The Racial Politics of Neoliberal Regulation in Post-Katrina Mississippi

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The Racial Politics of Neoliberal Regulation in Post-Katrina MississippiKate Driscoll Dericksona

a Department of Geography, Environment, and Society, University of MinnesotaPublished online: 04 Jun 2014.

To cite this article: Kate Driscoll Derickson (2014) The Racial Politics of Neoliberal Regulation in Post-Katrina Mississippi,Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104:4, 889-902, DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2014.912542

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The Racial Politics of Neoliberal Regulationin Post-Katrina Mississippi

Kate Driscoll Derickson

Department of Geography, Environment, and Society, University of Minnesota

After Hurricane Katrina devastated the landscape of much of coastal Mississippi, regional boosters frequentlymade the counterintuitive claim that the damage wrought by the storm actually represented an opportunity. Basedon extensive empirical research and drawing from literature on racialization, white privilege, urban neoliberalism,and disaster capitalism, I show that the “opportunity” the storm produced was to remake the landscape in ways thatdeepen the neoliberalization of governance in the region. The justification of these governing and accumulationstrategies hinged on the twin discourses of the region as a “blank slate” and the racial narrative of what Thomas(2011) calls “banal multiculturalism.” The relationship between the governing and accumulation strategies onthe one hand, and the cultural politics of race on the other, are best understood, I argue, through the lens ofthe often-overlooked regulation approach. Key Words: banal multiculturalism, Hurricane Katrina, racialization,Regulation Approach, white privilege.

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Despues de que el Huracan Katrina devastara el paisaje de la mayor parte del Mississippi costanero, los vocerosregionales con frecuencia esgrimıan la socorrida pretension de que el dano causado por la tormenta en realidadrepresentaba una oportunidad. Con base en amplia investigacion empırica y apoyandome en la literatura sobreracializacion, privilegios blancos, neoliberalismo urbano y capitalismo de desastre, muestro que la “oportunidad”que la tormenta genero fue la de rehacer el paisaje de modo que se ahondara en la neoliberalizacion de lagobernanza en la region. La justificacion de estas estrategias de gobierno y acumulacion se articularon en losdiscursos pareados de la region como una pizarra en blanco y la narrativa racial de lo que Thomas (2011) denomina“multiculturalismo banal”. La relacion entre los estrategias de gobierno y acumulacion, por un lado, y las polıticasculturales sobre raza, por el otro, se entenderıan mejor, pienso yo, a traves de la lente del tan a menudo subestimadoenfoque de la regulacion. Palabras clave: multiculturalismo banal, Huracan Katrina, racialiazacion, Enfoque de laRegulacion, privilegio blanco.

To most, the broad contours of Hurricane Katrinawill be familiar, particularly as they played outin New Orleans: A large but predictable storm

came ashore in late 2005 and rendered newly visiblea legacy of racialized poverty and state abandonment(Braun and McCarthy 2005). The visibility of theselegacies wrought by the storm’s devastation and its af-termath suggested, at least for a brief moment, that thepolitical order (Braun and McCarthy 2005) that hadproduced this human-made tragedy could not possiblyemerge unscathed, or at least retooled. Yet, as Klein(2007) shows in her treatise on disaster capitalism, theneoliberal political order is not undone or fundamen-

tally challenged in the face of disasters like HurricaneKatrina. Rather, the chaos produced appears to createopportunities for the deepening of neoliberal reforms.Klein draws attention to the pervasive narrative of post-disaster spaces as blank slates and the way in which suchnarratives work to embolden and justify neoliberal ac-cumulation strategies. Mitchell (2004) makes a similarobservation in a different register when she refers to theway in which neoliberal accumulation strategies are en-abled by narratives that seek to construct urban spaceas “spaces of spacelessness” (44).

In this article, I argue that in addition to drawing ona blank slate discourse in the context of post-Katrina

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104(4) 2014, pp. 889–902 C© 2014 by Association of American GeographersInitial submission, September 2012; revised submission, June 2013; final acceptance, September 2013

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Mississippi, neoliberal policies were further justifiedand made possible through nuanced and pervasiveracial ideologies that can be best encapsulated byThomas’s (2011) phrase “banal multiculturalism” orrace-blindess. These twin narratives work to deny thematerial and discursive ways in which race and spaceare historically produced and reproduced to creatediscursive and political justification for public policyand urban planning initiatives that engender theneoliberalization of urban governance (Brenner andTheodore 2002; Peck and Tickell 2002). I draw fromliterature on race and political economy (B. Wilson2000; Goldberg 2002; Melamed 2006; D. Wilson 2007;MacLean 2008) to further establish and deepen the linkbetween the ideology of banal multiculturalism andneoliberal political economic governance. In an effortto avoid the looseness with which the term neoliber-alism is often mobilized in the academic literature, Iground the concept in the intellectual tradition of theregulation approach.

My intention is to provide an empirical and concep-tual bridge between analyses of race, the racial state, andcultural politics and more traditional Marxist-inspiredanalyses of political economic change over the pastfour decades described under the rubric of neoliber-alism. My goal is to engender constructive and produc-tive engagement on the part of political economists,who, although inspired by the regulation approach, of-ten overlook the causal role of what tends to be deemed“merely cultural” (Butler 1997). This tendency on thepart of political economists to privilege accumulationstrategies as the proper realm of analysis creates theo-retical and political blind spots that have implicationsnot only for empirical research and theory buildingbut for the praxis of building effective solidarities withactually existing social justice struggles that privilegeso-called identity politics over anticapitalist activism.This article offers a comment on and rejoinder to thepast fifteen years of scholarship on neoliberalism in ge-ography and cognate disciplines that has struggled tofind common epistemological ground when attemptingto discern the most effective ways to understand andultimately contest neoliberalism (see, e.g., Leitner,Peck, and Sheppard 2007).

Focusing on the coastal Mississippi cities of Gulfportand Biloxi 90 miles east of New Orleans, I begin byestablishing the form that the racialized geographies ofthe region took before the storm. I then consider theinsights that an analysis grounded in the regulation ap-proach offers, noting the shortcomings and possibilities

inherent in the approach, and engage the existing lit-erature on the political economy of race. I note the wayin which scholars of the political economy of race haveargued that racial politics in the age of neoliberalismhave sought to erase and flatten notions of racial dif-ference and, in so doing, worked to justify race-blindand ahistorical approaches to public policy and urbanredevelopment.

