North Carolina [Un]incorporated: Place, Race, and Local Environmental Inequity

Abstract

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.

Creative extraction: Black towns in white space

“…From the fugitive antebellum communities of the Great Dismal Swamp (Sayers, 2014) to 20th century incorporated municipalities, such as Langston and Boley in Oklahoma (Slocum, 2019), they are critical sites not only for understanding the nuances of Black spatial imaginaries and governance (Lipsitz, 2011), but also to understand how whiteness is inherent to the structure and function of the town. Indeed, our observations of Black towns across the U.S., from Institute, West Virginia to White Hall, Alabama (Purifoy, 2018(Purifoy, , 2013Seamster and Purifoy, 2020) clarify that the U.S. town as a legal-spatial form is predicated on whiteness (Seamster, 2015).…”

“…They typically lacked adequate water and wastewater sanitation infrastructure, possessed few signs of thriving economic development, and most of their residents worked in the adjacent white town or somewhere outside of the community. They relied on neighboring white towns for many basic necessities-including banking and finance, groceries, and healthcare (Purifoy, 2018). The similarity of conditions across U.S. regions generated three main observations, which are the focus of this article.…”

“…We observe strong patterns of hindered development in Black towns across the U.S., particularly around the provision of basic infrastructure, which is the foundation of any modern economic development. For example, neither municipal incorporation in towns like Princeville, North Carolina and White Hall, Alabama, nor utility district designations of otherwise unincorporated places like Tamina or Taylortown, North Carolina, resulted in the sustainable provision of sanitation and water infrastructure, much less the desired Blackcentered economic development (Purifoy, 2021(Purifoy, , 2018.…”

“…Black communities living in those places "inherit" the benefits of those infrastructures, even after white populations leave. By contrast, Black towns often struggle to secure public financing and political consensus from white officials at the county and state levels to build their own infrastructures, because the town is not a white-led project perceived to benefit white populations (Purifoy, 2018). The difference in infrastructure access has direct bearing on the comparative growth and development of these Black places.…”

“…This research arose from a pattern of spatial relations we identified in existing case studies and research projects we pursued in seemingly disparate Black places-small rural and periurban Black towns like Princeville and Taylortown in North Carolina (Purifoy, 2021(Purifoy, , 2018 and the larger, demographically Black cities of Flint and Benton Harbor in Michigan (Seamster, 2018). Working within our "community of inquiry" (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012: 179), we observed a pattern captured in literature about race and local development.…”