In my latest article for The Activist History Review, I examine the proposal to remove a Confederate Monument in Decatur, Georgia. I wrote,

I’m happy that Decatur’s white supremacists will be deprived of a symbol to which they have deep attachment. but it’s a hollow victory when viewed in context. Left in place is a timeless system of structural racism and many more, less obvious monuments to white supremacy in Decatur. When those fall, too, then historians and anti-racists will have achieved something truly worth celebrating.

I began in 2012  trying to call attention to the structural racism that permeates every corner of Decatur society. The gentrifiers and Old South white supremacists living there ensured that any counter-narrative to the city’s brand as a diverse and liberal community would be violently ignored and marginalized. Meanwhile, six years later though my early observations have been vindicated.

Single-family home teardown, Oakhurst neighborhood, July 2012.

Decatur has become a white spatial imaginary where black bodies and black history have been erased. In their place are McMansions and historiography that celebrates a fictional past where the black experience exists only in the stigma of public housing projects and what white gentrifiers call “thugs”: the young African American men who strike fear into white mommybloggers’ hearts. Black history, like black wealth, black dreams, and black homes, was stolen while good white folks looked on, too self-absorbed, too prejudiced, or simply too stupid to see what was happening all around them.

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