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Kimberley Johnson, "Dark Concrete: Black Power Urbanism and the American Metropolis" (Cornell UP, 2025)
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Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Kimberly Johnson about her book titled Dark Black Power, Urbanism and the American Metropolis, published by Cornell University Press in 2025. Now, as the subtitle of the book suggests, we're going to be talking about the Black Power movement and specifically how it reshaped urban politics in the US Both in terms of. Of kind of what is important to various communities, but also in terms of like, actual things that then happened, how space was changed, there were various protests. I mean, there's a bunch of things that we're going to talk about here and looking obviously at some commonality, sort of the national level of the Black power movement, but really focusing on particular places and what, like, actually happened to real people and streets and buildings. You know, this isn't a book that's sort of only talking about national theoretical rhetoric. This is very much on the ground, so we have a lot to get into. Kimberly, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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B
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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C
Sure. So I'm a political scientist by training. And I focus on a subfield of American politics called American political development. I've increasingly been interested in. About thinking about the way race structures political institutions, and in connection with my interest in urban politics, the way that race shapes urban politics. And so in this book, it all kind of came together, Thinking about the interrelatedness of political institutions, Urban politics, and race.
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B
All right, there's all sorts of threads there that, as you said, very much do come together in this book and crucially, come together in the phrase and the name black power urbanism. So that's pretty foundational to our discussion. So can you tell us what it is?
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C
So, black power urbanism, I should say that I was actually inspired by some earlier scholars who had identified black power urbanism as something that was really coming out of the architectural world. And what I thought was really fascinating about their focus on sort of architecture was that I thought that this time period of rethinking what a city should look like really could be expanded to how a city should be governed. So I kind of took that kind of idea and really expanded it into thinking about what did black power mean as we move away from sort of iconic figures or we move away from social movements to actually, what does it mean in terms of thinking about cities? And so what I argue is that black power urbanism was a distinct political order that lasted roughly from about 1963 to about 1980, in which Black activists and residents sought to restructure urban governance, urban space, and public policy to secure the collective survival, autonomy, and dignity of black communities. I also argued that black power urbanism centered a number. So I focus on three policies that I. That I would. That I argued really sort of encompassed the sort of ethos of black power urbanism, which was housing, education, and policing. And I saw all these as kind of interlinked arenas of struggle and sites where black people could and should exercise governing authority and not merely sort of demanding inclusion, as was sort of proposed via the sort of liberal integrationist model. So I think the core of it, then, is sort of drawing from folks like David Harvey and arguing that there was a black power urbanism Asserted a black right to the city that was rooted in community control, use value over exchange value, and collective care.
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B
Okay, that's really helpful to have an overview of what you mean by the term and kind of how. The number of different aspects you examine in the book. Can you tell us more about when, how, and why this movement developed?
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C
So I think what I would argue. What I argue is that the black prayer Movement begins kind of in 1963, before, really, we get the sort of gains of the voting Rights act. That it really is kind of thinking about what does it mean to have rights in places that are relatively unscathed by the sort of formal segregation and inequality of the South. So it emerges in about 1963, and it peaks in the sort of late 1960s, 1970s, and again, thinking about the role of urban renewal and urban rebellions as kind of these key catalysts that. That begin the. That begin Black power urbanism. So it develops then through local insurgencies and not sort of a single national blueprint. So again, really emphasizing, I think, the localness of it, that each place had its own ideas about how to put black power urbanism into effect. I don't think they thought about it as black power urbanism as they were engaging in this. But certainly once you start, once you pull back and look across all these different communities, which are doing lots of different, similar things in terms of their actions, trying to force change through these unresponsive political institutions, okay, that's really helpful.
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B
To understand kind of the specific aspects of it, but also how it's tying in to other things going on at the same sort of time. So then thinking about investigating this black power urbanism and the impacts it's having. Can you tell us about how you've gone about figuring this out? So, talking about sources, archives, what sorts of materials and methods have you used?
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C
Sure. So I think this was really an interesting move for me in terms of my previous work as a political scientist looking at political institutions. I was very comfortable with looking at lots of different administrative records and court cases and legislative hearings and things like that. But what I think, for me, created, Opened up this opportunity is really taking on board this idea that there is a black power archive. And so looking at. Not looking at what people were saying and how they were saying it. And so looking at black power convention materials and manifestos, which a lot of them, looking at black newspapers, both mainstream as well as sort of alternative newspapers that sort of emerge in. During that moment. Looking at movement publications, looking at oral histories, looking at art, looking at music, and really sort of a much different kind of archival source than the sort of traditional political science archives, which are really sort of mostly focused on elite or institutional actors. And so what I think what it allowed me to do is really construct or allow for reconstruction of black power urbanism as both an ideology as well as a governing practice.
