In 1957, the city council approved demolition. Hundreds of homes were torn down to build Norfolk General Hospital — now a medical campus — and expand the surrounding road infrastructure. No new housing was built for those displaced. The community was not relocated. It was erased.
Atlantic City was not an isolated case. Between 1951 and the formal end of urban renewal in 1973, every racially integrated neighborhood in Norfolk was targeted for clearance. Roughly 20,000 people — almost a tenth of the city's population — were displaced. James Baldwin called it what it was: Negro removal.
Why these neighborhoods specifically? White's analysis is precise: the targeting aimed to wipe out the city's transition neighborhoods where indistinct color lines had failed to produce two distinct school communities, one Black and one white. The Brown v. Board decision in 1954 had made explicit school segregation unconstitutional. The city's response was to destroy the integrated neighborhoods that would have produced integrated schools — to maintain de facto segregation by eliminating the residential conditions that made integration possible. When that wasn't sufficient, Norfolk simply locked six of its public schools in 1958, leaving more than ten thousand students with nowhere to go.
Its author, Garrett Hardin, was a director of the American Eugenics Society and a white nationalist. He co-founded anti-immigrant organizations and sat on the boards of population control groups. He would go on to write "Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor," arguing that the correct response to famine in the Global South is to just let people die.
Jackson, Mississippi: median household income around $33,000; poverty rate approaching one in three among Black residents; a state legislature that passed a law in 2023 expanding state-appointed courts with jurisdiction over Jackson specifically — a maneuver so naked that the NAACP called it a modern form of plantation governance. The water system has failed repeatedly. The state has refused to fund repairs at levels even close to what its own engineers say are needed.
Not a conspiracy. A structure. The racial geography that decides whose land can be enclosed and under what legal cover. The psychology that makes the occupied feel responsible for their own occupation. The place where race and gender and class meet, where the demons multiply each other's force.
You have watched. The next chapter names the demons. Race in the mechanism. The colony in the body. Necropolitics in the budget.
On the plantation, a human being is classified as property. Every hour of labor goes to the owner — no wages, no negotiation, no legally recognized counter-power. Reproduction happens at no cost to the system: the enslaved person's body produces the next generation of workers, and that labor too is uncompensated, expropriated, invisible in the accounting. Risk is externalized completely. This is capitalism at its logical extreme: total externalization of reproduction costs, total suppression of any counter-power that labor could build.
And it required race. Not as a rationalization that arrived after the economic arrangements were in place. As the prior condition that made those arrangements possible. Race did not justify the plantation. Race produced it.
His 2003 essay, Necropolitics, names what Foucault's framework couldn't hold: the sovereign power to decide whose death is acceptable. Not necessarily who is directly killed — though that too — but who is left without the legal recognition, the infrastructure, the protection from violence that makes survival reliable. This is necropolitics: the foundational operation that the state's management of life rests on. The colony is the original necropolitical space. But the colony is not an exception to modern sovereignty. It is its foundation. The sovereign right from which citizenship and the rule of law extend is finally the right to decide which deaths are acceptable. Everything else rests on that prior decision.
Which is why the commons built in these spaces refuses something deeper than an economic arrangement. Palmares refused the plantation's classification of its members as property. The Zapatista autonomy zones refused the Mexican state's withdrawal of protection. The Crown Heights mutual aid network refused the neighborhood's abandonment — stocking the fridge on the sidewalk, staying after the crisis passed, learning each other's names. None of these communities convened a meeting to debate the foundational question. They just answered it differently, in practice, every day.
Undoing the inscription. Breaking the incantation. Rupturing the territory. The three together — that is what getting free actually requires.
On the other side of the world, decades earlier, Paulo Freire had run adult literacy programs in the northeast of Brazil — one of the poorest regions in the world, where the plantation economy had left generations of agricultural workers landless, illiterate, and legally excluded from political participation. In Brazil at the time, you had to be literate to vote. This was not a coincidence.
The standard literacy curriculum presented words as technical objects to be memorized. Freire tried something different: he started with what he called generative themes — the words and situations already alive in his students' experience. Favela. Land. Vote. Work. Not as vocabulary exercises but as situations to be investigated.
In 1972, an American activist named Selma James launched the Wages for Housework campaign with a pamphlet that made the argument in its simplest form.
James had come to feminist analysis through the Black radical tradition: her partner was C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian Marxist historian whose analysis of the Haitian Revolution and Atlantic capitalism had insisted that the labor the visible economy refused to count — enslaved labor, colonial extraction — was the labor it most depended on. She brought that tradition's understanding of invisible foundational labor to the question of housework. The two analyses converged: the slave's labor and the housewife's labor were both the foundation the visible economy ran on without counting.