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.