Project overview
The South of the United States has often been considered a regional backwater, an area out of step with modernity. Race Land departs from this stereotypical view; it applies a radically different perspective that places the South at the center of U.S. policymaking and racialized innovation in the post-World War II period. The project emphasizes the assertive strategies southern segregationists employed to keep their racist worldview intact and export its main tenets across the globe, with profound consequences for ecosystems around the world and for the populations inhabiting them. The legacy of such strategies continues until today.
In order to uncover the origins of this legacy and create a better understanding of its current footprint, Race Land advances a novel methodology that combines whiteness studies, the sociology of race and ethnic relations, environmental history, postcolonial studies, and decoloniality. As such, it generates a much more complete picture of the multifaceted and transnational nature of U.S. segregationist thought and practice and the global networks its proponents formed to sustain their white-supremacist worldview.
Race Land explores the impact of segregationist ideology on a wide range of policy decisions and economic activities: from oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico to the Caribbean sugar trade, from racialized genetic research to support for anti-communist dictators such as the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic, and from the development of pesticides to opening the European market for U.S. products treated with these toxics. The project addresses pressing current questions regarding social and environmental justice, which cannot be answered unless we know more about their historical context, about when and why these problems arose in the first place. During the last decades we have witnessed the rise of reactionary populism and the alt-right movement. Race Land exposes the complex and entangled roots of this right-wing upswing.
Race Land fits in a burgeoning field of scholarship on reactionary internationalism and seeks to historicize this phenomenon. At the same time, it challenges the oft-implied link between progress and modernity, unveiling modernity’s “dark side” instead. In contrast with the traditional view that the white South was fighting a forlorn rearguard battle to maintain its segregationist (or Jim Crow) system after World War II, I argue that southern segregationists were fully immersed in Cold War modernity and actively sought to secure and advance their white-supremacist way of life through interregional and transnational alliances, making their impact global in nature. Once civil rights activists began to contest internal colonization at home and independence fighters challenged white domination in the colonies, southern segregationists began to actively seek white allies to maintain preexisting racialized power structures and narratives in a decolonizing world. What Race Land does, then, is to take the study of U.S. segregation out of its national boundaries, track the networks its proponents were part of, and explore its economic and environmental impact.
