not end racism, either in Chamblee or elsewhere. Substantively, it did little to ameliorate it. This is not to make the argument that the Buford Highway Corridor is devoid of value: it remains a vital immigrant foodway, and its status as a starting point for culinary tourism is certainly merited. Today Chamblee and Doraville are widely recognized as diverse immigrant meccas in the greater Southeast, but just under a quarter of residents in each city live below the census poverty line.¹⁴ One effect of the excavation of this local history is to point up a history which has largely been whitewashed by probusiness interests. But, in a deeper sense, this exploration suggests that it didn’t have to work this way: the boundaries imposed by the racial capitalism, mediated through the neoliberal racial imaginary, foreclosed the potential for a socially-conscious, antiracist approach to community-building.

Bibliography

Brown, Johnson. “People of Chamblee Were Victimized by Biased, Inaccurate Press Reports.” Atlanta Journal, September 1, 1992, sec. A19.

Clarkson, Eric. “My City’s 20-Year ‘Overnight Success Story’ Offers Lessons to Others.” Atlanta Journal Constitution, December 8, 2019, sec. 28A.

Emling, Shelley. “Hispanic Leaders, Chamblee Officials Seeking Dialogue.” Atlanta Constitution, September 1, 1992, sec. C1.

Fields, Barbara. “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America.” New Left Review 181, no. 1 (1990): 95–118.

Hansen, Art. “International Immigration and Change in Metropolitan Atlanta.” In Beyond the Gateway: Immigrants in a Changing America. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005.

Hein, Virginia. “The Image of ‘A City Too Busy To Hate’: Atlanta in the 1960s.” Phylon 33, no. 3 (1972): 205–21.

Johnson, Walter. “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice.” Boston Review, February 20, 2018.

King, Gary. “Inflammatory Quotes Taken Out of Context in Chamblee.” Atlanta Constitution, August 31, 1992, sec. A8.

Kusz, Kyle. “Much Adu about Nothing? Freddy Adu and Neoliberal Racism in New Millenium America.” In Commodified and Criminalized: New Racism and African-Americans in Contemporary Sports. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.

Leong, Nancy. “Racial Capitalism.” Harvard Law Review 126, no. 8 (2013): 2151–2226.

Nicholls, Walter. The Immigrant Rights Movement: The Battle over National Citizenship. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019.

Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

Schmitt, Angie. “The Campaign to Fix Atlanta’s Most Dangerous Street and Preserve Its Immigrant Cultures.” StreetsBlog USA, September 21, 2017.

December 31, 2019January 15, 2020

The Crucible of Chamblee: Buford Highway, the International Village, and the Neoliberal Racial Imaginary at the End of the Twentieth Century (part I)

by Owen Griffis Clow

Part I

Get in the car. Drive. Don’t take I-85. Take S.R. 13 until it hits Clairmont, then continue straight onto U.S. 23. In Atlanta, where transportation infrastructure heavily favors the automobile, time can be as useful a measurement of proximity as distance. The town of Chamblee is about twenty minutes northeast of Atlanta proper. But how long it takes to get there depends largely on traffic.¹

The city of Chamblee. On the left, the city limits are filled in red; DeKalb County is outlined in thick black borders, while other incorporated cities are filled in with gray. On the right, DeKalb County (red) is shown within the state of Georgia. Image: Wikimedia Commons user Arkyan. Licensed under GNU Free Documentation License/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

Chamblee traffics in memory. In the early 1970s, the primary commercial attraction of the town was its “Antique Row,” a loose association of antique and consignment stores organized neither in a “row” nor even on the same street.² The antique trade, by way of justifying itself, conceives of “history” as a commodity. Professional appraisal as an “antique” imbues an object with nostalgia as well as a higher dollar value. In the American South, the antique store holds an additional valence: well into the twentieth century, Southern antique traders sourced many of their “wares” from poor black families, acquiring precious heirlooms and mementos “for fractions of their worth.”³ These items were then resold to consumers both within the South and beyond—serving, in effect, as totems of a romanticized “Old South,” as the material culture of the Confederate “Lost Cause” and as a means of culturally producing and reproducing those fictions.