Having established this empirical and theoreticalcontext in which to analyze the redevelopment pro-cess, I present the findings from extensive qualitativeresearch in the region conducted during the threeyears immediately following the storm (2006–2009).The methodology employed to conduct the researchincluded fifty-seven semistructured interviews withrepresentatives of the business community, local andregional government, community-based organizations,and residents from predominantly white neighbor-hoods, as well as from historically African Americanneighborhoods. The interviews were complemented byparticipant observation in the form of ongoing engage-ment with five community-based organizations in theregion focused on contesting and influencing the ne-oliberal form that redevelopment in the region took.1

“Blank Is Beautiful”

In the months following Hurricane Katrina, the re-gional growth machine of coastal Mississippi consis-tently sought to cast the damage wrought by the stormas an opportunity. In a region where some neighbor-hoods were reduced to rubble by wind and flood dam-age, the idea that there was any sort of silver lining to befound felt counterintuitive to those struggling to rebuildtheir lives and their homes. As Klein (2007) points out,however, the notion that urban space has been ren-dered blank is in fact “beautiful” to those seeking todeepen the neoliberalization of urban and regional gov-ernance. It hardly needs stating, however, that thesewere not blank slates but social geographies producedin the context of the racially segregated U.S. South.The spatial politics of slavery and Jim Crow and theirenduring legacy meant that the built environment andthe urban fabric were not, as many tried to argue af-ter the storm, postracial spaces that had shed centuriesof racialized distributions of wealth and property. Like-wise, the history of racially discriminatory U.S. pub-lic policy and cultural practice meant that race in theU.S. South remains coconstituted with class and wealth

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Figure 1. Historic African American neighborhoods in Gulfport and Biloxi, Mississippi.

(B. Wilson 2000; Brahinsky 2011). Hurricane Katrinawrought its damage on a landscape molded by theseprocesses and social relations; likewise, the legacy ofthe political economy and social geography of race andclass fundamentally shaped the rebuilding effort.2

The notion that the region was wiped clean, at leastin some places, set the stage for a host of urban de-sign and economic development challenges the citieshad been pursuing in the years leading up to the storm.Once known as the seafood capital of the world (Dur-renberger 1996), the coastal Mississippi cities of Biloxiand Gulfport had been stumbling to find economic foot-ing in the wake of a near collapse of the boat building,fishing, and seafood processing industries in the late1970s. The evolving economic development strategyof the region had coalesced around a characteristicallyneoliberal set of urban redevelopment strategies, in-cluding place promotion, high-end consumerism, state-led infrastructure investment to promote business, andlow taxes. The often-cited goal, repeated in numer-ous interviews with various members of what Loganand Molotch (1987) would call the regional growthmachine, was to transform the region into a tier onedestination. Although there does not appear to be atechnical definition of a tier one destination, those pro-moting this vision most often referenced airport capac-ity and connectivity, numbers of hotel rooms, qualityof tourist attractions, availability of high-end brandedcasinos and golf courses, and conference hosting capac-

ity as elements of the larger vision (see, e.g., City ofBiloxi 2012).

The prospect of the Mississippi Gulf Coast as a toptourist and conference destination turned primarily ona growing casino industry in the region. In 1990, theMississippi State Legislature passed critical legislationto allow individual counties in the state of Mississippito authorize casino gaming, with a restriction requir-ing that gambling floors be located on navigable waters.This restriction ensured that casinos would not be ableto dominate the landscape of the entire state, but italso meant that key pieces of property along the GulfCoast that were home to defunct seafood processingplants would be substantially more valuable as casi-nos sought to assemble parcels zoned to allow gaming.Notably, the legislation was shepherded by TommyGollot, a Biloxi representative who, along with hisbrothers, owned large swaths of land along the coastand has since collected substantial rents from casinos(“Mississippi senator profits from casino deals” 2005).By the time Hurricane Katrina hit, there were nine casi-nos forming a ring around the eastern peninsula of thecity (Figure 1).

Yet while the casino industry was thriving to thepoint that the mayor of Biloxi had declared the cityin the midst of a “renaissance” (Living Cities 2006,1) the landscape of East Biloxi and much of Gulf-port remained wildly uneven, still bearing the scarsof more than a century of institutional racism. During

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Figure 2. Casino locations in East Biloxi.

reconstruction, African Americans in the region tookadvantage of the Swamp Lands Act to purchase swampland, often in the backwaters and bayous set awayfrom the whites-only areas along the coast (Morse2008). Natural and human-made features of the land-scape served as de facto dividing lines and createdpockets of African American settlement that enduretoday. African Americans remained heavily concen-trated in neighborhoods that had been the historic cen-ters of African American life during reconstruction, JimCrow, and pre-Katrina Mississippi. Neighborhoods likeBiloxi’s Back Bay and Gulfport’s Soria City, North Gulf-port, and Turkey Creek were home to a disproportionateconcentration of the region’s African Americans andwere all majority African American, a notable concen-tration in an area where African Americans made upless than 30 percent of the population (Figure 2). Theeast–west railroad divided the beachfront from the backbays and bayous, setting Soria City and Back Bay apart(Figure 2), and Turkey Creek represented a swamp landacquisition of what the neighborhood’s folklore calls“eight forties” in reference to the promise of forty acresand a mule to freed slaves.3

Prior to Katrina, in Harrison County, which includesboth Gulfport and Biloxi, 27 percent of the AfricanAmerican population lived in poverty, whereas only 10percent of the white population were poor (U.S. Cen-sus Bureau 2000). Median household income for white

families was $38,353 in 2000, compared with $29,394for African American families (U.S. Census Bureau2000). Data from the 2010 census show an even starkerdivide, with median household income for whites in-creasing at a rate of 33 percent since 2000 (to $50,903),with African American household income increasingat a rate of just 3.6 percent (to $31,013; U.S. CensusBureau 2010). Further, neighborhoods associated withlow-income and poverty status are also the historic cen-ters of African American life in the region. Thus, whenthe specter and pathologies of low-income housing andfamilies are raised in the redevelopment process, raceis implicated as well. One interviewee active in the so-cial justice community in the region explained the waysin which language about income operates as “code” forunspoken attitudes about race:

