The Modern Infrastructure Landscape and the Legacy of Slavery

Abstract

I argue that a broad reading of the infrastructure landscape of the contemporary United States opens space to see how slavery affects our current geographies. By focusing on infrastructure—the roads, ports, rail lines, and buildings, among other examples—built by enslaved people, we can locate slavery in contemporary landscapes. By focusing on the built environment, we can also understand the centrality of slavery in making the U.S. nation-state. Perhaps most geographically significant, the modern infrastructure landscape built through enslaved labor generates existing wealth for individuals and corporations. If, for instance, the infrastructure built through slavery is still generating income, are there ways to capture that income and redistribute it to individuals or communities through reparative justice frameworks? This approach to addressing inequities within the U.S. economy can serve as a form of reparations and might help address fundamental economic inequities within the United States.

我认为, 对美国当代基础设施景观的广泛研究, 能够了解奴隶制度如何影响当前的地理。通过关注由奴隶建造的基础设施（道路、港口、铁路和建筑物）等实例, 我们可以在当代景观中找到奴隶制度的位置。通过关注人工建筑环境, 我们还可以了解奴隶制度在美国国家建设中的核心地位。在地理方面最重要的可能是：受奴役劳工建立的现代基础设施景观, 为当今的个人和企业创造了财富。如果通过奴隶制度建立的基础设施仍在创造收益, 是否有办法获取这些收益、并通过修复性司法框架将其重新分配给个人或社区？这种解决美国经济不平等的方法, 可以作为一种赔偿形式, 可能有助于解决美国经济的不平等。

Arguyo que una lectura amplia del paisaje de las infraestructuras de los Estados Unidos contemporáneos abre un espacio para ver cómo la esclavitud afecta nuestras geografías actuales. Enfocándonos en la infraestructura–las carreteras, puertos, carrileras y edificios, entre otros ejemplos–que fueron construidos por personas esclavizadas, podemos ubicar la esclavitud en los paisajes contemporáneos. Centrándonos en el entorno edificado, podemos entender también la centralidad de la esclavitud en la construcción del estado-nación de los Estados Unidos. Tal vez lo más geográficamente significativo, el paisaje de la infraestructura moderna construido con trabajo esclavizado genera la riqueza actual de que disfrutan individuos y corporaciones. Si, por ejemplo, la infraestructura edificada gracias a la esclavitud sigue generando ingresos, ¿existen modos de captar esos ingresos y redistribuirlos a individuos o comunidades por medio de enmarcaciones de justicia reparadora? Este enfoque, que pretende abordar inequidades dentro de la economía norteamericana, puede servir como forma de reparación y podría ayudar a enfrentar inequidades económicas fundamentales dentro de los Estados Unidos.

Key Words:

• infrastructure
• racial capitalism
• reparations
• slavery

Palabras clave::

• capitalismo racial
• esclavitud
• infraestructura
• reparaciones

关键词：:

• 基础设施
• 种族资本主义
• 赔偿
• 奴隶制度。

In 1965 in a debate with conservative William Buckley at Cambridge University, James Baldwin argued the United States owes its place as a global superpower to the labor of enslaved people (Bellot 2019). Noting the “harbors and the ports, and the railroads of the country—the economy, especially of the Southern states—could not conceivably be what it has become” if not for the labor of enslaved people. Baldwin connected the contemporary power of the United States through “my labor and my sweat, and the violation of my women and the murder of my children.” Through “cheap labor,” Baldwin argued enslaved people picked the cotton, caried it to the market, and built the railroads “for nothing, for nothing,” and this is foundational to understanding economic development in the United States (Baldwin 1965). For Baldwin, to understand the rise of the United States as the predominant global superpower is to understand a 400-year legacy of slavery, sharecropping, prison industrial labor, and the way those labors have contributed to the building up of the infrastructures that we continue to use, and that continue to generate wealth (Du Bois 1992; Woods 1998; Wilson 2000; Jennison 2012; Boodry, Hertner, and Kaczmar 2013; Boodry 2016; Bledsoe and Wright 2019).

Through Baldwin’s insight I argue a focus on infrastructure—the roads, ports, rail lines, and buildings, among other examples—built by enslaved people, we can locate slavery not as an artifact of history but part of the present in everyday geographies of capital accumulation (McKittrick 2013; Inwood, Brand, and Quinn 2021). Perhaps more important, a focus on the built environment locates slavery in the making of the U.S. nation-state. This raises a fundamental question: If the infrastructure built through slavery is still generating income, are there ways for us to capture that income and redistribute it to individuals or communities through reparative justice frameworks?

By locating enslaved people within a contemporary economic framework of roads, levees, ports, and railroads, we can estimate the monies enslaved labors continue to produce throughout the United States. In this way, and as I discuss in the conclusion, debates about reparations are not backward-looking, but instead locate slavery within the here and now of everyday economic life. As a result, we can understand how enslaved people’s presence animates contemporary processes of accumulation and dispossession. Thus, debates about reparations and the monetary compensation for slavery are not backward-looking, but connect to contemporary economic processes. Documenting how slavery is not just instrumental in cotton production, but the ways the broader system of enslaved labor gives rise to various structures that continue in our contemporary landscape is an important research agenda moving forward.

To address this article’s arguments, I first begin by discussing infrastructure. From there I address the role of slavery within the United States. Beginning with several examples, I show how the work of enslaved people still exists within contemporary landscapes of capital accumulation. These examples open to a broader discussion about how we need to see slavery within a contemporary context, written into what McKittrick (2013) argued is the urban palimpsest. From there, I talk about the idea of reparations and argue a critical rereading of the nation's infrastructure locates slavery in the here and now of the political economy. Therefore, efforts to address the legacy of slavery should be located within contemporary discussions of wealth redistribution and reparative justice frameworks (Coates 2016; Cowen 2020; Darity and Mullen 2020; Lewis 2020).

Infrastructure and the Development of the United States

Within the social sciences and humanities more broadly, but geography more specifically, there is increased focus on infrastructure and what infrastructures mean to the operation of modern society (Cesafsky 2017; Latham and Layton 2019; Strauss 2020). Known as the infrastructural turn, this work expands our definitions of what constitutes infrastructure and its role within modern society. Latham and Layton (2019) argued that to understand the central role infrastructure plays in modern society, it is helpful to focus on four interrelated characteristics. First, infrastructure is embedded—it exists within established networks and relationships (Latham and Layton 2019, 3). This includes how infrastructure connects to broader society, and the way infrastructure is embedded in the social, political, and economic realities of modern society. Strauss (2020) noted that infrastructure is shaped and shapes understandings of labor and racialized geographies in myriad ways. This includes everything from how the sighting of infrastructure has destroyed Black and Brown communities (Archer 2020) to the kinds of labor processes that go into making infrastructure and the way those labor systems rely on racial capitalism and processes of racialization (Strauss 2020, 1218).

Related are how infrastructures “have reach and scope” and how infrastructure can be used repeatedly (Latham and Layton 2019, 3). Because infrastructure is “transparent,” meaning that when it is used, “infrastructure is not necessarily noticed,” Latham and Layton (2019, 3) argued it also functions as background to daily life. Crucially this also applies to the kinds of labor that brought infrastructure to fruition. Thus, infrastructure is not just a “thing,” but is composed of a set of complex relationships and “social and technological processes” (Strauss 2020, 1218), which are made possible by a range of labor systems that remain hidden in plain sight (Cowen 2020; Strauss 2020). As a result, a focus on infrastructure reveals the logics of race and capital (Strauss 2020).

Once constructed, infrastructure can be added to and improved. For example, a port built to accommodate sailing vessels can be deepened and enlarged as technologies change. This flexibility gives infrastructure a kind of permanence that can endure through time and space and is central to understanding the economic conditions that gave rise to it in the first place, but also how this labor remains embedded in our contemporary infrastructure landscape. Finally, infrastructures embody standards. Infrastructure connects to other infrastructures and can help flatten differences over the landscape (Latham and Layton 2019, 3). For example, roads connect across jurisdictions, and although the specific materials used to construct the road might change (e.g., concrete, asphalt, etc.), the width of the road, the lane markers, and the yellow center lines are by and large the same. This standardization connects infrastructures into broader networks, government regulations, and labor systems that expand the scope of infrastructure and point to the ways that infrastructure is also central to ideas around the nation and nationalism (Cowen 2020).

Whereas popular imagination holds that slavery existed in the U.S. South or on the plantation, a focus on infrastructure expands the scale and scope of enslaved labor and its role in building up the U.S. nation-state. This has implications for how we recognize the role of enslaved labor in building up the infrastructure of the United States and the current role that enslaved labor plays in generating economic wealth. In the next section I expand on these ideas and show the central role that slavery played in the development of the United States and the impact it has on the development of the U.S. nation-state.

