This story is featured in CityBeat’s Sept. 6 print edition.
What do we want our cities to be? Why are they the way they are and how can we make them better for everyone?
These questions seem broad, but when Sarah Mayorga asks them in her latest book Urban Specters, the reader is urged to think about them in a definite way. More importantly, Cincinnati readers can zone in even further, as the book intimately compares and contrasts two local neighborhoods — Riverside and Carthage — and their residents while exploring the topic of racial capitalism.
The Harvard Law Review defines racial capitalism as, “The process of deriving social and economic value from the racial identity of another person.” It goes on to say that the “harmful” practice affects individuals and society as a whole. In Urban Specters – published Aug. 29 by The University of North Carolina Press – Mayorga points to racial capitalism as, “the ‘formation’ that produces poverty in Cincinnati and the United States.”
On a grand scale, Mayorga says sociologists tend to focus on their particular genre of study when defining a wide-ranging topic like racial capitalism; so a historical sociologist might cite slavery as a prime example of racial capitalism and even the beginning of racial capitalism in the United States. A medical sociologist may look at health outcomes of different people suffering from similar afflictions, she says. As an urban sociologist, Mayorga named gentrification as a common example.
“For me as an urban sociologist thinking about cities, when I’m thinking about racial capitalism, it’s like, how does racism — the dehumanization of racism, the devaluing of certain groups — facilitate capitalist accumulation? We can think of gentrification as an example of how racial capitalism functions in cities,” Mayorga tells CityBeat. “There is this disinvestment from predominantly Black spaces. There is disinvestment from poor neighborhoods and that disinvestment then facilitates capitalist investment later on.”
The story that circulates about these neglected neighborhoods is one that shifts blame to residents, condemning them as the culprit of their circumstances, while the ways that “policymakers, developers and other actors” facilitate certain conditions are ignored, Mayorga says. This “made up” story tends to create division between people when in reality what we need is connection, understanding and a sense of community, she says.
In the book, Mayorga uncovers everyday manifestations of racial capitalism through the eyes of Cincinnati residents. She calls these examples “urban specters,” and whether the residents are aware of it or not, Mayorga concludes that they are victims of this systemic practice. Urban specters are descriptions people use to make sense of or describe their living conditions and everyday life, often recognition of the harm being done as a result of racial capitalism. She conducted interviews with residents of Riverside and Carthage, examining how they interpret their lives and neighborhoods.
As a former professor at the University of Cincinnati from 2012-2016, Mayorga developed an interest in Cincinnati’s many neighborhoods and what was happening in them, specifically pertaining to the intersections of race and class, she says.
“The project often transforms by what you find in the field,” she tells CityBeat. “So in speaking to other people in that data residency, it turned into this book kind of chronicling people’s experiences. And what I think are really inequitable experiences, sometimes painful experiences. And trying to make sense of that within the larger Cincinnati context. What’s interesting is, I picked Riverside and Carthage in part because there’s similarities in terms of some demographics but also really important, different ones, particularly thinking about the racial and ethnic composition.”
Mayorga says the striking fact of the narratives was how similar they were despite different contexts. Between 2014 and 2015, she interviewed 117 people from Riverside and Carthage as well as some from surrounding neighborhoods, according to the book. She chose the neighborhoods for their economic and demographic profiles and size.
In Urban Specters, she describes the two neighborhoods as historically “white and working class” while today Riverside is “predominantly white” and Carthage is “multiracial” and has the largest Latinx population in Cincinnati.
She introduces “working class” as a meaningful definition to residents, with 52% of them identifying as such, according to Urban Specters. While class is a tough category to define, the remaining residents identified as lower class (17%), middle class (18%), upper class (10%) and the rest didn’t select an identifier, the book says. Some occupations in Carthage and Riverside were listed as social worker, delivery driver, mechanic, housekeeper or paralegal.
From her qualitative research, Mayorga deduced three main “urban specters” that were identified and repeated among Riverside and Carthage residents as neglect, trash and security.
“People use this metaphor of trash a lot,” she says. “So sometimes it was actual physical trash on the ground but other times it was this differentiation between themselves as honorable, worthwhile, worth investing in. And then who they identified as either the people who ruined the neighborhood or the people who are bringing it down were ‘trash.’”
She employs word clouds in the book as an effective way to directly convey how residents see their neighborhoods. Words like “quiet, convenient, unsafe, forgotten, inaccessible and hopeful” were used to describe Riverside and “needs guidance, tranquillo (calm), mixed, declining, disconnected and multigenerational,” were used for Carthage. Each word cloud has an abundance of words conveying varying emotions.
Mayorga noticed ways that residents combatted signs of “racial capitalist harm” through self-policing and neighborhood gatherings. She says that they found ways to make meaningful connections instead of isolating or condemning neighbors when problems arose. She called this “enacting care in the face of racial capitalism.”
Again, the question arises: what do we want for our neighbors and neighborhoods and how do we achieve that? Mayorga says, if creating places of care is the aim, we have to care about each other, an exercise that can be applied anywhere.
“I think this is very much a Cincinnati story,” Mayorga says. “But I think it points us to ways to understand what’s happening in other cities as well. So, what are residents saying about what their experiences are, and how can we zoom out to understand how to situate that within the broader history and current dynamic of a city? So while the story might not be exactly the same [in a different place], I think it gives us at least a way forward.”
To learn more about Urban Specters and to purchase the book, visit uncpress.org.
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