The Growth Machine as an Agent of Racial Capitalism: Gentrification Coverage and the News Media

The growth machine theory uses a political economy approach to explain why city politics center development interests. We argue that the growth machine operates not only to profit from capitalism, but from White supremacy. To capture this dimension of power and oppression, we theorize the growth machine as an agent of racial capitalism and illustrate it through a study of news media’s assessments of gentrification in two cities. Our findings demonstrate that the news media assesses gentrification as good for Asian and Black neighborhoods, but as bad for White and increasingly White, Latinx neighborhoods. These racialized patterns of assessment reinforce the connections between race and value: White spaces are valued as in need of protection, while non-White spaces are devalued as in need of change. The findings suggest the need for racial capitalism in studies of how the growth machine operates and the decisions it makes.