Southern politics, southern power prices: Race, utility regulation, and the value of energy

Abstract

For many middle-income households, paying the electricity bill is a mundane, even mindless, act. But for an ever-increasing number of low-income families, the electricity bill-filtered through the racialized materiality of poor-quality housing stock and antidemocratic price regulation-represents something more ominous: looming disconnection, eviction, and a deep spin of vulnerabilities. This article explores the materiality of race in the US South through the prism of southern utilities and maps the political landscape on which contestations over the value of energy are taking place. I ask, how do different conceptualizations of value by utilities, regulators, and energy justice advocates figure into the price of energy and racialized dispossession in the Deep South? I draw attention to the highly elaborated narrative politics of the value of Georgia Power's energy. In conversation with recent anthropological debates about value and "the just price," I argue that Georgia Power's monopoly on public power engages and reinforces the racialized political economy of the South to produce high home energy prices for lowincome families. But it also provokes a decryption of these energy prices by energy justice advocates that connects the silent violence of energy injustice to people's everyday experiences of extractive utility bills.

Introduction to special issue: Value, values, and anthropology

“…In reflecting on our discussions at the Annual Meeting of the 2022 Society for Economic Anthropology as well as on the articles collected in the following pages, we suggest that there are at least six ways we can become more precise with value theory: In considering the ethical and ontological presuppositions that always precede the ascription of value (Field, 2023; Rivers, 2023); In taking seriously the affordances that various qualia provide to specific things when they become valued (Graber, 2023); In noting how the relationships that underscore value ascriptions shift when people find themselves relating not to other people but rather to imaginary social totalities such as states or national communities (Majeed, 2023; Phillips, 2023); In appreciating the weird ways that value ascriptions are often sticky despite the best wishes of a given group of people (Majeed, 2023; Phillips, 2023); In accepting how value ascriptions are often retrospective and infused with certain claims about what the past was like (Khorasani, 2023); and In reckoning with the fact that humans often occupy multiple contradictory value regimes at the same time (Dean, 2023; DuBois, 2023). …”

“…What is more, people often take their relationships to imagined totalities as being of greater reality and importance than their everyday, immediate lives. In her analysis of often exorbitant (and widely unaffordable) energy prices in the US Deep South, Kristin Phillips (2023) takes the politics of these prices as axiomatic. From this starting point, she focuses on the way the public engages with the inherently political price of energy, particularly in the context of activists' contestations of seemingly indiscriminate price hikes.…”