White code words tend to be trying to conflate the un-stated thing of race with the stated thing, which would beeconomics, it’ll be, you know, uneducated, law-breaking,don’t-want-to-work, unambitious, lazy, no-account . . .

you know, all the southern things. (Biloxi activist, in-terview 28)

Prior to the storm, each of these neighborhoods wasfeeling squeezed by urban development strategies meantto realize the new vision for the region. Turkey Creekand North Gulfport were surrounded by an interstate,the airport, a creosote plant, and a polluted creek prone

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to flooding and targeted for a new road that would fillin wetlands to connect the State Port to the interstate.Soria City was also in this path and adjacent to theindustrial port. The Back Bay of Biloxi was directly inthe middle of the casino development.

Thus, the storm did not come ashore in a postracialspace; neither did it create one, despite the refrain of-ten defensively repeated in interviews and closed-doormeetings that the storm did not discriminate. In fact,analysis by the Mississippi Center for Justice suggestsotherwise. The Center found that 95 percent of res-idents of the most heavily impacted areas of Biloxiearned below federal median income, and 80 percent ofthese residents suffered extensive or catastrophic dam-age (Morse 2008). The most heavily African Americancensus tracts in the cities of Gulfport and Biloxi facedthe highest surge elevations of 16 to 22 feet (Morse2008).

In light of the uneven impact of the storm and thefact that these neighborhoods were located adjacent toareas designated for high-end use, the giddiness withwhich regional boosters declared that the storm was, ineffect, an opportunity can be newly interpreted. In thesame way that the racialized concept of blight justifiedand created opportunities for new forms of urban devel-opment under the guise of urban renewal in the postwarera (Brahinsky 2011), the highly racialized and impov-erished nature of these neighborhoods worked to justifyand enable the narrative that the storm had renderedthem blank slates and, in so doing, created new oppor-tunities for intensifying and further accomplishing thevision of the city promoted by regional boosters.

The notion that the cities were blank spaces to beremade was encapsulated in the City of Gulfport’s invi-tation on their Web site to potential investors:

Like the artist with the blank canvas or an explorer whosteps foot in a brand new land—as residents of Gulfport,Mississippi, we eagerly await the authors who will writethe future chapters of our beloved hometown. . . . Fromthe fury of Mother Nature comes the opportunity to re-define our city as a progressive new enterprise of hopeand prosperity. When you bring your vision to the shoresof Gulfport, you will take your place among the othercaptains and watch your own ship come in. (City of Gulf-port 2010)

In short, the storm had accomplished what the region’selites could not have otherwise, creating conditionsunder which rapid and sweeping redevelopment andgentrification were possible. But if the background justprovided suggests a certain coherence between race and

the racialization of space, the postdisaster blank slatenarrative, and neoliberal accumulation strategies, in theremainder of this article I want to delve deeper intothis suggested coherence to consider whether there isan existing theoretical framework that can both accom-modate an analysis of the relationship between racial-ization and urban neoliberalism and perhaps even bestrengthened by an engagement with these processes.In pushing the limits of an existing theoretical frame-work, I seek to develop and deepen conceptual bridgesbetween contemporary political economic inquiry intothe changing nature of governance and the cultural andinstitutional forms of racialization.

In the following sections I argue that the regulationapproach provides a theoretical apparatus for consider-ing the intersections and mutually constituted nature ofthe cultural politics of racism and racialization and ne-oliberal accumulation strategies. I then engage with theliterature that considers the particular discourse andnarratives about race and racialization that articulatewith, and reinforce, neoliberal ideology and practice. Ithen return to the empirical context of post-Katrinaredevelopment in coastal Mississippi to demonstratethe purchase of this theoretical framework to betterunderstand the dynamics influencing the redevelop-ment process.

Neoliberalism, Race, and Regulation

Geography’s preoccupation with neoliberalism4

means that the regulation approach has always beenwith us, despite the fact that overt engagement withthe approach has declined since its heyday in the mid-1990s. There is something of a relentless looseness withwhich the term neoliberalism has and continues to beinvoked, so much so that Brenner, Peck, and Theodore(2010, 182) have called it a “rascal concept,” and polit-ical economic debates in geography in the last decadewere dominated by the various ontological, epistemo-logical, and political implications of competing concep-tions of the term (see Springer [2010] for an overview).Perhaps surprisingly, these debates seldom engageddirectly the analytical tools of the regulation approach,despite the clear influence the approach has had onhow neoliberalism is researched and mobilized as anexplanatory concept. Insofar as neoliberalism can beunderstood to signal a particular and distinct permu-tation of capitalism, qualitatively different from itsprecursor Fordism, entailing a historically specific align-ment between forms of capital accumulation and a

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common-sense social and political order that works(unevenly and imperfectly) to render replicable and rel-atively stable the process of accumulation, it is clearlyinfluenced by the concepts and frameworks of theregulation approach. Moreover, in tracing the intel-lectual trajectories of those whose work has been mostinfluential in the discipline of geography on understand-ing neoliberalism, we see a legacy of regulation-inspiredwork (specifically but not exclusively MacLeod 1997;Jessop 2002; Peck and Tickell 2002; Harvey 2005).

Work in the tradition of the regulation approach(RA) has been concerned with identifying the so-cial and institutional conditions that secure the repro-duction of capitalism, despite its inherent structuralcontradictions (Aglietta [1979] 2000; Lipietz 1986;Boyer 1990; Peck and Tickell 1992, 1995; Jessop 1997;MacLeod 1997). It has thus been motivated by anempirical and theoretical interest in the economy asembedded in social, institutional, and cultural5 rela-tionships that secure relatively stable periods of capitalaccumulation and the production and reproduction ofthose relationships during and following crisis.6

Two conceptual building blocks serve as the foun-dation for the approach: the regime of accumulationand the mode of social regulation. The regime of accu-mulation refers to an extended period of stability andgrowth or “a way of dividing and systematically real-locating the social product” (Lipietz 1987, 31, cited inMacLeod 1997, 532). During this extended period oftime, there is what Lipietz (1987) calls “a certain con-vergence” between the processes of production and theprocesses of consumption (31, cited in MacLeod 1997,532). The regime of accumulation, in other words, is a“social structure” that connects decisions made by indi-vidual producers with the effective demand with whichthey must contend (Noel 1987, 311).

