In contemporary studies of blackness, scholars are responding to the need for more nuanced representations of everyday life to illustrate the commonalities and divergence of negotiating whiteness. In this essay, I situate the Gullah/Geechee within ongoing struggles for accurate representation and access to power across the contested landscapes of the “New South.” More specifically, I interrogate three economic strategies of urban development—urban renewal, historic preservation, and heritage tourism—as contemporary manifestations of white racism. I begin by defining the Gullah/Geechee as a cultural group within their own situated predicament. Next, I operationalize “the social field of whiteness” and “white racism as habitus” as tools for the subsequent discussion. Finally, I zoom in for a closer look at Charleston, South Carolina, as a local site of this increasingly global process. Throughout this essay, I demonstrate how these particular strategies of urban development serve as “security checkpoints” in the maintenance of race‐based inequality across the broader “social field of whiteness.”

Each year, millions flock to the US Lowcountry South in search of the illusory appeal of a bygone era; one that never existed outside the white imagination. The contemporary grand narrative of long defunct plantations, standing as beacons of a onceheld hope that the South would rise again, offers a cultural commentary on the state of racial politics in the United States-connecting the social and discursive practices of white supremacy to contemporary daily operations across an entire geographic region, in ways that illustrate the structural dialectic between capitalism and race-making. [Lowcountry plantation, race, Gullah/Geechee, New South, spatial dimensions of white supremacy]

Global Ethnography: Forces. Connections, and Imaginations in. Postmodern World. Michael Burawoy. Joseph A. Blum. Sheba George. Zsuzsa Gille. Teresa Gowan. Lynn Haney. Maren Klawiter. Steve H. Lopez. Seán Ó Riain. and Millie Thayer. Berkeley, CA. and London, UK: University of California Press, 2000. xv. 393 pp. (Paper US$17.95)

Ivan Cohen, a Trinidadian tour guide from Savannah, Georgia, in a candid synopsis of cultural heritage tourism during a 2003 focus group interview, said: We have this saying in Trinidad. But there are no exceptions anywhere in the world, not even in Savannah. And the saying is, ‘The fools (F-O-O-L-S) [Mr. Cohen chose to spell it out] live O-F-F the damn fools!’ ‘THE FOOLS LIVE OFF THE DAMN FOOLS!’ It applies in Savannah. It applies in Trinidad. It applies in every city. And we would be damn fools if we expect white people to tell our stories. That's a damn fool idea. {Loud yells}. Let me finish. I conduct this African American History tour for the Civil Rights Museum. A couple of weeks ago, two white people got on the van. I discovered midway through that one of them was a part-time travel tour guide. I said, ‘Give me a critique of the tour; what did you think?’ And he said, ‘Well I learned a lot of things I didn't know.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, but give me something critical; this is where you improve.’ He said, ‘You didn't say much about Oglethorpe!’ {Eruption of laughter}.

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