Betting on Black: Emergency Management Hedges on the Marginalized

Over the last three decades, urban cities and their residents have faced precarity. In the face of late capitalism, several metropolitan cities across the nation but particularly in Michigan, namely Detroit, have been forced to think critically about their long-term financial solvency and democratic commitments. As these cities engage in economic development and financial restructuring, they tend to err on the side of risk and capital accumulation often to the detriment of already marginally situated residents. Using elite interviews and historical archives, this paper examines the calculus that the City of Detroit’s emergency managers made in providing public goods to their constituents during times of crisis. The goal of this paper is to address how risk is conceptualized and acted upon by state actors to reproduce patterns of racial inequality and mechanisms of expropriation and exploitation in the twenty-first century. It works to explain that race reproduces how expropriation works to maintain racial economic injustice in public administration. An examination of how these public institutions decided to restructure their budgets toward fiscal stability, this paper considers the priorities of local public institutions and the kinds of risk they are willing to take when marginalized communities are at stake.