The stability of this convergence between produc-tion and consumption over time can only occur inmutual constitution with a set of social processes calledthe mode of social regulation.7 The mode of social reg-ulation is broadly defined in the regulation literatureas the social norms, habits, conventions, customs, statelaws, and patterns of conduct that serve to normalizethe accumulation process (Peck and Tickell 1992; Jes-sop 1997; MacLeod 1997). The mode of social regula-tion acts to “guarantee that the dominant accumulationsystem is reproducible in the medium term, through theaccommodation, mediation and normalization of crisistendencies” (Peck and Tickell 1992, 349).

When the regime of accumulation and mode of socialregulation are in sync, long periods of capitalist expan-

sion occur. Many regulation-theoretic accounts havedirected their analyses toward the period of capitalistexpansion from post–World War II to the early 1970s,during which growth in productivity facilitated thegrowth of real wages, which in turn generated the rapiddevelopment of mass consumption (Aglietta [1979]2000; Noel 1987; Peck and Tickell 1992). The modeof social regulation, including Keynesian welfare statepolicies (Peck and Tickell 1992), as well as social normsand expectations regarding the “family wage” (Bakshiet al. 1995), the suburbanization of housing, and massconsumption, secured the conditions that facilitatedthe reproduction of the labor pool and rising consumerdemand and staved off the crisis and recession tenden-cies in the regime of accumulation.8 Although manyhave documented the way in which this growth hingedon racial exclusion (Jackson 1985; Sugrue 1996), Bakshiet al. (1995) do so by explicitly mobilizing a regulation-ist framework, arguing further that challenges to genderand racial social formations (i.e., the mode of regula-tion) contributed to the decline of the Fordist regimeof accumulation. Clearly, then, economic develop-ment premised on racialized exclusion is not unique toneoliberalism.

Unlike orthodox applications of Marxist theories ofthe relationship between the base and the superstruc-ture, in the RA, the regime of accumulation and themode of social regulation are, in theory, accorded equalanalytical value (Peck and Tickell 1992) and, impor-tantly, equal causal value in contributing to the repro-duction of capitalist social relations (Aglietta [1979]2000). Nevertheless, in most applications of the RA,neither of these theoretical commitments are borneout. Rather, there is a disconnect between the in-tention of the RA to avoid overt structuralism andits “methodological objectification of the economy”(MacLeod 1997, 535). Thus, the analytical promiseof the regulationist formulation is never fully realized,in part due a failure to conceptually and empiricallydevelop the important dimensions of the concept of themode of social regulation (but see Jenson 1990, 1991,1993; Bakshi, Goodwin, and Painter 1995; B. Wilson2000).

Although regulationist-inspired work has produced aconvincing road map for understanding the forms thataccumulation has taken, work in this tradition has beenless engaged with a central question the regulation ap-proach demands: How do social formations and culturalpolitics create the conditions by which different accu-mulation strategies are enabled and reproduced? To ef-fectively answer this question, we need a better, more

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developed understanding of how revanchist neoliberalaccumulation strategies are rendered commonsense so-lutions through references to and articulations with thesocial formation and cultural politics. In the remainingspace, I explore the way in which the cultural politicsof race, specifically narratives of banal multiculturalism(Thomas 2011), work to deny and silence analyses ofthe historical material forms that racial inequality hasproduced and thus justify public policies that support ac-cumulation strategies that ignore and exacerbate racialinequality and perpetuate white privilege (i.e., revan-chist neoliberalism).

By invoking the concept of race, I mean to signala socially constructed category of difference producedthrough discourse as well as through material and spatialpractices. Pulido’s work is particularly relevant. She il-lustrates the way in which U.S. public policy and spatialpractices not only produce racialized others and racial-ized spaces but perpetuate racial difference throughthe reproduction of white privilege (Pulido 2000). Al-though there is little scholarship that seeks to explicitlydiscern the relationship between race and the mode ofsocial regulation as such (but see Bakshi et al. 1995; B.Wilson 2000), there is substantive work that attemptsto discern the ways in which the fields of politics, cul-tural practice, and social formation are produced andreproduced by historic and institutional racism and theways in which that inherited social landscape articulateswith and reinforces neoliberal accumulation strategies.

Although focused on these processes as they play outat different scales, work in this vein reinforces Thomas’s(2011) observation that dominant racial narrative inthe context of neoliberalism can be best described asbanal multiculturalism. Whereas robust forms of multi-culturalism can include historical material analyses ofmarginalization and oppression that lead to restorativeand redistributive practices, banal multiculturalism is away of rendering all cultures or forms of social differenceequivalent, as though a slate has been wiped clean andhistoric forms of oppression and marginalization are nolonger relevant. Importantly, however, as relevant workhas shown, banal multiculturalism not only denies thecurrent relevance of past injustices but works to mask orrender less visible the way in which neoliberal accumu-lation regimes both rely on and further entrench racialdifference and oppression (Goldberg 2002; Melamed2006; MacLean 2008; Mele 2013).

The work of Melamed (2006), MacLean (2008),Mele (2013), D. Wilson (2007), and others demon-strates the ways in which this thread of banal multicul-turalism is “sutured” (Melamed 2006, 5) to neoliberal

politics and accumulation at a range of scales, at thesame time having the effect of eliding the perverselyracialized and disproportionate impact of political eco-nomic policy at a range of scales. Taken together, thesestudies offer a convincing portrait of the mutually con-stitutive nature of racialized difference and narratives ofbanal multiculturalism on the one hand and the deepen-ing of neoliberal accumulation strategies on the other.Each of these scholars points out that race remains whatMelamed called a “procedure” (2006, 15) that justifiesthe uneven distribution of wealth in the context ofneoliberal capitalism. Goldberg (2002) pushed this fur-ther by arguing that race is an instrumental explanatorymechanism that allows the continued (if contested)legitimacy of neoliberalism as a political economic for-mation in the face of its obvious failure to producegeneralizable benefits accrued to all.

