Posting some findings from a great class with K. Ian Grandison I took this fall at UVA called Race in American Places, h/t @CarisAdel for doing this and inspiring me to share too!
This paper starts with two weird things I found in Charlottesville’s commemorative landscape. First, this monument from 1901 up at Monticello near the bus parking lot. I’ve always wondered... Jefferson who enslaved hundreds of people as “the greatest advocate of human liberty”?! 
Second, the bizarre fact that in 1927, there was a Sperry 1.3 billion candlepower aircraft spotting light installed on the roof of the Monticello Hotel in Court Square. Are these two things connected, and do they relate to other aspects of Charlottesville’s memorial landscape?
I’ll introduce the work of two political theorists to frame this exploration.
Cedric Robinson writes about a framework called “racial capitalism” - that blackness is a social invention that rationalizes the exploitation of people deemed racially “other,” and this categorization of people is one of the main engines of profit production as we know it.
Constructing whole categories of people as lower in the social order is an ideological tool that legitimizes exploitation, abuse, and results in big profits for those at the top.
Robinson further argues that in order to accomplish the construction of Black people as worthy of exploitation, Western scholars spent several hundred years expelling African and Muslim history from the canon of “legitimate” knowledge.
Another thinker, Achille Mbembe writes about a related concept called “necropolitics.” He connects the social hierarchies that are produced under racial capitalism to practices of power.
He argues that “the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the murderous functions of the state.”
Mbembe argues that racial “othering” is related to the legitimacy of systems of modern governance. In this racial construction, Black people are depicted as a fictionalized enemy.
The state works hard to produce that enemy in order to argue that it is doing its job protecting people who are worthy of such protection. Under this system, the people worthy of protection are white.
Mbembe goes on to explain three spatial mechanisms that show up in necropolitical governance. First, is a spatial separation of racial categories of people in three-dimensional space.
Second, the production of dominance relies on the “politics of verticality.” Height is associated with strategic advantage. In these arrangements, visual prospect is really important, and “settlements could be seen as urban optical devices for surveillance and exercise of power.”
Third, the construction of the “legitimate” state relies on violence to prove its solidity. Black space and Black bodies become zones where violence is performed to both prove an internal enemy and to exercise power over those constructed as enemy.
It’s important to note that Mbembe doesn’t just mean the government when he says “the state”, he means the all social systems of power.
So back to Charlottesville. I argue that both Racial Capitalism and Necropolitical governance are at play in the development of Charlottesville’s urban fabric in the early 20th century, and the symbolism of Thomas Jefferson is a key ideological tool in this project.
Jefferson is positioned as the “ideal” figure, at the top of a human hierarchy based on race. People who can are convinced to identify with him, and in doing so see themselves as close to the top of this hierarchy.
Back to the local context, in postbellum Virginia, the collapse of the interracial Readjuster Party in the 1870s meant that the state’s politics was dominated by Democrats well into the 1960s.
Cartoonist Thomas Nast depicted the coalition that brought the Democrats to power after the Civil War: Lost Cause Southerners, urban immigrants, and Northern industrialists. They join together and trample on the Black Union soldier, drawing power from their shared whiteness.
During this time, people who had not yet been considered “true Americans” like German and Irish immigrants were being brought into the halls of power through identification with whiteness. Nell Irvin Painter calls this the “second enlargement of American whiteness.”
The monument that sits up at Monticello is squarely a part of these dynamics.
This monument was dedicated by the Jefferson Club of Saint Louis. The Club sent 250 members on a pilgrimage to pay their respects to Thomas Jefferson in 1901.
This Club’s membership overlapped with other groups. They were Democrats, but many also were in the midst of planning the St. Louis World’s Fair, which was to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase in 1904.
According to speeches given at the pilgrimage, many were also connected to UVA.
The rituals and speeches show the ritual fusing of the three interest groups from Nast’s cartoon of the Democratic coalition. Former Confederate officers spoke at the dedication to satisfy Lost Cause southerners.
Many speeches talked about Jefferson’s ideals of religious freedom to appeal to Catholic portions of the Northern immigrant constituency, and the group’s arrival in a chartered train showed their faith in industry and infrastructural development.
Continued in next thread!
Link to part 2:
