Archaeologies of Race and Urban Poverty: The Politics of Slumming, Engagement, and the Color Line

For more than a century, social reformers and scholars have examined urban impoverishment and inequalities along the color line and linked "slum life" to African America. An engaged archaeology provides a powerful mechanism to assess how urban-renewal and tenement-reform discourses were used to reproduce color and class inequalities. Such an archaeology should illuminate how comparable ideological distortions are wielded in the contemporary world to reproduce longstanding inequalities. A 20th-century neighborhood in Indianapolis, Indiana, is examined to probe how various contemporary constituencies borrow from, negotiate, and refute long-established urban impoverishment and racial discourses and stake claims to diverse present-day forms of community heritage.