Achaeologies of Race and Urban Poverty: The Politics of Slumming, Engagement, and the Color Line

Abstract

For more than a century, social reformers and scholars have examined urban impoverishment and inequalities along the color line and linked “slum life” to African America. An engaged archaeology provides a powerful mechanism to assess how urban renewal and tenement reform discourses were used to reproduce color and class inequalities. Such an archaeology should illuminate how comparable ideological distortions are wielded in the contemporary world to reproduce longstanding inequalities. A 20th century neighborhood in Indianapolis, Indiana is examined to probe how various contemporary constituencies borrow from, negotiate, and refute long-established urban impoverishment and racial discourses and stake claims to diverse present-day forms of community heritage.