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Despite the tangible and documented impact race plays in questions of housing, employment, education, and health, discourses of antiracialism perpetuate the idea race—and by extension, racism—is no longer a relevant marker of disparity. In this alleged “post race” context, how do news accounts cover stories on urban crisis and renewal? This article takes up scholarly calls to develop “conceptual tools” that may enable critical scholars to explore how racism continues undercover in the 21st century. I argue for the importance of exploring how strategic forgetting operates in conjunction with the familiar and formulaic frame of personalization to erase or evade the continued presence of structured, systemic racism in the (re)construction/renewal of city spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narrative of the 'fall'-an account by urban residents about a decline in the morality and aesthetics of their surroundings-is common in US urban studies. Researchers typically explain the 'fall' as an outcome of post-Fordist changes in urban resources, neglecting to explore the social construction of this sense of things. Analyzing the oral histories of people who were born in Detroit from the 1920s to the 1970s, the author considers three explanations for the persistence of this narrative: constant urban decline, a moralizing hegemony or doxa, and a clash between objective structures and embodied histories over the life course. This line of inquiry is relevant to concerns about the impact of structural crises on social consciousness, and it is of particular significance to the theorization of the politics of place in post-Fordist cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]