About
Race Land examines how exploitation and entanglement upheld the white supremacist society of the U.S. South. Segregationists not only exploited (and destroyed) human beings, but also the environment — human and natural resources were systematically mined to uphold the ecosystem of Jim Crow apartheid. This resource extraction happened through geopolitics and the entanglement with industries and commercial activities that were not always explicitly racial in nature: the implementation of the Marshall Plan in Europe, oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean sugar trade, the development and application of pesticides and herbicides, and the digging of canals. Four academic institutes facilitate research for Race Land: the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, and the Research Institute for the Study of Culture at the University of Groningen. Find out more about this project below.
Race Land: The Ecology of Segregation
Project overview
Race Land investigates how white-supremacist social systems affect people and the environment on a worldwide scale. Its aim is to examine how race and class discrimination globally interlocks with economic development, ecological issues, medical research, and the advancement of science more generally. The focus of this project is on a modern and quintessential white-supremacist society: the segregationist South of the United States during the Cold War era.
Sub-projects
Race Land is structured around a number of sub-projects (or case studies) that demonstrate the entangled and transnational nature of Jim Crow segregation. The ecosystem of southern apartheid was both symbiotic and parasitic in nature — symbiotic in the sense that its agents sought allies across the globe to keep their white supremacist ecosystem alive, parasitic because it exploited humans and the environment in multiple unsustainable and destructive ways.
The U.S. South, including the border states (pale red)
About Maarten
Maarten Zwiers is senior lecturer of History and American Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He is the author of Senator James Eastland: Mississippi’s Jim Crow Democrat (Louisiana State University Press, 2015), co-editor of Profiles in Power: Personality, Persona, and the U.S. President (Brill, 2020), and contributed to The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture and the Mississippi Encyclopedia. His work appeared in Southern Cultures and The Southern Quarterly. During the 2020 presidential race he regularly wrote about U.S. politics for the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant. He studied American Studies and History at the University of Groningen and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and went to graduate school at the University of Mississippi on a Fulbright scholarship. His research focuses on rural history, regionalism, and (American) political culture, in particular the U.S. South.
photo: Arjan Spannenburg