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B
All right, so we've got a lot of good foundations then here in terms of methods, sort of overarching goals, origins. What does this then mean? What are, I guess, the implications of this investigation? Right. Like, how does looking at Black Power urbanism help existing understandings of Black Power sort of more broadly?
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C
What I think looking at Black Power urbanism does, it shifts our attention to how Black Power was understood by everyday people and local communities. I think that the Black power movement, as well as the Black power activists experienced, I think, a renaissance in studies over the last decade or so. And quite rightfully sort of trying to recapture a lot of the energy and ideas of the sort of. The sort of very. The prominent, prominent folks. It also, I think, focused on the sort of international aspect of the Black Power movement, which again, I think was. Is very important thing for us to not lose in terms of thinking about that moment. But I think what it wasn't doing and it wasn't really thinking about how people on the ground were really understanding and translating Black power to their day to day lives. So that what I was hoping to do is just show how this moment of tremendous transformation, the 1960s, especially in thinking about urban politics, was affected by these other ideas about what good governance ought to be. And so it really shifts our ideas about what's happening in sort of the urban politics world. It's helped to shift our thinking about what's happening in terms of Black power scholarship. And so what I sought to do is sort of reveal Black Power urbanism as kind of a governing project that was concerned with land use and schools and police power, and show it as kind of a much more of a pragmatic, institution oriented and spatially grounded movement, as opposed to simply something that was oppositional or symbolic.
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B
That's definitely interesting to keep in mind as we discuss then some of the things that are happening sort of on the ground. But of course, the challenge of looking at something on the ground, I mean, you've just outlined why it's important to do so. But one reason it's hard is there's a lot of ground. Right, so which four places do you examine in this book and why did you decide on these places to look at?
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C
So I was interested in teasing, pulling together different strands of approaches. So one rooted very much in the sort of urban politics literature. Thinking about how does sort of the structure of the. How does the structure of a city's political institutions shape political outcomes? I was also interested in thinking about space in terms of urban versus suburban. And then I was also thinking about region in terms of thinking about the Great Migration and the ways in which post war black settlement in the north was. Was quite different than, say, post war black settlement on the west Coast. So that led me to thinking about cases where I could explore these political and institutional differences as well as regional differences, as well as kind of spatial differences. So that led me to kind of an East Coast, West Coast, east coast, west coast separation. And so for the east Coast, I chose Newark, New Jersey, largely because it seemed to be a much more doable city. It's not New York City, it's a smaller city, but it's a city with a strong machine politics as well as durable black institutional footholds that African Americans have been living in newark since the 18th century. And that in fact, it had been sort of a center of black resistance, a center for abolitionist, black abolitionist politics. And so they sort of had long, rich kind of embeddedness within the city. And then that that sort of long history expands, if you will, or changes slightly with the arrival of the great. The first stages of the great migration in the 1910s and then expanding even more so in the 1940s. Hard right next to Newark is East Orange, which was in the early 20th century, a predominantly white and very affluent suburb with a small black community that had mostly made up of middle class and working class African Americans. By the 1960s, it had been framed as kind of a model interracial city. And so I thought this was very interesting to think about Newark, which was the place where the first black power convention happens in 1967, right after the Newark riots, and comparing how black power gets sort of articulated in a space like the Newark versus how black power gets articulated in a place like. Like East Orange, which is far more sort of middle class. And then if we switch to the west coast, in contrast to Newark, Oakland is what we would call political scientists would call a reformed city. It's much less bureaucratic. It's kind of fragmented politically and institutionally. It's hard for blacks and other minorities to kind of get a strong foothold within this sort of political system. It's also the birthplace of the Black Panther Party. So I thought the two together was sort of very interesting. That what was it about Oakland that sort of leads to the. The emergence of a particular kind of political response or just the Black Panther Party. And I should also say it was. It's also interesting to look at Oakland because Oakland, which by the 1980s has about sort of a 40 something percent black population to 2010, the black population is around 28% and it's even lower. So thinking about Oakland which almost becomes a majority black city and is now not. Is also, I think, kind of an interesting story in and of itself, which connects to the story of East Palo Alto, which is a small city suburb that is on the other side of the highway from Palo Alto, which is the home of Stanford University. And so I think that brought other interesting questions about what does it mean to be a black residential enclave during that moment when Silicon Valley is sort of beginning to emerge as kind of a new kind of economic space. So what is interesting, though, I think, about all these four cities is that even though they're sort of spatially separate, as I dug into this sort of black power archive, you see that there's lots of connections and that activists are literally moving and moving to these different spaces, giving speeches, advising them about different approaches. And so really you sort of see this kind of web of relationships that emerge across these cities, even as each city creates their own response to an own articulation of a black power urbanism.