Enslaved Labor, Infrastructure, and the Building of U.S. Empire

The opening up of the territories that became Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas was significant for several reasons related to the economic growth of the United States (Baptist 2016). Originally home to the Chickasaw and Choctaw peoples, this territory contained rich soils and a climate that supported widespread cotton production (Woods 1998). At the time, cotton was the most important global commodity, linking the slave economies of the United States with New York and the extensive textile mills and investment houses in London, then the most important financial institutions in the world (Beckert 2015). As this area was opened to widespread cotton production, Southern state governments used the rising land and cotton prices to fund government functions, and plantation owners used the profits to invest in their plantations, and later these improvements supported the infrastructures that planters relied on to get their cotton crop to the market (Williams 2014). This, in turn, spurred economic development within the United States as banks in the North invested in building roads and improving waterways so that the cotton crop could be more easily transported to markets across the globe. These investments spurred the development of ever-increasing ways to finance these projects and led to credit systems that allowed planters to take out loans or debt as they expanded their production capacity (Inwood et al. 2020). Although numerous examples exist through the eastern half of the United States, I want to concentrate on two projects that historians have documented and represent the role enslaved labor played in building up U.S. infrastructure.

The first is the levee system developed along the Mississippi River that protected cotton lands and plantations from periodic floods. Planters whose lands bordered the Mississippi River were taxed on the portion of their land that ran against the river. To maintain the system of flood protection, the state of Mississippi and other Southern states developed a tax system in which those planters and landowners whose land ran adjacent to the river were responsible for an annual tax to maintain the levees (Mizelle 2013). Within this system plantation owners had a choice. They could either pay their tax in cash, which was often in short supply, or in lieu of those cash payments, they could pay their share with “donated labor.” Very obviously, planters would hire out their enslaved peoples, and the state could use those leased slaves for levee maintenance, which would take care of the planter’s share of the tax burden. This system helped create the modern levee system and was instrumental in maintaining the Mississippi River region’s levee system throughout the pre–Civil War period. Davis (2018), who has written about the levee system in Mississippi, noted, “[a] potent ideological mix of white supremacy and cotton fever underly antebellum infrastructure,” and this system was instrumental in constructing the “social organization [of the region] through a focus on property and racial hierarchy.”

Recall from the previous section that infrastructure is embedded into the landscape and exists within broader networks and relationships. The relationship between enslaved labor, the generation of wealth, and the creation of a broad set of infrastructures to support the generation of that wealth is reflected in the ways state governments employed enslaved people to build up infrastructure along the river. It also reflects how these structures gave rise to the broader political economy. Woods (1998) termed the property regimes that came to predominate in the region the “plantation bloc.” The plantation bloc system created a range of political, economic, and cultural systems that dominated the landscape of the Mississippi Delta region and fueled the expansion of racial capital throughout the region and the nation. Infrastructure was central to its creation and the maintenance of the plantation bloc’s power.

By “tracing the past to the present and the present to the past” (McKittrick 2013, 7), we reorient our understanding of the role enslaved people play within contemporary society through infrastructures. Recall that infrastructures are transparent and often exist unnoticed within the broader landscape. This is especially true for the laborers who brought infrastructure into fruition in the first place. As a result, instead of seeing slavery as something in a distant past or something that happened over there, on the plantation, a reading of the contemporary landscape through infrastructure locates slavery in the here and now of capital accumulation and extends our understanding of the role slavery plays within the broader national landscape. Put directly, slavery is a central and ongoing legacy of the U.S. economic system. This contemporary “conceptual palimpsest to contemporary cityscapes” (McKittrick 2013, 5) means seeing slavery and the lives of enslaved people as present both within the past and within the contemporary landscape of infrastructure, the labor and lives of enslaved peoples casting shadows on contemporary wealth generation.

Because the slave system is so deeply ingrained within the U.S. economy and landscape, disentangling slavery from wealth means understanding the fundamental ways slavery underwrites key concepts and core economic principles. Harris’s (1993) foundational work on property reveals how property rights are rooted in racialized understandings that emerge through slavery. The property relation is central to understanding the United States and the foundation of White supremacy on which the economic development of the nation rests (Bonds and Inwood 2016; Boodry 2016; Inwood and Bonds 2017; Ranganathan 2020). Critically, the ability to own property while African Americans were denied this right and were considered property creates a set of political, economic, and juridical frameworks that continue to predominate within the U.S. racial economy. White property ownership underpins White possession, what Moreton-Robinson (2015) described as the rationalization of White property and the U.S. nation-state’s cultural and social construction as a White nation.

