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Full Description
Framing infrastructure as the expression of a state's care for its population, White Care explores the crucial role of race in the building, maintenance, scope, and quality of US infrastructure.
Infrastructure delivers to its users a range of benefits, from health, safety, and sanitation to mobility, energy, and education. It is, as Cotten Seiler argues, how modern states show care for their populations. White Care recounts the rise and fall of public infrastructure in the United States, unearthing its origins as an investment in those Americans deemed most highly evolved, showing the political stakes of its desegregation, and accounting for its current state of dilapidation.
From the late nineteenth century through much of the twentieth, government investments in physical ("hard") and social ("soft") infrastructure constituted a regime of care that Seiler calls "custodial liberalism." This regime achieved legitimacy with the New Deal, which conferred upon white citizens a bounty of life-enhancing public works. But custodial liberalism began to unravel in the postwar decades, as Americans of color gained access to public schools, housing, swimming pools, parks, and other sites from which they had long been excluded. As the infrastructural commons were desegregated, white Americans withdrew from the social compact that had empowered them and turned toward neoliberalism, with its program of austerity and privatization. This racialized renunciation has deprived everyone—including themselves—of a cleaner, greener, healthier, safer, more affordable, and more functional environment.
Contents
Introduction: Infrastructure and Future-Orientation
Chapter 1. The Forms and Beneficiaries of Infrastructure
Chapter 2. "Care for the Race"
Chapter 3. "A Heritage of Hygienic Experiences": Euthenics and the Population as Child
Chapter 4. "The Capital Nature Provides": Make-Live and Let-Die Infrastructures of Early Custodial Liberalism
Chapter 5. Consanguine and Beset Whiteness: The Beneficiary Population of the New Deal
Chapter 6. "Biological Equality!" and Racialized Futurity at Midcentury
Chapter 7. The Surround of White Care
Chapter 8. "The Best Horse They've Got": Race Realism and the Decline of Custodial Liberalism
Conclusion: The Renunciation of Populational Care
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