The antique trade is no longer the core of Chamblee’s civic or economic identity. Since the late 1980s, Chamblee has served as one of the primary destinations for new immigrants in the Atlanta metropolitan area, as well as a highly visible site for recent immigrant commercial endeavors. The factors which once made Chamblee appealing to antique dealers—namely, cheap land and relative proximity to the downtown nucleus of Atlanta—similarly provided the impetus for commercial redevelopment by a wide array of new immigrant entrepreneurs.⁴ Much of this redevelopment involved the occupation of preexisting (that is, abandoned) commercial space, generally grouped along U.S. 23—an area often referred to as the Buford Highway Corridor.⁵ Curiously, Chamblee lacks clear ethnic neighborhoods: there is no “Chinatown” or any such equivalent; rather, strip malls (the dominant spatial-architectural form of the Buford Highway Corridor) play host to an eclectic mixture of immigrant businesses, many of which are restaurants.⁶ It is not uncommon to find strip malls with signage in Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Tamil. Guides to Atlanta make regular reference to Buford Highway as a destination for “food tourism.”⁷ In a recent editorial, Eric Clarkson, the current mayor of Chamblee, characterized the city’s development as a “twenty-year overnight success story,” claiming that the “community has welcomed the arrival of many new immigrants […] Chamblee has truly represented this past century’s greatest eras of progress.”⁸

Reporters, pundits, and other commentators tend to regard Chamblee’s new demographic diversity as evidence of the city’s “success.” It is less clear what, specifically, has been successful. The geographic distribution of class remains uneven within the city’s borders. Despite a dizzying array of commercial activities, many of Chamblee’s new immigrant residents do not experience the upward class mobility traditionally associated with community support for entrepreneurship.⁹ Nonetheless, if one consumes the tourist literature, reads the local reporting, or listens to the mayor, one might be led to believe that the city has not only realized the dream of the “melting pot,” wherein distinct cultural background are reduced to a common “colorblind” identity, but moreover that it has done so with uncharacteristic grace and harmony. The overall purpose of these two essays, as a unit, is to question the limits of this idea.

This essay provides a sketch of a pivotal 1992 Chamblee City Council meeting, traces the fallout from this meeting, and assesses the factors that led to Chamblee’s eventual receptiveness to nonwhite immigration and nonwhite immigrant entrepreneurship. It rejects a common assumption that Atlanta’s hosting of the 1996 Summer Olympics prompted Chamblee to embrace internationalism and harmoniously integrate a diverse array of nonwhite immigrant groups into a theretofore-white community.¹⁰ Negative national press attention catalyzed Chamblee’s initial attempts at governmental reform, but it was neither public outcry nor “the Olympic spirit of international brotherhood” which led Chamblee to deliberately rebrand itself as a welcoming home for immigrants. Despite the city and its boosters suggestions to the contrary, it was a calculated recognition, advanced through probusiness interest groups like the DeKalb County Chamber of Commerce, that immigrants represented the most viable means of economic revitalization of the city.

An early twentieth century house on Dresden Drive in Chamblee. Photograph taken by the National Park Service and under public domain.

Officially incorporated in 1907, Chamblee began its existence as a “railroad town.” What little commercial development existed could be found at the intersection of the two rail lines that ran through the community. Nearly all other developed land was devoted to agricultural production, primarily dairy.¹¹ After World War II, the expansion of Atlanta’s transportation infrastructure and the opening of a massive General Motors factory just north of Chamblee prompted rapid residential development. Secondary industrial development followed: Kodak, Frito-Lay, and General Electric all opened factories in Chamblee in the immediate postwar period. By the 1980s, however, the plants had begun to close.¹² The displacement of industry corresponded with the departure of many residents as the fringes of Atlanta’s suburban development expanded ever outward, toward Chamblee and beyond.