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B
My dad taught me a lot, including how easy it is to forget to cancel things. So I downloaded Experian, my bff. Big financial friend. Experian could help me cancel my unused subscriptions and lower my bills, saving me hundreds a year. Get started with the Experian app today. Your big financial friends here to help you save smarter. Results will vary. Not all bills are subscriptions eligible. Savings not guaranteed. $631 a year average savings with one plus negotiations and one cancellations paid. Membership with connected payment account required. See experian.com for details. Experian. Yeah, that's definitely a really interesting element of it, as well as the sort of things you've highlighted as being of note for each of those cities. There's also, as you mentioned earlier, some kind of key issues that you focus on as well. And we're probably not going to be able to look at kind of every issue in every city in depth, but we can at least talk about kind of some of them to give a sense. So thinking, for example, about housing, this comes through really clearly in the book as being in many ways a very specific reaction to sort of post war urban renewal. Right. Like the war has ended, now we're going to go do a bunch of things. What are some of the problems with this that Black power activists identify when it comes to housing?
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C
Well, I think probably what the key critique of the urban renewal order was that it just, it displaced black communities and reinforced racial containment through policing and through really a lack of sort of educational opportunities. That displacement was accompanied by A sort of liberal pluralism which failed to deliver meaningful power or repair to these communities. And so in the eyes of these activists, they've been displaced, community organizations have been displaced, Local businesses, particularly black owned businesses, have been displaced, and. Or they've just shut down. Housing hasn't been replaced. And city governments essentially kind of threw up their hands and said, well, that's the price of progress. And so I think it just. It really, I think, created a sharp desire to figure out what could black communities do in the face of this massive displacement, and how could they ensure that the rebuilding or the repair of these communities could occur on a basis that led to. That would lead to better communities and not simply a replication of what had been there before. So, as you said, housing was really understood as the foundation of community power, that it was not merely shelter, that it was actually place, not only places people lived in, but places that held a lot of meaning. That places where organizations, community organizations had been built up, um, and also places which they had been able to assert a sense of identity, and that kind of identity had been taken away.
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B
It really makes the point that kind of housing is not just about sort of structures to keep out the cold. Like, that's part of it, but there's a whole bunch of other things brought up in it as well. Obviously, it's one thing to identify these problems. It's another thing to sort of do something when problems, whether related to housing or other issues, are brought up. What sorts of methods of resistance do we see across the places that you looked at? You know, for instance, in East Orange or in Oakland, what kinds of methods of resistance to this worked for activists trying to do something different?
