A Chicago Casino for Racial Equity?

Abstract Recent scholarship has directed attention to how racial discourse, and colorblind racism in particular, influences urban redevelopment in U.S. cities. This study employs a theory of strategic racialization to better understand how developers use race-related discourse to seek public support for their projects and how community members respond. Focusing on a series of public meetings regarding three competing proposals to build a casino in the city of Chicago, we find that racial meanings and categories played a central role in efforts by developers and community members to characterize, support, and challenge the casino project. Comparing public interactions across three different communities, we argue that developers deployed a shifting array of discursive strategies—territorial ascription, multiculturalism, colorblind racialization, and a more novel variety of racial equity claims—to mobilize the unique geographic and organizational characteristics of their proposed projects as assurances of racial equity. We identify three distinct discourses that organized the racial equity claims of developers and community members: Black-led capitalism, racially representative capitalism, and spatially connective capitalism. We conclude that while community members actively contested developers’ claims and called for greater specificity concerning beneficiaries, they did not challenge the capitalist logic that merely redistributing the benefits of development among owners and workers—however racialized—could bring about racial equity.