Citation: Author. “Title.” Atlanta Studies. Date. [INSERT DOI HERE]
The metropolitan Atlanta area is different from any place I’ve lived. Nowhere South, North, or West is it so common for Black, brown, and white people to rub shoulders. The more comfortable margins of Atlanta society—such as the suburb of Decatur where my family rented when we first arrived—felt the closest to a multiracial, integrated society I’ve ever lived in.
Yet, it seems that the experience of relative integration I’ve had—in university circles, in restaurants and stores, in public parks—is somewhat a reflection both of my privilege as a white male academic and, more broadly, of what’s often called the Atlanta Way: a sharing of political power, social capital, and business opportunity between the Black and white bourgeoisie. The working, and often the middle, classes are left out of the calculus, except when they can be mobilized and manipulated as constituents, residents, or consumers. Such a Way is supported by the ideology of a Black Mecca that is beyond racism and a political culture where only moderate efforts and officially sanctioned efforts at racial justice are permitted. 1 The history of Atlanta, ongoing in the present, seems violently opposed to the interests and the lives of working-class and low-income Black people.2 Despite white flight and the retrenchment of desegregation, the Atlanta Way has adapted by creating a less segregated form of middle- and upper-class community life in certain spaces where more privileged or monied people congregate.
And there’s something uncanny about this relative degree of integration. Freud spoke of the experience of “the uncanny,” something at once homelike and unhomelike, a repetitive phenomenon that has its source in a return of the repressed.3 The signs of racism are right there on the surface, alongside the diversity: the lushness and jollity of city parks pocked with historical markers of lynchings;4 the ubiquity of Civil War battle markers that blur into Jim Crow monuments, dedicated to Confederate enslaver heroes such as the chunk of granite at Ponce and East Lake marking “Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway” (graced at certain times of the year with a wreath of flowers), and the 1902—Jim Crow-era—monument of Confederate Major General William H. T. Walker that’s been coupled in popular imaginary with the 1877 monument to Union General James McPherson.5 This pair of East Atlanta monuments has recently been called a testament to “blue-gray unity,” but this term, as historian David Blight has argued, was in fact a euphemism for the repression of Black civil rights and a national agreement on white supremacy.6
As a white male Southerner, I continue to battle racism within myself: cacophonous thoughts and feelings as I talk with Black people I am organizing with; the wish to impress, to be nice, to distract myself from the racist stereotypes and fears that intrude on my consciousness as I try to reckon with my history and imagine a different future; the wish to rush in the process of anti-racist organizing and center my own ideas, which I believe are best.
With trepidation, in this essay I offer some thoughts about how the remarkable degree of diversity found in the metro Atlanta area might be seized on to help generate a multiracial people’s movement that could create a deeper level of integration and socioeconomic justice here in the state of Georgia, and perhaps beyond. I suggest a few preconditions of such a movement: for whites like me to deal more deeply with their racism and to admit the serious existential stake in an integrated metro Atlanta; for working and middle classes of all racial backgrounds to be included in and to build such a movement from the beginning; and for a shared vocabulary to be forged that could provide common ground. I suggest that one possible vocabulary can be derived from the American dream.
The segregation of Atlanta seems to vary by neighborhood and suburb. Sandy Springs may be the tenth most segregated metro area in the US, although that’s just an instance of one very white suburb.7
Nevertheless, segregation is undeniable in many residential areas. A commentator in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution observes this division: “It may not be obvious when you go to a big department store, a concert or a restaurant. But when you drive through our neighborhoods, the segregation is plain as day.”8 This is a valid distinction. However, in most neighborhoods I’ve lived in—Knoxville; State College, Pennsylvania; Lansing, Michigan; Greenville, South Carolina; New Orleans; New York; Los Angeles—even the restaurant clientele tends to be racially homogenous. Sociologists use residential and school-enrollment measures to determine the level of segregation. But—as the early, and probably still most secure, victories of the Civil Rights Movement attest—restaurants and department stores are important, too. Concerts, with their deep effect on the psyche, perhaps are even more so. I submit that Atlanta holds the promise of a racially integrated community to which all of the United States might look.
