HSOC Speaker Series: Vine City as the World Trade Center: Structural Violence in Atlanta and the Crisis of the Black Worker Today
Augustus Wood is an assistant professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is a scholar of African American history of the urban south with an interdisciplinary focus on political economy, intra-racial class struggle, working class social movements, and gentrification in modern urban regions.
The social construction of Atlanta is a structurally violent process where a pro-growth movement — led by the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and executed by the majority-Black junior partners of capital — restructured the political economy into a neoliberal pillaging of Black working class bodies, labor, and land. Through the lens of the Black working class and their neighborhood social movement capacity, we can fully interpret the complex social relations of the class warfare responsible for Atlanta’s transformation into the central hub of global capital accumulation and circulation in the U.S. South.