Focusing on U.S. foreign policy and the interna-tional context, Melamed (2006) argued that chang-ing discourses regarding racial tolerance and inclusionwere necessary to engender and maintain U.S. hege-mony. This alternative discursive posturing did littleto transform underlying material racial relations butrather served to institute a race-blind or multiculturalstance. This stance has the perverse effect of renderingall racialized claims equivalent and erasing the lega-cies and relevance of past injustices. Melamed referredto the insistence by some that historically black col-leges and universities must diversify or claims that theNational Association for the Advancement of ColoredPeople (NAACP) is a racist organization as examples.Crucially, her argument emphasizes continuity in thematerial forms of racial exclusion, highlighting the wayin which the discourses that justify or mask racial dif-ference change in response to geopolitical conditions.

MacLean (2008) made a similar argument about thenecessity of race-blind or race-neutral discourse as aprecondition for the broader dominance of the particu-larly Southern style of political economy that she arguesserved as the political incubator for the U.S. brand ofneoliberalism. The effect of this discursive posturing wasto protect inherited privileges under the banner of raceneutrality and the promotion of the notion that unevenprivileges and benefits emerge from meritocratic socialrelations rather than overt forms of discrimination. LikeMelamed (2006), she argued that this discourse servesto render those who do not thrive in the context of so-called race-neutral policies as themselves not worthyand works to neutralize claims of racism as a relevantexplanatory framework (MacLean 2008). The work ofB. Wilson (2000), D. Wilson (2007), Mele (2013), and

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others extends this analysis at the scale of the cities andregions (Bonds 2013), showing how neoliberal urbanredevelopment strategies at once depend on racializeddifference to create space for neoliberal accumulationwhile depending on race-neutral discourse to elide anddelegitimize claims regarding the uneven racial impactsof the associated redevelopment policies.

Taken together, these observations suggest the con-tours of the racial mode of social regulation in relationto neoliberal accumulation strategies. Further, there isan analytical value in uniting these companion projectsunder the banner of the regulation approach. The RAprovides a theoretical language and empirical data setavailable to political economic scholars who recognizethe relevance of the cultural politics of the mode ofsocial regulation but tend to focus analyses on theelements of neoliberalism or political economy morebroadly that fall into the category of the regime of ac-cumulation. I argue that in the context of post-Katrinacoastal Mississippi, negative racial associations were es-sential for justifying redevelopment strategies that madepossible the further entrenchment of neoliberal forms ofaccumulation. At the same time, the active construc-tion of an ethos of banal multiculturalism worked torender less visible and delegitimize claims regarding theuneven, racialized impact of the proposed policies.

In the following section I lay out the specific waysin which the economic development strategy in the re-gion both before and after Katrina can be understoodas characteristically neoliberal, elaborating the famil-iar contours of the neoliberal regime of accumulationbroadly and as they played out in the region specifically.I then draw on the preceding literature to flesh out thespecific form that the racial dynamics of the neoliberalmode of regulation take in the region. My objectiveis to provide a synthesis of theoretical literature ar-ticulated through an empirical example to advance ourunderstanding and analytical approach to comprehend-ing the way in which race and neoliberalism specificallyand the regime of accumulation and the mode of socialregulation more broadly are “sutured” together.

Race and Regulation in Post-KatrinaMississippi

If, as I have already argued, neoliberal urban gover-nance can be broadly characterized as a shift in theorientation of the state away from demand-side in-tervention and redistribution and toward supply-sidestate-sponsored economic development, we can clearly

see this playing out in the prestorm approach to culti-vating a “renaissance” (Living Cities 2006, 1) throughentrepreneurial strategies for place promotion and busi-ness development predicated on low tax rates. In thissection, however, I focus specifically on the packageof policies enacted as part of the post-Katrina recoveryprocess to consider the way in which neoliberal publicpolicies thrived on and reproduced the twin narrativesof racialized blight and postdisaster blank slates on theone hand and banal multiculturalism on the other.

Encapsulating the neoliberal ethos in the region afterthe storm was the refrain that the role of the govern-ment was to prime the economic engine of the region.A range of city officials and business leaders repeatedthis phrase as though it were the obvious role andresponsibility of the government and objectively thebest use of state resources. Further, it helped explainthe uneven nature of the recovery, wherein the busi-ness community, particularly the casino and gamingsector, recovered much more quickly than residentialneighborhoods.

Shaped as it was by this ethos, the recovery processin coastal Mississippi included a package of public poli-cies promoted by Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour,the regional business council, and city leadership thathad the aggregate effect of deepening the orientation ofthe region toward neoliberal accumulation strategies.The first and most telling piece of legislation passedby the state legislature after the storm was to relaxhard-fought legislation concerning where casinos werelocated to bolster their capacity to rebuild. The newlegislation no longer required the casino floor to befloating on water but continued to limit the locationof casinos to within 800 feet of the high-tide line,effectively ensuring that the prestorm geographies ofcasinos would be re-created. This decision emboldenedthe casino industry, and owners bought up land to ex-pand and rebuild, prompting intense land speculationon the peninsula and slowing the pace of recovery bycreating uncertainty about East Biloxi’s future.

According to interviewees, some residents delayedrebuilding their homes, hoping for large paydays fromcasinos seeking to expand, and other small-scale specu-lators bought up land and attempted to assemble parcelsto sell to casinos and luxury condominium developers.This flurry of speculation overheated the market on thepeninsula for more than a year after the storm, makingit difficult for nonprofit housing organizations to obtainlow-cost land to develop affordable housing and con-tributing to a spotty landscape of vacant lots adjacent torebuilt homes. This dynamic created uncertainty about

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the future of the neighborhood and was exacerbatedby the comparatively slow processes by which the Fed-eral Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and theregional government rolled out new requirements forresidents seeking to rebuild homes. The result of theseregulations was that some residences would need to beelevated as much as 17 feet in the air to meet buildingcodes and zoning requirements.

