Kim Williams
We have become accustomed to understanding the path of political succession in urban America as a process in which blacks replace whites. The current wave of immigration complicates this picture considerably. My research extends Peter Eisinger’s 1980 book, The Politics of Displacement: Racial and Ethnic Transition in Three American Cities, which examined the response of white elites “displaced” by blacks in city government in the early 1970s. Starting with Eisinger’s framework for understanding how displaced whites adapt, this project focuses on what I believe to be the next chapter in the story: the displacement of blacks by Latinos.
How, and under what circumstances, do black elites adapt to urban landscapes transformed by the influx of Latinos? Ambivalence seems to prevail. On one hand, Latino population growth has yet to translate into commensurate political power, which perhaps serves to mitigate some aspects of black displacement. On the other hand, surely, some blacks are appalled at the gross under representation of Latinos in American political life given their own history of disfranchisement. For Eisinger, displacement occurred when a black mayor supplanted a white one. Current circumstances render this definition impractical. This study distinguishes between four displacement domains (demographic, political, economic, and ideological) operating at different levels of geography. This serves as the basis for a typology that situates state and local black displacement trends in a national context. Presumably, the circumstances of Latino succession and black responses to it are highly variable across cities, while absolute levels of previous empowerment shape the expectations and subsequent competitive orientations of urban minorities in general. I will conduct fieldwork in six cities to investigate the modes of black adjustment from the perspective of displaced black elites. Theories of racial and ethnic succession lag behind present-day realities. If we are to understand the dynamics of cooperation and conflict in transitional urban settings and beyond, then we need to know more about the patterns of black adjustment and the conditions that govern them.