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C
Well, I think this is where scale, whether it's a small suburb versus a large city really is. You see sort of interesting similarities as well as differences. So in East Orange, which, again, was, you know, had a strong black middle class, but also increasing numbers of black working class and black poor people, there was a variety of strategies and resistance that was used. One certainly method was really thinking about and articulating the need for stronger neighborhood schools. So what the sort of elites in East Orange proposed was kind of a. Kind of a collapsing of neighborhood schools and kind of creation of a giant mega school. And this was kind of an idea that had been put forward for lots of. For. For many school districts that were facing issues of how do we create integrated school districts out of districts that had, you know, segregated neighborhood schools. In the minds of the black residents of East Orange, it was very important for them to keep neighborhood schools, given that they were basically almost a majority, they were going to be a majority of the school district in the next decade or so. And so there are real struggles about how schools should be literally where they should be cited and then how they should be funded. This carried over in terms of urban renewal. Early attempts at urban renewal focused almost exclusively on the black areas of town. Black middle class residents were able to push back and stop urban renewal happening in their neighborhoods. Uh, but black poor and black working class folks were less successful. Um, and those neighborhoods became subject to not only urban renewal, but also highway construction. So they pretty much disappeared. In Oakland, it too was, I think the resistance strategy too was kind of developed in this sort of shadow of urban renewal and highway construction. Um, and so what you saw in Oakland was, I think, far more overt signs of resistance as opposed to places like East Orange. So there's mass protest, there's the creation of the Black Panther Party, which really kind of set up a kind of a clear signal to city officials that they could no longer engage in business as usual. I think probably the most prominent signs of resistance were the survival programs created by the Black Panther Party, which articulated how black residents and minority residents could specifically address different aspects of urban life that had been sort of harmed by unequal governance. I'd also like to add in some more thoughts about Newark, New Jersey and East Palo Alto. So going back to the idea of big city versus small community, what's interesting about Newark is that unlike Oakland, Newark black activists had an entree into the political system. And so in Newark, the sort of strategies of resistance kind of took a different path in terms of both happening through attempts to influence and try to take over the political system, the sort of formal political institutions, as well as protests and sit ins and other types of other types of kind of resistance. And so it's quite different because it's sort of a two prong approach. So Newark elects its first Black mayor in 1970, Kenneth Gibson. But that doesn't actually reduce black power urbanism. It sort of acts as kind of a complement to it that even as Gibson is trying to sort of push the institutional structures of Newark and a sort of more egalitarian and inclusive direction, you still had a very strong black power urbanist activist base that's also pushing for different kinds of policy outcomes for black and Puerto Rican communities in Newark. If we then switch to East Pau Alto, which is the smallest of all these communities, but in some ways the most hyper segregated, you see attempts to resist in a space in which they don't really have a lot of formal political power. So at that point, East Palo Alto is an unincorporated part of the county. And so they actually don't have formal political power. They actually have to continually go to the county board of supervisors to. To get funding to do all sorts of things. And so their strategy ends up focusing on. There's lots of protests. But I think what their strategy does is they. They attempt to use the one kind of institutional foothold that they have, which is education, and that becomes the sort of nexus around which they try to push forward black. It's their own sort of black power urbanist approach that then becomes coupled with a successful attempt to gain power, so self governance. And then by the early 1980s, they actually become incorporated community, and they have their. Then they have their own mayor at city council. So it took several decades for East Palau to depend on, actually acquire sort of formal political power.
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B
All right, so this is really interesting to think about how education and things like mayoral politics are, like, not accidentally happening at the same time. Like, there's a reason these things are seen as linked. So can we stay in East Palo Alto for a moment and tell us more about why educational institutions were seen as so central to activism efforts there?
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C
Sure. So I think education is central because, again, it is sort of one of the few formal political spaces that local people, particularly black residents, can access. But in many ways, the education it becomes means something much broader that for young people in East Palo Alto, education was a process of discovering sort of sovereignty. So in the late 1960s, black youth actually pushed for and actually got onto the ballot a measure to try and change the name of East Palo Alto to Nairobi. And the idea behind this is that it would assert, it would symbolize black self determination, link them to sort of a rising sort of global black consciousness, and also signal to political structures like the county board of supervisors that they were self consciously organized space that could and would press for and in fact, demand better services in a place that had been marginalized both politically and economically as well, spatially within the county. So going from this idea of renaming the city to Nairobi, activists looked at education as a place in which assertions to control local control could be enacted. And so, in addition to trying to gain more control over the local elementary school system, there were attempts to also gain control over the high school that was located there and have the high school serve the black, Its black students in a way that they hadn't really been served before. It was largely a high school that wasn't really successful for students. That was extremely high dropout rate. Young black men were essentially encouraged to go to Vietnam, and girls were sort of just kind of pushed out. So parents were trying to change that as well. At the same time, parents also, a group of really committed parents, led by black mothers in particular, created an independent school called the Nairobi Day School because they simply felt that public schools, as they were, were not sufficiently responsive to the needs of black children. And so you get the creation of these schools, as well as a junior college, which really tried to create and deliver a different model of education that really kind of emphasized black cultural competence as well as sort of the sort of educational basics. And so these institutions were seen as not simply providing education, but really kind of anchoring a new identity for the community.
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B
That definitely makes sense as to then why it was kind of such an important part of what the community was trying to achieve. And obviously, education is, along with housing, one of the central aspects that you look at, not just in East Palo Alto, but across the cities. Another one, though, is policing, which we mentioned briefly earlier. And I want to make sure we don't lose that thread, because, of course, questions about reforming the police forces are relevant now as well as in the period you mainly focus on. So can you tell us more about how these discussions around how to reform the police were related to these debates and movements around reforming housing and education?