A second piece of the policy package that char-acterized the redevelopment process was the decisionby Governor Barbour and his administration to divert$600 million in federal funds from the U.S. Departmentof Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that hadbeen intended to support the building and rehabilita-tion of housing for a massive overhaul of the State Portof Gulfport instead. Barbour and his administration ar-gued that the Port would drive economic growth andsought to use the storm and the funding flows associatedwith it to capitalize on an opportunity to rebuild the portas a “Port of the Future” with new capabilities to accom-modate cruise ships and larger container ships comingthrough the newly expanded Panama Canal (Port of theFuture 2012). This move was seen by observers from awide range of sectors, including those in social serviceprovision and many of the federal legislators who hadapproved the expenditure, as an audacious repurpos-ing of housing funds to economic development. Thisrepurposing encapsulates the state’s orientation awayfrom a traditional redistributive model, in which resi-dents would be supported by the funding as they soughtto rebuild or be rehoused in the region, and towardaggressive supply-side, economic growth-driven policy.The extent of this reorientation is encapsulated by thestaggeringly low impact in terms of job creation (thepurported justification for the allocation of funds).Analysis by the Mississippi Center for Justice estimatesa total cost of $400,000 per permanent job created,whereas HUD’s best practices in economic develop-ment recommend a target cap of $40,000 in capitalspending per permanent job created (Morse 2008).

Whereas the previous two pieces of policy exemplifythe reorientation of the state toward economic growthand supply-side intervention that is characteristic ofthe neoliberal regime of accumulation, the punitive, orwhat Smith (1996) calls revanchist, characteristics ofneoliberal accumulation are also in evidence. In coastalMississippi, where more of the poor are non-white, theeffects of these policies are highly racialized. Most no-tably, the state made a decision soon after the storm torefuse to provide assistance to homeowners with wind-damaged homes who were not carrying wind insurance.

To do so, Governor Barbour stated, would be to bail outhomeowners who had been “irresponsible” in choos-ing not to purchase wind insurance (Brady 2007). Thisdecision has left more than 7,300 households with sub-stantial wind damage without assistance (Steps Coali-tion 2008). The decision disproportionately affectedlow-income homeowners who had failed to carry windinsurance because they could not afford it and effec-tively omitted them from the recovery effort and unableto avail themselves of federal recovery dollars (StepsCoalition 2008). Louisiana did not impose the samerestrictions.

Immediately following Hurricane Katrina, Missis-sippi was frequently compared favorably to Louisianafor its rapid recovery. Exercising his wide authorityto allocate federal dollars, Governor Barbour chan-neled funds in ways that specifically targeted economicdevelopment and recovery. His administration receiveda series of waivers for the low-income requirement at-tached to most funding from the HUD, the federalagency that oversaw the disbursement of most of therecovery dollars. As a result, as of 2008, only 13 percentof Mississippi’s spending had benefited low-income Mis-sissippians, whereas 54 percent of Louisiana’s spendinghad been directed toward low-income residents in thatstate (Steps Coalition 2008).

Contrasting Mississippi’s recovery spending to thatof Louisiana further reveals the extent of the state’sorientation toward economic growth and developmentand away from distributive approaches that woulddirectly assist low-income and poor households.Whereas Louisiana dedicated 78 percent of its recov-ery spending toward housing as of 2008, Mississippidirected 49 percent toward housing and 42 percent to-ward economic development. Spending in Mississippihas also been directed toward homeowners and awayfrom renters. In Mississippi, homeowners make up 70percent of the population but had, by 2008, received81 percent of the housing funds, whereas renters, whomake up 30 percent of the population, had receivedonly a fifth of the funding (Steps Coalition 2008). As aresult of these processes, recovery in low-lying predom-inantly minority communities has lagged considerably(Steps Coalition 2008).

These policies, taken as a whole, demonstrate theorientation of the state toward opening up new op-portunities for accumulation, simultaneously taking arevanchist approach to the recovery process that ad-vances white privilege by ignoring the disproportionateimpact of such an approach on low-income non-whitecommunities. Thus, the nature of recovery spending

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and policy in Mississippi is an institutional manifesta-tion of white privilege (Pulido 2000) insofar as spendinghas been directed away from low-income and nonwhiteneighborhoods. These neoliberal accumulation strate-gies hinge on, or are sutured to, social norms, patterns,and cultural practices that can be understood as dimen-sions of the local mode of social regulation.

Banal Multiculturalism and the NeoliberalMode of Regulation

If neoliberal accumulation strategies work to disad-vantage low-income African American neighborhoodsby excluding them from the recovery process, the ques-tion remains as to how this uneven distribution issufficiently politically tenable or defensible as to ren-der this accumulation strategy replicable in the shortand medium term. My argument here is that banalmulticulturalism and the blank slate discourse fold to-gether to produce a mode of social regulation that caststhese racialized spaces as blighted and in need of beingremade. At the same time, these narratives deny therelevance of race in shaping the outcomes of the recov-ery process. Despite the fact that African Americansare disproportionately both poor and likely to have suf-fered catastrophic damage from Katrina, claims madeon these grounds failed to gain traction in the discur-sive field of politics in the region. In fact, attempts todemonstrate the uneven impact of the storm on low-income African American communities were activelyresisted by residents and many city officials alike.

As Brahinsky (2011) points out, “urban” can standin for non-white. East Biloxi was often characterized ininterviews as the “inner city” to the rest of the city’s sub-urban feel, which bears little logic in terms of density orland use. In planning meetings and public workshops,East Biloxi in particular was often referred to as a spacewith a “cancer” where problems “fester,” and when low-income African American neighborhoods were refer-enced in planning meetings, a largely white audiencereferenced them as places with pathologies that shouldbe contained or walled off. In one such meeting, a par-ticipant referred to the desired social geographies asfollows:

We like diversity but it should stay below I-10. (Biloxiresident, public meeting 7)

In so doing, he referred to the existing geographies ofthe coast, where most of the African American neigh-borhoods are located south of the interstate.