Groups such as Welcoming America are concerned particularly with integrating immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and Africa to make metro Atlanta a “welcoming” place.9 Yet trends of segregation and displacement continue for Black and Latinx residents and schoolchildren.10 In an article on immigrant settlement in Atlanta, AJ Kim reports that “segregation has increased between all groups,” including Asian, Latinx, African, and African American.11 Kim observes that most of the increased population since the nineties is due to immigration, creating “low income immigrant ethnoburbs” in suburbs such as Doraville, Norcross, and Clarkston.12 The segregation further correlates with social and economic inequality: “uneven income, poverty, educational quality, and property values.”13
Recent research by the Institute for Othering and Belonging at University of California-Berkeley supports this linkage of segregation and inequality and suggests the implication for disadvantaged peoples of color beyond Black communities: segregated Black and Latinx neighborhoods are substantially poorer than segregated white neighborhoods; income and home ownership are also much lower in these communities of color.14 Further, political polarization is higher in segregated neighborhoods. Such polarization is related to gerrymandering and voter suppression. Kim concludes their article with the open question “whether local integration can lead to regional and state-scale integration and the eventual political incorporation of diverse immigrant groups.”15 Elizabeth Anderson in her examination of racial integration argues that integration is “an imperative of justice.”16 Citing evidence that “segregation is a fundamental cause of social inequality,” she infers that “integration promotes greater equality and democracy.”17
If even communities of color are segregated from each other, Atlanta whites of all classes are historically responsible for the failure of desegregation. Kevin Kruse recounts the story in his book White Flight: a majority-white ruling class that during the 1950s and 1960s agreed to a minimal compliance with federal mandates, appeasing Black demands for integration of working-class schools and neighborhoods while trying to defuse the white working-class backlash against the measures, which ranged from flight to open violence.18 The majority-white political and business class, concentrated in the northern part of metro Atlanta, found this minimal desegregation in accordance with its interests, and the white working and middle classes to the south of them responded with resentment that the alleged “sacrifices” involved in desegregation of residential areas and schools were imposed on them rather than on the ruling class. Research on corporations in metro Atlanta such as Lockheed tells a similar story of sluggish integration of a workforce.19 Kruse’s narrative connecting the “massive resistance” of the white masses in Georgia in the fifties and sixties to modern conservatism in the seventies and beyond might be updated: that conservatism, having evolved from colorblind discourse, now permits openly racialized, indeed racist and white supremacist, discourse. Perhaps white racism doesn’t explain all of metro Atlanta’s ethnoburbs of people of color. But Atlanta-based journalist John Blake judges that this is the crucial reason for the failure of integration: “There have never been enough white Americans who embraced the concept.”20
According to a long tradition of Marxist analysis, racial and ethnic division has been an effective way of dividing the working class in the United States, preventing working-class solidarity and by extension, a strong labor movement and a strong socialist movement.21 As historian Robin D. G. Kelley puts it, the labor movement involves “a very long history of trade union and white working-class intransigence to black working-class advancement alongside episodes of interracial class unity and the elusive promise of a radical future. It remains elusive because those precious moments of solidarity repeatedly crash on the shoals of white supremacy.”22 A similar, more recent argument has been made about the white middle classes by Heather McGhee, who contends that segregation and the social hierarchies that it supports are bad for white people too, of nearly every class except for the very rich whose access to goods can be secured simply by their own buying power.23
Some Americans are being targeted in extremely violent, direct ways in the second Trump Administration: federal workers and academics, particularly Black, and most intensely, Black women; advocates, especially Arab and Muslim, calling for the end of genocide in Gaza; and Latinx and Asian immigrants, whether documented or not. In Georgia, the mass deportation of immigrants happens openly in the spectacle of ICE raids and more covertly through the coordination between ICE and local sheriff’s offices under the legal framework of Immigration and Nationality Act Section 287(g). Yet even relatively privileged whites, such as academics like me, are feeling the intensity of the current repression. Today there is an even more urgent imperative for interracial, interethnic, and interclass solidarity: a true people’s or populist movement. Neither the white working classes nor middle classes are an easy target for organizing. Labor organizations engage with the working class across the color line and do coalitional work with Black-led racial justice groups—difficult, bold, and absolutely necessary coalitional work.24 The corporate class has its language of right-to-work defending its class interest in a fragmented, unorganized working class. And despite the right-to-work law, there is organized labor in Georgia; 3.8 percent of workers belong to a union.25
The white middle classes of Atlanta are no less challenging a target for organizing an anti-racist people’s movement. This class is nationally under the current sway of a nativist and racist Trumpism. The one-on-one conversations I’ve had on the topic with sympathetic fellow middle class whites, whether evangelicals or Jews like myself, sometimes founder on skepticism, despair, or changing the subject. Still, I suggest that all of us are in a bad way if we cannot organize a critical mass of white people. Finding common ground on which to organize and clearing away the impediments of prejudice and fear, are necessary.