The proliferation of vacant commercial and residential space made Chamblee an attractive site for new immigrant settlement. Some newcomers were sponsored by the federal government, which, beginning in the late 1970s, began resettling Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian refugees in the area through the cooperation of local churches.¹³ By the middle of the 1980s, non-refugee immigration into the Atlanta metropolitan area had likewise started to funnel into the Buford Highway Corridor, generally feeding into both Chamblee and a small suburb to the immediate north, Doraville. Geographer Susan Walcott identifies 1990 as a high watermark for both Mexican and Vietnamese immigration to the Buford Highway Corridor, pointing to broadly-defined “macroeconomic changes” as the impetus for this event: the Mexican economy was in the throes of an oil crisis, while the economy of California—where many Central American and Southeast Asian immigrant groups had initially settled—was beginning to decline.¹⁴ Summit National Bank, an “immigrant-friendly” bank which opened in Chamblee in 1988, conducted its own informal census of immigration to the Atlanta metropolitan area that same year, finding 13,000 Koreans, 14,000 Chinese, 18,000 “Southeast Asians,” and 75,000 “Latin residents.” Summit’s data collection, while imprecise, includes undocumented immigrants, a factor which has historically underrepresented immigrant populations in Chamblee and Doraville.¹⁵ By the 1990s, the economic and social fabric of Chamblee had been profoundly transformed.

On August 14, 1992, the social implications of these economic and demographic transformations came to a head at an otherwise routine meeting of the Chamblee City Council. Thirty-seven white residents of Cumberland Estates, a relatively wealthy neighborhood, presented the City Council with a petition demanding that the city take action against “aliens and vagrants.” Their petition drew on archetypal imagery of urban decay, expressing a fear that Chamblee would soon resemble “the worst part of the Inner City area of New York.”¹⁶ The specific issue which prompted this petition was the increased visibility of working-class Latino men in public spaces—many of whom were working in an informal “day labor” market. Of course, day laborers are neither an explicitly nonwhite phenomenon, nor a phenomenon exclusive to the end of the twentieth century: historians Philip Foner and David Roediger, for instance, include “day laborers” as an important constituent group in early American labor organizing.¹⁷ Pools of day laborers were crucial to the economy of the agrarian South before and after the Civil War, and economists have noted the effect and availability of day laborers in adjusting wages and rates for agricultural work more generally.¹⁸ But when Chamblee petitioners cited the “Inner City area of New York” they invoked images of nonwhite ghettos and the urban poor, elements of an overriding white fear of racial mixture.¹⁹ The threatening rhetoric soon grew overtly violent: a council member suggested that residents set bear traps on their property to catch and deport trespassing “illegals”; another official suggested the formation of a vigilante group.²⁰

Public outcry began as soon as reports from the City Council meeting went to print. Mexican consular officials took to local news media to complain. Advocacy groups and immigrant rights organizations were similarly appalled.²¹ Mayor Johnson Brown and councilman Gary King wrote to Atlanta’s two major newspapers, The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution, to defend their behavior. Brown and King blamed inaccurate reporters, suggesting that their quotations had been taken out of context and leaving the reader to wonder what context, exactly, would justify the use of bear traps to catch and subsequently deport men seeking work.²² The Department of Justice opened a civil rights investigation into the Chamblee City Council, bringing the attention of national news media to the city and subsequently catalyzing some local reforms.²³ Ernie Stallworth, a “senior mediator” assigned to the Chamblee case, later reflected that “Chamblee was bad news […] you had institutional and systemic racism—a ‘good old boys’ system that worked well if you were white and didn’t work at all if you weren’t.”²⁴ While most councilmembers were unwilling to own up to any real wrongdoing, the Department of Justice investigation facilitated the formation of a task force within the city government with the ultimate goal of defusing “racial tensions”—a task force which implemented a few reforms, generally targeted at the Chamblee Police Department, but which was unable to truly usurp the ingrained power structure of the Chamblee city government.²⁵

The DeKalb Chamber of Commerce, however, had a plan to dramatically rebrand Chamblee and end its public relations nightmare. Even by national Chamber of Commerce standards, the DeKalb County chapter wielded—and continues to wield—outsized power in local governance. Unlike the Chamblee City Council, which was beholden to the racist and xenophobic beliefsof its white constituency, the DeKalb Chamber of Commerce regarded the newest wave of immigrants as a potential economic resource: cheap labor, in many cases, but with a certain entrepreneurial streak. Prior to the Chamblee City Council controversy, the DeKalb Chamber of Commerce had been advocating the creation of the “International Village,” by setting aside a sizable section of commercial and residential land in the Buford Highway Corridor to be redeveloped and “internationalized.” The ultimate goal of this project was to make the “multiethnic” experience of Buford Highway accessible to a white consumer base. Historian Tore Olsson explains:

The Village would feature pedestrian-friendly, tree-lined sidewalks, cooperative efforts between ethnic businesses, and community centers catering to various immigrant groups, including the Latino day laborers whose presence had heightened ethnic tensions within DeKalb County. In essence, the project would capitalize on an existing phenomenon, by rendering it palatable and consumable for the worldly tourist, whether they be from a neighboring suburb or a foreign country.²⁶

While the negative press attention drawn by the explosive City Council meeting—as well as the Department of Justice’s visit, which did not create new rules within the city but certainly drew the ire of national media—motivated Chamblee officials to meet with DeKalb Chamber of Commerce planners, it was the Chamber’s pitch of the International Village as a financially productive tourist attraction that won over Chamblee officials.²⁷ To Chamblee officials, however, it was merely a beneficial side effect that the development might make the area more livable for the immigrant communities that lived and worked there. ²⁸

The International Village project was never completed, but Chamblee’s distinctly-probusiness embrace of its recent immigrant population persisted. As with nearly any public development project, the funding was often difficult to access—but perhaps the most pressing reason for the project’s failure was the response of Doraville, Chamblee’s suburban neighbor to the north. The DeKalb Chamber of Commerce’s plan for the International Village included some land in Chamblee and some in Doraville; Buford Highway itself runs through both. Doraville’s government refused to consider the International Village in the context of its potential economic benefit, as Chamblee’s had. Instead, Doraville’s city council lambasted the project, suggesting that it ran contrary to the “way of life” in Doraville—a “way of life” that one councilmember described as “basically Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians,” a peculiar invocation of protestantism that is difficult to understand as anything other than thinly-veiled racism. Doraville’s “vice mayor,” Lamar Lang, sarcastically asked The Atlanta Constitution, “Why would we want to attract more immigrants when we got all we want? We got plenty. We got enough to go around. If you want any in your neighborhood, we’ll send you some.” Maritza Soto Keen, who was involved with the local Latin American Association, told Olsson in an interview that “Doraville did not want to become a Chamblee; in fact, not being Chamblee was a priority to them.”²⁹ In effect, thinly-veiled fear of the outcome to which Chamblee officials had eventually acceded—a commercially-active city outwardly amenable to nonwhite immigrant groups—prevented the ultimate completion of the project on its initial terms.

I began this essay by remarking on Chamblee’s “Antique Row” and its historical affinity for the commodification of memory. There are, of course, still antique shops in Chamblee; they can be found on backroads and in nondescript storefronts, bounded on either side by businesses with little to no English-language signage. The transformation of Chamblee, and of the Buford Highway Corridor more generally, suggests the packaging and sale of another kind of memory: the utopian imaginings of a neoliberal multiracial project, a project which failed in some respects and succeeded in others, and one which I will explore in the second half of this essay. It suggests the sale, moreover, of the kind of false memory current mayor Eric Clarkson suggested in his 2019 editorial: the notion of a “20-year overnight success story,” or the idea that the city welcomed an influx of nonwhite immigrants with open arms and secured for them a vibrant commercial space to live the American Dream.³⁰ The perception of Buford Highway as Atlanta’s “immigrant quarter,” which has motivated much of the area’s boosterism since the 1990s, elides a good deal of historical nuance and reinforces a way of thinking that celebrates the “multiracial” composition of a commercial district without, for instance, the installation or procurement of adequate public services. The “overnight success story” narrative functions as a mask not just for the endurance of racism but, moreover, as a means of obscuring the realities of life in the Buford Highway Corridor. Marian Liou, a local activist, suggests a less rosy image:

From a distance, in one shopping center you might have a Guatemalan restaurant next to the Korean restaurant next to the Mexican taco place. And you see it and it looks beautiful in one sense, even though they may not get along. Or they might be competing over resources, such as parking, or customers. When there are three rolled ice cream shops, the owners probably aren’t the best of friends.³¹

Chamblee is still selling antiques, but the “memory” they conjure and the “past” they overlook are far more recent.

One of Chamblee’s antique stores. Photograph: John Phelan. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Bibliography

Ballon, Marc. “The Melted Pot.” Inc, February 1, 1999.

Barclay, Liz. “Some of the Best Food in Atlanta Is Found along Buford Highway.” Vice, October 16, 2017.

Bishop, Mary Beth. “Shopping Destination: Chamblee’s Antique Row ‘Everything from Ridiculous to Sublime.’” Atlanta Journal Constitution, November 26, 1998, sec. BE12.

Brown, Johnson. “People of Chamblee Were Victimized by Biased, Inaccurate Press Reports.” Atlanta Journal, September 1, 1992, sec. A19.

Clarkson, Eric. “My City’s 20-Year ‘Overnight Success Story’ Offers Lessons to Others.” Atlanta Journal Constitution, December 8, 2019, sec. 28A.

Hansen, Art. “International Immigration and Change in Metropolitan Atlanta.” In Beyond the Gateway: Immigrants in a Changing America. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005.

Kelting, Lily. “”Performing Multicultural Futures on Atlanta’s Buford Highway.” Southern Quarterly 53, no. 2 (2016): 41–56.

King, Gary. “Inflammatory Quotes Taken Out of Context in Chamblee.” Atlanta Constitution, August 31, 1992, sec. A8.

McKibben, Beth. “21 Restaurants to Try Along Atlanta’s Buford Highway.” Eater, November 6, 2019.

“Mixed Signals on South’s ‘Immigrant Highway.’” Associated Press, March 11, 2009.

Myerson, Allen. “Ethnic Atlanta.” Georgia Trend, November 1988.

Newman, Adam. “Rethinking Buford Highway: An Interview with Marian Liou.” Atlanta Studies, April 13, 2017. https://www.atlantastudies.org/2017/04/13/rethinking-buford-highway-an-interview-with-marian-liou/.

Olsson, Tore. “Making the ‘International City’: Work, Law, and Culture in Immigrant Atlanta, 1970-2006.” M.A. Thesis, University of Georgia, 2008.

Ordonez, Juan Thomas. Jornalero: Being a Day Laborer in the USA. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.

“Planned Unit Development Pattern Book.” City of Chamblee, March 22, 2019.

Rhodes, Trent. “The Antiques Trade in Transition: Collecting and Dealing Decorative Arts of the Old South.” University of Delaware, 2018.

Roediger, David, and Philip Foner. Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day. New York: Verso, 1989.

Vega, Muriel. “A Beginner’s Guide to Eating around Buford Highway.” Atlanta Journal Constitution, March 22, 2017, sec. online.

Walcott, Susan. “Overlapping Ethnicities and Negotiated Space: Atlanta’s Buford Highway.” Journal of Cultural Geography 20, no. 1 (2002): 51–75.

Whatley, Warren. “A History of Mechanization in the Cotton South: The Institutional Hypothesis.” Journal of Economics 100, no. 4 (1985): 1191–1215.

Wilkins, Joy. “Chamblee, Georgia: Home Grown Industries and the New Faces of the Entrepreneurs.” Case study. Atlanta: Georgia Institute of Technology, 2000.