Follow-up interviews with participants furtherrevealed the ways in which race and space were coim-plicated for residents. For example, one Biloxi residentstated that the key to Mississippi’s success as comparedto that of Louisiana in recovering from the storm wasthat even though Mississippi has many African Amer-icans, they are not as “densely concentrated.” He wenton to say that the lack of concentrated black neigh-borhoods was a strength of the region: “We used tokinda have pockets and concentrations of blacks here,and whites there, but it was pretty mixed up” (Biloxiresident, interview 41).

The racialized nature of spaces and places in theregion is illustrated by these quotes and was evidentthroughout community meetings and one-on-one inter-views. Poor neighborhoods of color were consistently,if in sometimes veiled ways, deemed undesirable andproblematic—places where problems “fester” as a resultof their populations and their density. These negativeperceptions shaped the ways in which residents engagedpolitically in the redevelopment process, influencingtheir attitudes toward what would constitute a desir-able redevelopment process. These subtle but pervasiveattitudes work to discursively render these spaces andtheir inhabitants undesirable. In so doing, they bothjustify and explain the structural and institutional dis-investment facilitated by the state and outlined in theprevious section.

Indeed, these “festering” places, particularly SoriaCity and East Biloxi (see Figure 2), were directly inthe midst of emergent redevelopment plans designedto remake the downtowns of Gulfport and East Biloxias tourist destinations. Collective understandings thatinformed the redevelopment process about the undesir-ability of some spaces after the storm did not turn ontechnical assessment of vulnerability as one might ex-pect but, rather, on racialized perceptions of the valueor blight of some parts of the city. These perceptionswere rooted in the cultural politics of racism imbued inthe space through the legacies of Jim Crow and state-sponsored racialized difference. Importantly, not all ofthe region’s neighborhoods were targeted to be remade;planning documents and public meetings both fore-grounded the blighted or “diverse” spaces. Thus, thespatial differentiation of the region along racial linescreated a justification for regeneration projects thatdeepened the region’s trajectory toward neoliberal, en-trepreneurial urbanism (Harvey 1989; Peck and Tickell2002). It is in this sense that the cultural politics ofrace and banal multiculturalism can be understood asdimensions of the local mode of social regulation that

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functioned to smooth out or legitimize the deepeningof the neoliberal regime of accumulation.

This notion of being specifically targeted for redevel-opment emerged from activists and residents who livedin these neighborhoods and who had a keen sense ofthe way that the redevelopment process had changedthe value of their land. In their comments we can alsosee how they are experiencing the blank slate discourseas one that is actively being constructed through thedevaluing and disinvestment of their neighborhoods.

One resident of the Soria City neighborhood indowntown Gulfport, a historic African Americanneighborhood adjacent to an area targeted for a newlydesigned port, articulated her anxieties about city landgrabs made possible by vulnerable land holders:

Because the thing is, now this is owned, by the lady is likeeighty-nine or something years old on fixed income. So,since the storm, she can’t afford to fix this up, and wasn’table to qualify for any of the grant monies. And so the cityis going to come along and condemn it, and once theycondemn it, they have justification to tear it down. That’swhat the intent is for this area—tear as much down aspossible. (Soria city resident, interview 23)

An activist in East Biloxi, a neighborhood sur-rounded by high-rise casinos and home to the mostlow-income residents of color in the city, voiced hisconcerns this way:

[Residents of East Biloxi are] being targeted and obstaclesare being thrown in their way that will not allow themto recover. Which works to the plans that have beendeveloped, primarily by the city in terms of looking atthis land and saying, “Well, we think this land wouldbe better suited for condominium development, this landwould be better suited for multi-family development, parksor whatever, and this is the plan we want to implement.”Well, the city owns none of the land. So what happensis, you create enough hurdles, people can’t recover. Theycan’t recover then, of course now the land is up for grabs.Because what happens is, people got to have a place tolive, and if they can’t live on that site they’ve got to tryand find someplace. At that point, you can come in andget the land. (Biloxi activist, interview 17)

At the same time that some people and spaces werebeing left out of the redevelopment process and non-white communities were being cast as diseased and un-desirable spaces, political discourse that sought to nameand identify the uneven racial impacts of the stormand public policy were being actively delegitimized.One Biloxi resident summed up a sentiment commonlyheard among white residents:

But I do think that the media had a big play on that andthat they actually turned it in to a race issue, and I remem-ber saying that on the couch at my in-laws’, and going,“Oh God, I hope they don’t turn this into that.” And sureenough, next thing you know, people are complaining inNew Orleans, they’re not helping us because we’re black.(Biloxi resident, interview 43)

This adamant insistence that race did not play a rolein the impact or the outcome of the storm often wasoften accompanied by the refrain that the storm didnot discriminate. These sentiments were seldom voicedin public but would be divulged in private spaces to awhite interviewer.

Nowhere was the effort to delegitimize racial politicsmore evident than when a prominent Gulfport businessleader described an informal network of African Amer-ican ministers and business leaders and white businessleaders as “inflaming” racial tensions in the region andcalled them up and ask that they “cool it.” He wantedthem to cease contesting racial disparities or uneven-ness in the redevelopment process (Gulfport resident,interview 32).

This overall tone of hostility to public discussion ofracial discrimination was echoed by a Biloxi residentactive in the local NAACP chapter. He characterizedthe way in which efforts to work for racial equality weresimilar to the white supremacist attitudes of the Ku KluxKlan (cf. Melamed 2006; MacLean 2008):

The name says “National Association for the Advance-ment of Colored People,” and even some people kind ofrelate us to the KKK, you know, on the other side of thestream, you know. When they see NAACP, they thinkKKK. (Biloxi activist, interview 22)

The interviewee went on to explain how the tendencyto equate all forms of racial politics has had a disciplin-ing effect on the ways in which the NAACP in theregion frames issues and targets its activism, emphasiz-ing that they do not only work on behalf of people ofcolor. His comments reflected a tendency in interviewsfor activists who represent or work on behalf of peopleof color to express a desire to not be seen as makingan overt argument about the systemic ways in whichpeople of color were disadvantaged.

Despite the fact that African American neighbor-hoods were more likely to have suffered damage fromthe storm and were more likely to be left out of therecovery process in coastal Mississippi, the cultural pol-itics of the region meant that it was difficult for theserealities to be acknowledged or recognized in the pub-lic discourse regarding the impact of the storm and the

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dynamics of the recovery process. Far more prominentwere the assertions that the storm did not have a dis-proportionate impact and that it left in its wake a blankslate to be remade rather than a highly uneven anddeeply racialized landscape. Following from the work ofThomas (2011) and others, this can be understood asan example of the banal multiculturalism that charac-terizes the racial and cultural politics that make up onedimension of the neoliberal regime of accumulation.This banal multiculturalism is of a piece with the neo-liberal mode of social regulation and works to enableand justify neoliberal accumulation strategies.

Conclusions

Racialized neighborhood struggles and the idea thatrace shapes the landscape and the built environmentare, of course, not new. Neither is the idea that racialdifference explains class stratification and uneven de-velopment. What this study contributes is an analysisof the way in which these cultural politics articulate ne-oliberal visions for the city by serving as a legitimatingnarrative for displacement and disinvestment in low-income and African American neighborhoods targetedfor neoliberal redevelopment. Inquiry into the culturalpolitics and accumulation strategies of the present con-juncture might be enhanced by sustained engagementwith the RA, which holds promise for deepening ourunderstandings of cultural politics and political econ-omy by exploring the ways in which they are united.

The RA not only provides a conceptual frameworkfor engaging these two often disparate strands of analy-sis; it also poses provocative questions about how to bestcontest the continued reproduction of neoliberal urbangovernance. When situated within the larger frame-work of the RA, the discourse of banal multiculturalismcan be understood as integral to the maintenance ofthe delicate balance between accumulation and the so-cial relations that secure and regularize capitalist socialrelations in the context of neoliberal accumulation. If,as I demonstrate, both racialized discourses and pro-cesses and the denial of racial identities or claims aslegitimate grounds for critique or analysis are central toneoliberalism’s regulation in these southern U.S. cities,then even talking about race, and identifying processesas racialized, holds promise to challenge the neoliberalnature of recovery and delegitimize neoliberalism as asocial and political economic framework.

Of course, it is not clear that without these narra-tives and silences about race that accumulation wouldnot proceed unabated in coastal Mississippi or find co-

herence with some other form of social regulation thatexplains away uneven development and either justifiesthe targeting of these specific spaces or remakes thebuilt environment in other ways. In the same way thatnaming the highly racialized nature of the urban re-newal strategies of the postwar era allowed for a sharedunderstanding of their uneven impacts, though, nam-ing the highly uneven racialized nature of the storm’simpacts and recovery might serve to delegitimize theneoliberal accumulation strategies such policies engen-der. Although this study cannot claim to identify thelinchpin for undermining neoliberal accumulation incoastal Mississippi, it does provide an example of themuch discussed but seldom empirically pursued “socialnorms” and cultural conventions that, in part, consti-tute social regulation.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to James McCarthy, Lorraine Dowler,Melissa Wright, Jamie Peck, Katherine Hankins,Kendra Strauss, Anne Bonds, Paul Routledge, JenniferPatico, Richard Wright, and the anonymous review-ers for comments, critiques, and suggestions that havesubstantively improved this article. Thanks also to thenumerous activists and residents who gave generouslyof their time to facilitate this research.

Notes1. The organizations included Coastal Women for Change,

The Gulf Coast Community Design Studio, The Missis-sippi Center for Justice, Turkey Creek Community Initia-tive, and the STEPS Coalition. In my role as a participantobserver, I contributed to the capacity of these organi-zations when possible through producing maps, conduct-ing research, and acting as a meeting facilitator at times.Although none of these organizations would likely castits work specifically in terms of “contesting neoliberal-ism,” each operationalized a social justice agenda basedon a critique of historic and structural racial inequalityand the dominant approach to redevelopment in the re-gion, which I argue in this article is characteristicallyneoliberal.

2. Of course, this was not the first time that the “blank isbeautiful” framework had been mobilized to justify erad-ication of working-class neighborhoods of color. Hauss-mann rendered the streets of Paris a blank canvas for hisgrand boulevards, just as Moses and a generation of ur-ban planners rendered neighborhoods of color blank tobuild highways and instantly dated, car-oriented “urbanrenewal” projects.

3. Vietnamese residents, many of whom were attracted tothe region after the Vietnam War by the ability to makea meager living in the shrimping industry, were also con-centrated in the census tract adjacent to Biloxi’s Back Bay

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neighborhood. The social and racial geographies of theVietnamese population in the region likely reveal muchabout cultural politics, geopolitics, and political economy,although for the sake of space this thread is not exploredin this article.

4. The term neoliberalism has been challenged for being toostatic or suggesting that it is an ontological thing thatexists outside of or independent of a whole host of polit-ical economic discourses and practices (Peck and Tickell2002). Many prefer the term neoliberalization to describethe way in which it is ontologically a process of reforms orchanges to existing governing practices. I use the term torefer to the debates in the social sciences as a whole for thesake of simplicity, a practice that is not incompatible withthe critiques of the term as empirically and ontologicallyimprecise.

5. Although “first-generation” RA (i.e., the work of Aglietta[1979] 2000) as well as later work in the RA tradition statean interest in and a theoretical and empirical concernwith “cultural” relations, little empirical work was doneto expand on these relationships.

6. Crisis in the Marxist sense is understood as a structuralcrisis of accumulation, but in the RA tradition, crisis canalso be understood as a crisis in social and cultural rela-tionships and norms that stabilize accumulation as well(Jenson 1993).

7. The concept is variously referred to throughout the liter-ature as the mode of regulation, the mode of social regu-lation, the social mode of regulation, and the social modeof economic regulation. Despite the variety of terms, theyall appear to refer to the same concept.

8. Although the RA has been accused of functionalism, it isimportant to note that such couplings are not explainedin terms of their effects (Bakshi et al. 1995).

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Correspondence: Department of Geography, Environment, and Society, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, e-mail:[email protected].

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