Atlanta is contradictory in a way that may hold great potential. On the one hand, characterized by the Atlanta Way of a biracial political and economic governing class, metro Atlanta is strongly stratified by class inequality plus systemic racism that disproportionately affects low-income and working-class Black people. In Atlanta, and in Georgia more broadly, property appears to be what theologian Paul Tillich called an “ultimate concern”—something that trumps all other values.26 On the other hand, with Black, white, and brown people juxtaposed in a way that’s absent in most places in the United States, metro Atlanta holds the potential of a multiracial people’s movement that could challenge the racial capitalism of the city, the state, and the nation.
I have a stake in such a movement in part because I live in one of the segregated, majority-Black neighborhoods of metro Atlanta, in a section of unincorporated Decatur. My family and I moved here, among other things, because of affordability. Without fighting directly against the forces of gentrification and displacement of legacy residents, our move into the neighborhood risks contributing to these longtime patterns of racial capitalism.27 According to the Census Bureau, the neighborhood, as of the most recent 2020 numbers, has a majority of Black residents.28 It lags behind the state in most economic and health measures, including median household income (61,292 vs. 74,632), poverty (16.5% vs. 13.6), homeownership (despite the prevalence of single-family houses) (57.8 vs. 66.1), and employment (56 vs. 60.6).29
My neighborhood is a place of precarity and potential. Precarity because of “blight,” economic depression, environmental racism, and real estate and zoning decisions based on the interests of businesspeople and politicians outside of the community. Potential because everyone actually living within the community (from low- to middle-income), I argue, has an interest in creating an integrated society that could confront the racism and classism of education, environmental care, policing, and real estate policy.
In my neighborhood, there doesn’t yet seem to be a focused pushback against this development to stabilize prices, support legacy residents, create egalitarian zoning policies, invigorate small local and Black-owned businesses, or bring community members into common cause. Online searches and a query over a neighborhood social media app revealed that there is one “civic association,” but its vision of community flourishing includes aggressive, private policing funded by member dues and does not prioritize issues of justice, equity, or solidarity.
The property values of the community could easily be inflated (God forbid) like East Lake, Oakhurst, or incorporated Decatur: resulting in the displacement of low-income Black residents. Zoning policies and variances could be used to favor whatever outside capitalists would like to do, or conversely, new zoning regulations and taxes can be imposed that will benefit legacy residents’ homes, education, public spaces, and public services. We can improve environmental quality in the process. This is the potential. But in order to do so, we need to look at the lessons of the past, the lost potentials and unfinished business.
I propose, then, an integrated movement that would prefigure an integrated society. However elusive racial integration has often proved, it is ultimately the best path towards a just community. It is arguably the only way that the injustices people of color of all classes face can be prioritized on par with the political and economic priorities of working- and middle-class white people. Integration is not, to my knowledge, an explicit aim in current movements for racial justice in metro Atlanta, which, for good reasons, tend to categorize activists of color as full-fledged members, and white members as allies, to guard the agency, concerns, and priorities of Black organizers against the dual tendencies of white allies to take center stage and to bail when it is convenient.30 I don’t propose that Black-led groups devoted to racial justice shift their focus. Rather, I suggest that in coalition with such movements, a third, integrated movement be created that would be anti-racist and centered on leadership of color from the start. The movement would need to “prefigure” the kind of society it aims to create. 31 It would be a form of integration that begins with the effort itself, so that the movement to an integrated Atlanta is also integrated.