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C
Absolutely. So if I think about the sort of three pillars that I look at, education and housing, policing is sort of the one that. That really sort of links the two. So if we're looking at the case of Newark, for example, Newark. Newark's police force, like Oakland's police force, had virtually no black police officers, certainly no black administrators or police chiefs. But in the case of Newark, it was incredibly corrupt. And so what you had was essentially a police force that really was in some ways kind of predatory in terms of vice and other kinds of things, but also a police force that was essentially tasked, like many other urban police forces, tasked with kind of containing black populations in certain areas. And so there was an incredibly hostile relationship between the black community and the Newark police force. Protests against police brutality and police killings had been going on since the 1940s. There have been periodic commissions looking at this, but Certainly by the 1960s, things had really not changed at all. Even as more blacks joined the city government, this policing shaped where kids went to school, their experience with the school system, and certainly in terms of housing. I think the most symbolic of this connection between education and housing and policing was the newark rebellion in 1967. The site of the rebellion was the precinct house in the Central Ward where the majority of black, majority black public housing projects had been overly concentrated. So if you can imagine that there's, you know, thousands and thousands of households living in these gigantic 12, 10 to 12 story housing projects with no parks, no amenities, just kind of jammed in there with this police precinct kind of located right in it. And so the rebellion starts off with a case of police brutality. And you can sort of see on it's a map that was created by the Hughes Commission, which sort of investigated the aftermath of the disorders. And what you see is that the sort of where buildings had been sort of damaged, where deaths had occurred, really was kind of concentrated in this place of over policing, overcrowding of housing, particularly public housing, and the schools that were sort of not really equipped to handle this huge over, over concentrated population of black, poor and working class folks. And so I think out of that was yet again another attempt to kind of seize, to gain control of the police department through both integrating. Integrating the police department by getting more black and Puerto Rican police officers, by getting a black police chief, but also more, in the case of Oakland than in Newark, though, trying to change what does effective policing mean? And so really, you see the beginnings of community policing in both places. And I'll just say in Oakland, they were far more radical. They actually put forward an idea to essentially break the police department into precincts where each precinct would kind of be largely composed of whatever the sort of dominant ethnic group lived there. And so the hope was that a precinct that reflected a precinct that was made up of one or two groups would have officers and police officers, an administrative structure that would sort of be more responsive to those groups. And so there, I think there really was an attempt to kind of figure out how to make existing. How to reform existing policing institutions, but also how to sort of rethink the idea of policing itself.
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B
All right, so this is really interesting, the linkages that you're drawing for us between the aspects, but also like the particular places and times where things really brought all of this to a head. What happened to all of this? What happened to black power urbanism?
- [36:56]
C
I think what happened to the black. What happened to black power urbanism is both partial success, but then also partial dismantling. So on the one hand, where black power urbanism was somewhat successful is where activists and their allies were able to attach themselves to or create political spaces or institutional spaces where their ideas could kind of come into being, but where black Power urbanism sort of faltered was partially because of state repression and surveillance. I mean, we know about things like cointelpro, which really was quite successful in disrupting activist networks and groups, particularly in places like Oakland, but also East Palo Alto, which was kind of connected in the survey area network of activists. So that was part of as well. Starting in the late 1970s, you had rising suburban backlash as well as the beginnings of fiscal austerity. This kind of comes to kind of flowers with Reagan's election in 1980 and essentially the kind of dismantling of the sort of urban programs that had kind of enabled activists to find funding to create and put into place new types of programs that addressed community needs. And so. And then on top of that, on top of that, that was not enough deindustrialization happens. And so in places like Oakland and Newark, the sort of manufacturing jobs that still existed that African Americans were able to access kind of disappear. And then on top of that, the crack epidemic emerges. And that really is sort of a kind of a one, two punch to these communities, from large cities like Oakland and Newark to smaller communities like East Orange and East Palo Alto. In fact, the crack epidemic is so destructive that East Palo Alto, for a moment, becomes the murder capital of the United States, because it actually is a place where many folks in the sort of South Bay area would come to East Palo Alto to buy drugs. So these things really just kind of put black power urbanism kind of dismantles, I think, the idea of black power urbanism and black power movement in general. I think, you know, by the 1970s, it sort of run into difficulties because of internal divisions within. Within the movement as well. But even I think as it sort of lose its loose esteem, becomes institutionalized and. Or becomes dismantled, I think the core of the ideas become absorbed by the political system that once these ideas about community control get out in the wild, if you will, once these ideas of. And examples of things that could be done differently are out in the wild, they can't really kind of be taken back. And so what you do see, I think from the. The 1980s onward, is this kind of periodic contestation about these forms. Should we have more community control or less community control? They're periodically revived. I think one of the examples that I was really struck by was a group called Moms for Housing in Oakland, where unhoused mothers basically took control over a house that had been empty because it'd been redeveloped by. By real estate, had been rehabbed by real estate developers, and was going to be put on the market. And their argument is that, you know, we have people without housing and housing without people. And if you look at their language, they are very much drawing upon Black Panther's community survival programs and saying that housing is a right and really sort of tapping into that. And because they're able to tap into that, they're able to kind of create kind of support within the Oakland parts of the Oakland city government that, hey, you're right, we do have a housing crisis. And that leads to them to reviving this idea of community land trusts, which had been brought up by the Black Panthers and other groups in the early 1970s as an approach to sort of stabilizing affordable housing in communities. And so you see, I think these ideas kind of periodically getting revived and taken up because in some ways, they do sort of address issues both then and now in terms of struggles over housing justice, over school control, and over municipal power.
