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A rapidly expanding body of research has sought to connect the Home Owners' Loan Corporation's (HOLC) so-called redlining maps to a wide array of present-day social injustices. The assertion is that these maps helped entrench emerging cogeographies of racial segregation and devaluation that have continued to reproduce racial-spatial inequities through time. We argue that such arguments likely underestimate the ongoing power of racism by narrowly focusing on the map grades rather than on racial segregation itself. To investigate this possibility, we conduct a set of statistical analyses that decouple race from redlining. These analyses produce two main findings. First, postwar Black population growth did not occur in all HOLC redlined neighborhoods evenly but was most concentrated in those areas that either had an initial Black population or that were adjacent to them. Second, whereas HOLC grade was a stronger predictor of neighborhood home values than Black population share until about 1970, the latter has become the more salient factor since. Thus, rather than obliquely highlighting the persistent geographies of racialized devaluation by way of the HOLC grades, researchers should instead focus on the racially uneven geographies of value directly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November of 2016, the City of Stonecrest was carved out of Atlanta's suburban Black Mecca. The hope was that the new city's "brand" might bring development and increased wealth to an area which has borne the brunt of uneven development, racialized urban secession, and racial capitalism for many decades. The case of Stonecrest points to several interesting tensions, contradictions, and necessary reckonings around race, class, and neoliberal urban space in Atlanta. We reconsider the historical politics of the Black Mecca alongside contradictory geographies of racialized housing policy, arriving at an analysis of Stonecrest as a project of White democracy that fails to challenge the material and ideological conditions of its own subordination. We build from this analysis to argue that abolition democracy in Atlanta must work to transcend not only the particulars of its own history (and that of Atlanta more broadly) but the hegemony of neoliberal racial capitalism as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]