A City's History and Racial Capitalism

ON JUNE, 2020 a middle-aged white couple in St. Louis greeted Black Lives Matter protesters on their street by brandishing firearms.The images became instantly iconic: neither was wearing shoes, he holding an AR-15, she waving a semiautomatic pistol - sometimes at his head - outside their palatial mansion in a gated section of St. Louis' Central West End. In 1847, Missouri imposed a $1000 bond on Black "immigrants," treating them like Indigenous persons: trapped somewhere between foreigners and citizens as codified by the 1831 Cherokee v. Georgia Supreme Court decision. No Rights to Respect A decade later, the Supreme Court ruled on Black people's contested legal status. Colorblind Racial Blindness After World War II, St. Louis politicians replaced explicit references to segregation with the color-blind rhetoric of property values and blight.The city's 1947 master plan zoned industrial sites away from white, middle-class neighborhoods and forced new "superhighways" through the ghettos.