A colleague invited me to Decatur, Georgia, to take her public history class on a test run for the walking tour I designed for the National Council on Public History 2020 annual conference. I began last week’s session in my colleague’s college classroom with an introduction to how I began my research in Decatur. I described documenting more than 130 teardowns over three years, African American families packing their lives onto U-Haul trucks for moves away from the city, and erased Black history.

At the end of the introduction we had a brief discussion with questions from the students, the professor, and a college administrator. One person asked me how Decatur could address is racism problems.

I thought for a moment and replied, “I don’t think it can.”

Classroom, February 7, 2020.

After another brief pause, I explained my answer. Decatur has sorted itself into a community dominated by well-educated, middle-class white folks who pride themselves on their identities as liberal and progressive people. Any suggestion that their personal decisions contribute to racism, displacement, etc., elicits violently defensive responses drawn from the deepest of white fragility wells.

Decatur is a city with many yard sign liberals.

For Decaturites to solve their city’s racism issues, they need to first do some serious soul searching and acknowledge that they may be a big part of the problem. Though their decisions with regards to housing, voting, etc. may not be driven by racist intent, the outcomes —displacement, the creation of racialized spaces, police racial profiling, etc. — most definitely are racist.

We displaced no one and only have added to the tax base in Decatur — Decatur resident who lives in a home built on a teardown site in the city’s Oakhurst neighborhood. Email to David Rotenstein, February 2019.

Decatur’s racism problem is first and foremost a public policy problem driven by decisions made in city hall and reinforced by feedback from the city’s residents. Whether it was the city’s failure to implement affordable housing objectives recommended more than a decade ago or its decision in 2013 to not implement a moratorium on single-family home demolitions, Decatur’s racism is public policy.

When the city realized it had a public relations problem related to its racism, it undertook cosmetic fixes that included a bogus “Better Together” initiative and now “civic dinners” designed to bring diversity to the wealthy white suburban ghetto.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution headline, October 28, 2014.

A fix for Decatur’s racism isn’t going to found at a contrived civic dinner table or in a socially engineered strategic planning roundtable session. The fix must come from small actions by Decatur’s residents and Decatur’s culture consumers. These include speaking out against racism and being intentional in pursuing an anti-racist way of life.

It’s the latter that most folks will find the hardest to grapple with. For us, that meant moving out of the city after just 11 months. That also included not spending another discretionary dime in any of Decatur’s businesses and avoiding the city’s bread and circuses (Decatur’s many municipally-sponsored spectacles and festivals): no more trendy bars and restaurants, no more wine crawls, no more beer festivals, no more book festival, and no more art festival.

2012 Decatur Arts Festival

Abstaining was easy for us. For my friends who still live in the Atlanta metropolitan area who have devoted themselves to social justice and who try to lead anti-racist lives, it’s a lot harder. Though they decry Decatur’s racism, gentrification, etc., they still patronize Decatur’s businesses and they still partake in the city’s spectacles. Those daily decisions are not consistent with defeating racism in Decatur.

Trendy bars and restaurants in Decatur’s square.

There is no easy fix to Decatur and as I told the class last week, I don’t see one at all. Maybe I’m wrong — I hope that I am but my gut and more than a century of history in the city say that I’m not.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

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