A multiracial coalition would risk marginalizing this concern and not reckoning with anti-Black racism. As Heather McGhee reminds us, multiracial coalition building can only be successful if it confronts racism.32 Tackling a system of racism should include challenging and talking about the ideas, affects, and attitudes that especially invade white psyches like mine and justify that system.33
Recent calls for interracial organizing have attempted to reconcile Afrocentrism and cultural integrity with integration.34 Warning that integration can too easily “capitulate to the logic of white supremacy,” Sharon Stanley calls for integration to be a process of “mutual transformation,” even “conversion,” with the onus resting on white people in the process.35 Because of my own positionality and my own concern about the intransigence of white working and middle classes, I do emphasize white transformation here; much of this needs to be done prior to the intensity of struggle. There is doubtless ongoing internal work being done or to be done by other groups, but it’s not for me to suggest what that is.36
While the stakes of such a conversion are public, social, and profound, the process includes individual self-reflection and change. In my own experience, the conversion is a process, not a single event, and it is a path I am still traveling. It involves rooting out racist ideas, affects, attitudes, and defense mechanisms, seeking out relationships, mentorship, and coalition with people of color, and having conversations and organizing with other whites.37 Part of this conversion is learning to listen and not center myself—and, when stepping back, not to check out. These are the challenges of being a white ally, and of hopefully moving beyond allyship—a role too easy to shirk when the going gets tough—towards a sense of common interest and community.38 I will say, though, that as a white Southerner, I felt fractured internally; most of my life was spent living in segregated environments. It has only been around Black people that I have recovered a sense of myself. For me, racial integration is bound up with the integration of my own soul and body.39
Observing the challenge of contemporary Trumpism among white Americans, I suggest that the movement forge a vocabulary that articulates anti-racist and egalitarian ideals and practices while appealing to a broad cross-section of Atlantans and Georgians, including whites. One possibility, which complements the moral vocabulary of Rev. Dr. William Barber II’s Poor People’s Campaign but has a middle-class resonance, too, is the discourse of the American dream.40
To be sure, many invocations of the dream have been racially coded and reserved especially for white Americans.41 The language of the dream has also been deployed to justify “meritocratic” policies that pit alleged white “excellence” and deservingness against Black entitlement.42 Yet the discourse of the American dream draws heavily on Black and immigrant rhetoric. In the 1930s, Langston Hughes offered an indelible vision in his poem “Let America Be America Again” and once more, in the early 1950s with the publication of a suite of poems titled Montage of a Dream Deferred.43 As W. Jason Miller argues, the dream rhetoric of Atlanta native Martin Luther King Jr. recast Hughes’s dream poetry.44 King’s “I Have a Dream” has been reduced to a statement of colorblindness today. But in its original context of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a coalitional event of civil rights groups and organized labor, the speech was a statement in support of the Civil Rights Act that would be passed in 1964.
The American dream remains a metaphor across the ideological spectrum: it is invoked by the nativist Trump and is alluded to by the term “Dreamers,” referring to undocumented children seeking full citizenship status.45 Trump began his 2015 presidential campaign with the assertion “the American Dream is dead,” a statement also reflected in the title of a film about Noam Chomsky’s social critique, Requiem for the American Dream, released a few months before Trump’s announcement.46 Since the dream is often an immigrant dream, it can be deployed against nativism; since the dream has a long lineage in Black letters, it can be used in an anti-racist and inclusive way. The dimensions of the dream that are relevant to the struggles of various constituencies in metro Atlanta include: immigrant status and citizenship; homeownership and secure, affordable housing; upward mobility and financial security; and realizing what Langston Hughes in 1951 called “the dream deferred,” a phrase alluding to a whole constellation of social, economic, and political aspirations of Black Americans.47 Particularly before the ossification of Cold War ideology, the American dream was sometimes articulated as an ideal that only an alternative economy could make real.48 This deployment of the dream was the legacy of the Popular Front strategy of the Left, utilized to express a socialist vision through a vocabulary of Americanism—a strategy that did not cynically pander to but instead “reshaped American culture.”49
The dream carries lots of baggage, to be sure. A major shortcoming of the American dream discourse is its tenacious exclusion of Indigenous people. The founding images of the American dream include the opposition of “pioneer” and “savage” found in The Epic of America, the 1931 bestseller that coined “the American dream.”50 Reimagining the American dream would require a correction of this settler-colonialist Americanism, perhaps through the Americanist thought of such Indigenous thinkers as Luther Standing Bear.51 To take up a shared vocabulary of the American dream would require radically, and collectively, reimagining it. In building a multiracial people’s movement in metro Atlanta—a true populism in contrast to the Trump variety—it will be useful to seek out the ideologies that vex us and forge a moral vocabulary that could instead unite us. I’ve sketched a few possible ideas towards a multiracial people’s movement in Atlanta, but much more needs to be said, done, and questioned.
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