- [42:12]
B
That is, as you said, a combination of so many different things happening that it kind of makes sense that this wouldn't be something that we sort of think we see as much anymore. But of course, it's not entirely gone. Right. Like, there are aspects or ways that we can see links between what you've been describing and sort of politics happening now. Right, Right.
- [42:32]
C
Absolutely. I think, you know, I live in New York City, and so we just elected Zoran Mamdami as our new mirror. And there is, I think, what Mamdami and his administration and certainly his political supporters are envisioning is kind of an urban renaissance, a city that is responsive to neighborhoods as opposed to sort of more elite actors and institutions. And I think not only in New York City, but I think in other places, there's a sense that housing is not simply a luxury, but in fact, it's a right. And so thinking about new structures that takes or limits the sort of impact of the private market on people's ability to gain access to housing. In terms of education, I think there is a renewed attention to how do we ensure that schools are responsive to not just parents, but also to the community as well. And then, I think, in terms of policing, certainly since George Floyd, policing and how we police and who we police has remained kind of remained a topic of concern, even as there are folks who would argue that maybe we've gone too far in terms of police reform. But certainly, I think that once the idea of police reform and how we're policing has gone onto the agenda, it's hard to kind of push that off of the agenda. So again, thinking about Mamdami and his sort of thinking about ways to keep New Yorkers safe, both in terms of armed, in terms of armed officers, but also thinking about, in terms of responding to say, for example, mental health crises. So I think that these ideas kind of are there. They're kind of articulated kind of differently. But I think what Black Power urbanism does is that it sort of opens up these ideas and kind of puts them into sort of a kind of ideas ecosystem where they're kind of thought about and reconsidered and repackaged and reconceptualized to address current day issues.
- [45:07]
B
Well, and of course, having a book on this history is also part of growing that idea ecosystem too. So is this the kind of thing you're continuing to work on or do you have any projects on your desk at the moment you want to give us a sneak preview of, even if they're totally different or it's building a garden or I don't know.
- [45:23]
C
So I have two projects. One is part of my interest in looking at places like East Palaut and East Orange has been a recognition of the sort of suburbanization of, of, of African Americans. At this point, a little over 50% of black Americans live in suburban areas. And I don't think we've really sort of systematically thought about what does that mean. What does it mean to be in suburban areas which are far more institutionally fragmented, where black populations are more likely to be less concentrated than not, where the financing of these spaces are certainly much more frail than, say, cities? And so along with some other folks, where we're looking at sort of how black life is sort of unfolding in these suburban spaces. What does it mean to be in a space that symbolizes the sort of American dream, but in fact might not work for all? And so that's one project. And the other project that I'm working on is really a moment thinking about what's happening in terms of the American state and thinking about this, about American state capacity as we're going through this tremendous political transformation under the Trump administration.
- [46:53]
B
Well, that certainly sounds interesting. Best of luck with the project.
- [46:56]
C
Thank you.
- [46:57]
B
While you are off working on those new ideas, then, of course listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Dark Black Power, Urbanism and the American Metropolis, published by Cornell University Press in 2025. Kimberly, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [47:13]
C
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure.