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This article interrogates the “anomalous” case of Black-founded towns, so-called because of their relative absence from discourse on Black place, their unique struggles for self-determined development, and their externally ascribed narratives of absent or dysfunctional governance, frequently invoked to explain their lack of access to basic infrastructure. We propose illuminating some of these so-called anomalies through Charles Mills’ “racial contract,” which we argue structures space at a deeper level than traditional legal arrangements and allows us to look relationally at Black towns in “white space.” We also rely on Cedric Robinson’s “racial capitalism” to demonstrate how white space develops through extraction of value from places racialized as nonwhite. Through the case of Tamina, Texas, we argue that Black towns specifically, and Black places more generally, experience racially predatory governance and resource extraction, often by nearby white places, under the guise of following mundane rules of legal jurisdiction, standard economic planning, and development. To illustrate this, we focus on three overlapping mechanisms of “creative extraction” that reinforce white spatial, political, and economic power at the expense of Black places: theft, erosion, and exclusion. These mechanisms are tied to the environmental harms inflicted on Black towns, as some of the existential threats they face.

Research linking municipal underbounding to racialized environmental inequality suggests that understanding the built environmental outcomes of municipal annexation or incorporation may add an important dimension to scholarship on environmental justice and critical race theory. This article explores whether white, black, and Latinx populations are likely to receive the same built environmental benefits from municipal incorporation. I study the distribution and proximity of built amenities and disamenities across white, black, and Latinx populations in incorporated municipalities and unincorporated communities in North Carolina—a state with ongoing controversies about who benefits from municipal jurisdiction. To the extent that municipalities are associated with built environmental amenities, I find that block groups with high white populations are the primary beneficiaries. By contrast, environmental disamenities are distributed disproportionately in communities with higher black and Latinx populations regardless of municipal incorporation. These findings suggest that histories of racialized municipal exclusion are an additional layer of already overdetermined environmental racism, such that municipal inclusion—primarily through annexation of excluded black and Latinx populations—may do little to alter the existing inequities.

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There's a new world coming, everything's gon' be turnin over, everything gon' be turnin over. Where you gon' be standing when it comes? (Reagon & Reagon, 2015) As I write in late summer 2020, crews are containing a chemical fire in a place called Westlake, Louisiana, on the Gulf Coast, in the southern United States (Figure 1). Westlake is 3.6 miles from another place called Mossville. From the late 1700s, Black folks who loosed themselves from the jaws of slavery made their lives in that place, in the no-man's land claimed by neither the US nor the Spanish (Towne, n.d.). When seven newly freed Black families settled in that same place, which they named Mossville, they planted orchards and created fisheries and grew by generations on streets named for themselves (Lanier & Glustrom, 2019). Much like the Black communities referenced in Celeste Winston's essay on Black ground truths and abolition (Winston, 2021), Mossville's residents kept themselves safe by maintaining close relations and interdependence; many came together in solidarity to fight the ever looming menace of chemical industries.The day before the fire, a hurricane with a girl-next-door kind of name grew the size of Texas before toppling trees, peeling roofs, merging the briny Gulf of Mexico with the flat, swampy, carved-up lands of tiny towns at the coast. Laura did what all hurricanes do -she found the gaps of abandonment and ripped them open; a tangle of clinging oil and salt and chemicals only industries know (but bodies understand) and pipes and people already barely hanging on. No one is certain what exactly started the fire at Biolab, but suffice it to say conditions on the ground were right. Everyone living there knows conditions on the ground are always right for fire. The officials said the burning chlorine gas at Biolab wouldn't hurt anyone -I picked up the relief in their voices on the webpage of National Public Radio (Dean et al., 2020) -relieved that the same Lake Charles that had been absorbing the toxic stench of the ring of industries surrounding it for decades would simply take more, swallowing, diluting, hiding.For Mossville, the time for taking things has long passed. The orchards died when the first petrochemical plants were built around them, promising jobs and growth. The people have been dying ever since. The toxic plumes rising from the