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THE CARCERAL SPIRIT OF THIS NEOLIBERAL ERA EXTENDS FAR BEYOND the physical walls ofcorrectional facilities; indeed, both governmental and private actors play essential roles in criminalizing, confining, and amplifying the social suffering ofmarginalized communities. Profit-centered objectives, racism, and the penalization of poverty overlap and yield projects that benefit privileged actors while intensifying the struggles ofthose already in precarious positions. One such project is gentrification-redevelopment in pursuit of capital-which, I argue, epitomizes how neoliberal forces yield social suffering.
Driven by privatization and profit-centered objectives, neoliberalism is premised on the social subordination of particular groups and increasingly facilitated by punitive practices and policies. Although the neoliberal order maintains forms of social and racial containment (Eick 2006), a set of hegemonic discourses and ideologies privatize social problems such as poverty and mass incarceration, masking them as accumulations ofindividual actions rather than products of a confining social structure. Racially coded narratives produce fear, suspicion, and antipathy toward poor people of color and blame them (i.e., the "Black culture") for their overrepresentation in the criminal justice system or the blighted state of the neighborhoods they inhabit. Accordingly, such ideologies normalize the racially disparate outcomes of state-supported contemporary projects that generate profit for private actors.
The present case study focuses on a gentrification conflict in Edgewood Park1-a predominately Black, working-class neighborhood in a prominent mid-Atlantic city-and explores how racially coded narratives about gentrification's potential for neighborhood improvement serve to rationalize and normalize the resultant subordination of long-time residents. At the same time, this case study highlights how local activists problematize the social suffering of marginalized residents in their neighborhood and challenge the racist, exclusionary nature of the redevelopment they experience. Omi and Winant's (2014) racial formation theory provides important analytic tools for understanding the dialectical relationship between racial oppression and anti-racist resistance in this era of neoliberal confinements. Specifically, this theory explains how the convergence of racial meanings and concrete structural impacts (e.g., racially disparate resource allocation) occur through various racial projects-"attempts to both shape the ways in which social structures are racially signified and the ways that racial meanings are embedded in social structures" (Omi & Winant 2014, 125). Racial projects vie for hegemonic status; some projects produce or maintain racial oppression, whereas others resist racist practices and structures of...