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WHEN DEMOCRACY DISAPPEARS

Emergency Management in Benton Harbor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2018

Louise Seamster
Louise Seamster*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology,University of Tennessee-Knoxville
*
*Corresponding author: Louise Seamster, Department of Sociology, University of Tennessee, 913 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996. E-mail: lseamste@utk.edu.
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Abstract

In this case study, I look at Benton Harbor, Michigan’s tenure under a state-appointed “emergency manager,” with extensive local powers replacing all local elected government, and a single imperative to balance the city’s budget. The law, ostensibly race-neutral, wound up targeting almost all of Michigan’s cities with significant Black population. The law ultimately disenfranchised half the state’s Black population but only two percent of Whites. This law invalidates a basic civil right and prerequisite for urban political theory: electoral democracy. Who holds power in the urban regime when the state takes over? Drawing on forty-four interviews, observations and archival research, I argue a White urban regime governs without elected representation in this majority-Black city. The ideological framing of emergency management as “neutral,” and Black politics as “corrupt” or “self-interested,” provides the logic to blame Black governance for structural disinvestment and White-led extraction.

Keywords

RaceUrban PoliticsCitizenshipDisenfranchisementGovernanceUrban RegimeWhiteness
Type
State of the Discipline
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , Fall 2018 , pp. 295 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © Hutchins Center for African and African American Research 2018 

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