December 31, 2019January 2, 2020

Suffering in Silence: African-Americans and the Modern HIV Epidemic

by David Marchionni

https://minorityaidssupport.org/ending-hiv-will-only-happen-if-black-america-leads/

It is difficult to escape the shadow of history. This is as true for disease as it is for people. Take Yersinia Pestis, for example; centuries later it is still associated primarily with the Black Death of Medieval Europe. Bubonic Plague seared itself into the West’s collective memory, yet the bacterium remains a very real concern for millions across the world. A 1994 mass outbreak in Surat, India forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, infected 693 residents, and caused 54 fatalities.¹ This same issue plagues the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (colloquially referred to by the acronym HIV). HIV has remained a highly stigmatized illness since the AIDS crisis of the 1980’s and has been inextricably linked to homosexual promiscuity in popular culture. This connection has proven useful in some respects. For example, it fostered eventual support and funding for HIV-related aid programs in the metropolitan areas where much of the “Out” American LGBTQ Community resides. Yet, it has also proven highly detrimental to at-risk and HIV-positive populations who do not fit this traditional perception. HIV’s continued association with urban homosexual enclaves has proven particularly harmful to African-Americans living with HIV, especially within impoverished communities in the southern United States, which currently faces a veritable AIDS crisis of its own.

As the nation slowly confronted the AIDS epidemic between the late 1980’s and early 2000’s, a combination of governmental intervention, targeted prevention efforts, increased access to quality medical care and education, and more potent (and non-toxic) treatment options have markedly slowed down the rate of infection within the United States.² A welcome sign of such progress is the reported 19% drop in the number of new diagnoses between 2005 and 2014.³ The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that there are approximately 1.1 million Americans currently living with HIV, and of that number, only 15% are currently unaware of their HIV-positive status.⁴ Unfortunately, these numbers mask a bleak reality. While it is certainly true that White America has experienced significant progress in the campaign against HIV/AIDS, this has not been mirrored in Black America. African-Americans account for the highest proportion of both new HIV diagnoses and of people living with HIV, encompassing more than any other American race or ethnicity. Currently, within the African-American community, the 2017 “Diagnoses of HIV Infection in the United States and Dependent Areas” CDC report noted that while African-Americans account for just 13% of the U.S. population, they comprise 42% of all new HIV diagnoses.⁵ Breaking these numbers down slightly, 73% of diagnosed patients were men, while 26% were women. Beyond gender, it is apparent that sexual identity continues to be closely tied to HIV. Roughly 60% of newly diagnosed African-American men identified themselves as gay or bisexual, with male-to-male sexual contact remaining the primary vector of HIV transmission, with 80% of all new male infections occurring this way. African-American women, on the other hand, primarily listed heterosexual sexual contact as their primary means of disease transmission, occurring in 91% of new female cases.⁶ All told, there are approximately 468,800 African-Americans currently living with HIV. Yet even with these statistics, it remains difficult to visualize the whole picture. The figures listed above reflect national averages; in so doing they fail to demonstrate where HIV transmission and mortality rates have grown the most prevalent (and the least treated): the American south.⁷

Amidst the AIDS crisis of the 1980’s, HIV was concentrated in urban metropolitan areas. While the concentrated infection proved horrifically devastating in the early years of the crisis, the relative proximity of patients has since allowed for far easier cataloguing of transmission vectors, as well as ensured greater infrastructure and financial support to benefit affected communities. In the South, however, the population is far less concentrated, and is dispersed across rural, semi-rural, and small-scale metropolitan spaces. While only approximately 36% of the U.S. population resides in the south, American southerners comprised 51% of all new HIV infections in 2015.⁸ Also, the 2010 census reported that of the roughly 38.9 million African-Americans living in the country, 55% of them resided in a southern state.⁹ Of these southern States, the traditional “Deep South” (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South, Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas) has been particularly hard-hit by HIV/AIDS.¹⁰ These States have not only struggled with the highest HIV diagnosis rates in the nation, but also the highest associated mortality rates, standing at between 1.5 and 3 times the national average.¹¹ This reporting may also not fully reflect the true severity of this ongoing epidemic, as underreporting remains a very real concern.

Several factors work together to fuel the southern HIV crisis: geographic constraints (the large space necessary to travel in order to access healthcare), concentrated poverty (the clustering of extremely poor populations within poor communities), the prevalence of abstinence-based sex education, lack of adequate training within the medical community on HIV-related health issues, the criminalization of HIV-related risk behaviors (such as draconian anti-drug laws), White-controlled state and local governments that readily ignore issues predominantly affecting their African-American constituencies, and widespread stigmatization within the African-American community. It is difficult to ascribe primary culpability to any one of these factors, as they all play a part in this theatre of misery. Concentrated poverty leaves already low-income families saddled with additional burdens (including poor access to public facilities, poor access to quality healthcare, poor health outcomes, and poor educational opportunities) that make it effectively impossible to afford, let alone regularly receive, proper treatment. Homophobia and criminalization, meanwhile, help foster a culture of fear that disincentivizes potential HIV-positive individuals from getting tested, risking further transmission. Persistent stigmatization of HIV in the Deep South has in effect forced individuals with HIV to remain hidden in the proverbial closet. Those that do choose to “out” themselves run many of the same risks that HIV/AIDS patients did back at the height of the original AIDS crisis. Southern individuals living with HIV continue to experience familial, workplace, healthcare, and governmental discrimination, as well as risk violence and harassment.¹² If their HIV-positive status is discovered, they may be denied or fired from work, removed from their homes, denied medical care, or be abandoned by their families. In addition to southern-associated issues including concentrated poverty and HIV-specific criminal laws, the culture of silence within African-American communities also plays a role. As summarized by Phil Wilson (of the Black AIDS Institute), “you don’t tell other folks that there’s a gay son and that someone else in the family has AIDS.”¹³ This general lack of communal admission or acceptance is complicit in the thousands of new infections each year. It should be no surprise that the old “Silence = Death” slogan has slowly begun to circulate amongst impacted Southern communities. For those continuing to live with HIV but who do not or cannot seek treatment, the lack of community-wide African-American discourse on HIV places thousands more at significantly increased risk of complications and disease progression. The silence also incentivizes those with HIV to keep their status a secret from everyone, including sexual partners. This prospect may help explain how 91% of African-American women with HIV reportedly contracted it from heterosexual intercourse. Black “Respectability Politics” also plays a central role in fueling the stigmatization of African-Americans with HIV. Mirroring the cultural norms of the White mainstream, middle-class and wealthy African-American communities, which still remain organized around religious congregations, continue to characterize homosexuals and individuals living with HIV as immoral or degenerate.¹⁴

The American struggle against HIV has been ongoing for nearly forty years. For much of that time, efforts to combat HIV/AIDS by activists, policymakers, and health care providers took place along the coasts. Yet it has become increasingly apparent that all the while, the epidemic has proliferated freely across rural America. The deep south now stands as the current battlefield in a modern AIDS crisis, one that has primarily ravaged the African-American community. While NGO’s and the Federal Government slowly move to confront HIV in the south, stigmatization and homophobia, geographic constraints, concentrated poverty, and the criminalization of HIV-related risk behavior continue to hamper (if not render impossible) efforts to provide adequate medical care. The continued stigmatization of HIV, both in White and Black America, makes accurate testing and reporting unduly difficult. This, coupled with high rates of poverty and southern State governments that have refused to expand their Medicaid programs (which would have covered uninsured HIV patients), exacerbates the situation.¹⁵ Given ongoing discrimination against African-Americans, as well as the continued stigmatization that comes with HIV’s close association with homosexuality and transgenderism, it appears unlikely that meaningful progress toward lowering infection rates and raising treatment levels among African-Americans will occur in the near future.

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