Capitalizing on Heritage: St. Augustine, Florida, and the Landscape of American Racial Ideology

Abstract

Drawing on Black and Indigenous intellectual traditions, this article applies racial capitalism and settler colonialism as twin frameworks essential for understanding gentrification in a city whose growth is predicated on historical storytelling. Challenging the hegemony of neoliberal and colorblind urbanisms, it is argued that the longue durée world system of racism is always already structuring capitalism and the urban process. The case study of St. Augustine, Florida, shows the role of White nationalist place-making in consolidating the material and ideological structures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, past and present. Using ethnographic and textual data, I show how what I call the “heritage industrial complex” produces and is produced by racist ideology, promoting diversity and inclusion in historical storytelling about “the oldest city” at the same time as urban processes of gentrification, redevelopment, and disenfranchisement characterize contemporary race relations in the city and the state. Although we have a firm understanding of spatialized inequalities, bringing together the sociology of race and ethnicity’s attention to ideology with urban sociology’s emphasis on the city and landscape can help us understand how race is constitutive of the capitalist project.

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