Returning to the concept of infrastructure, it is not only that enslaved people worked to create myriad roads, rail lines, and water improvements, among other examples; it is that slavery itself creates an infrastructure of control, a framework for understanding the place of different racialized populations within the broader racial hierarchy that has developed out of the system of forced labor, what we might term the broader racial caste system. Slavery was central to creating the U.S. racial hierarchy and infused the political economy in ways large and small, from how we conceptualize property ownership and land to the way we police our streets and communities (Du Bois 1992). As Woods (1998, 5) reminded us, the formation of the plantation bloc led to a monopoly over agriculture, banking, manufacturing, and water, a monopoly extended throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and increasingly organized into Northern capital. This near-total control of the infrastructure of capitalism extends into every facet of the U.S. nation-state.

Perhaps no state within the United States exhibits these realities more than Louisiana. No infrastructure system is as interrelated to slavery as the levee and waterway improvements system that holds back trillions of gallons of water and opens the fertile grain-growing regions of the United States interior to global marketplaces. Hall (2018) explained that within Louisiana, state lawmakers used enslaved people to build up the state’s waterways to improve the flow of goods and services throughout Louisiana. As a result, the state government developed a mobile slave force that was deployed at various points for water work and other improvements to the system. Hall (2018) noted, “[s]lave crews worked the snag boats, operated dredging machines, and paddled into swamps with handsaws” (33) to clear the waterways. This force led to the development of several key state agencies, as the state wanted to maintain and regulate the work of the slave force and wanted to ensure that the enslaved state workforce would contribute to the growth of all regions of the state. This, in turn, extended the power of the planter class into regions of Louisiana, where because of different climate and soil conditions, widespread slavery was not economically viable. In this way, the mobile slave force expanded the power of the plantation bloc within the state, ensuring that this bloc’s interests and economic power would be central to Louisiana’s development.

Wright (2006) argued that to understand enslaved labor and its impact on the U.S. economy, you need to understand how enslaved people were put to work on tasks and on projects that would not have attracted free labor in any economically viable way. Woods (2017, 9), in Development Drowned, explained that New Orleans, because of its location and development, attracted a diverse and wide-ranging set of immigrants to the city and region, but those free-born immigrants avoided the dangerous and hard labor in the sugar fields reserved for enslaved labor. As a result, the Company of the Indies, who helped settle and invest in agriculture in the region, directed the African slave trade to New Orleans to make up for the widespread labor shortages in sugar production, an essential global commodity. The reality that free labor was not economically viable to make the bayous, swamps, and cypress forests exploitable meant that if these improvements were to be undertaken, they needed to be undertaken by enslaved people. As both Wright and Woods, in their separate works, explained, slavery in Louisiana is both a labor system—a specific way of making the land productive for plantation owners and their economic interests—and a property system that created legal, social, and cultural infrastructures that came to predominate in the state. The use of enslaved labor as a statewide labor force fits within this framework and points to how slavery was central to the region’s economic development. Not only could enslaved people be bought and sold at will, but they could also be assigned jobs no matter the age or gender of the person, and because enslaved people had no legal recourse for untenable labor conditions or abuse or violence, they were continuously put to work in the worst places and under the worst circumstances.

The levee system and waterway improvements that enslaved people undertook created a system that “intensified class and racial hierarchies” (Woods 2017, 120). As in Mississippi, the water management system in Louisiana focused itself on protecting White wealth, homes, and property, and has been all too willing to expose the economically vulnerable and racially othered to what Gilmore (2007) described as racism’s death-dealing displacements. In this way and within the context of the Louisiana swamps and bayous, it was not just necessary for enslaved people to take on waterway improvements in the state because Louisiana lacked free labor conditions that would have made these projects economically viable; it is also how the infrastructural improvements these conditions created continuously work to protect White wealth and power. Because of the labor conditions within Louisiana, every White person, regardless of their ability to enslave people, was invested in the infrastructural improvements enslaved people undertook. Their wealth—even if modest—and their life were dependent on slave labor, and by extension, the power of the Louisiana plantation bloc extended across the state. This reality speaks directly to the way infrastructures come to embody standards and flatten differences over the landscape.

Perhaps a no more prescient example of this reality exists than during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Although New Orleans initially weathered the storm, soon after, there were levee breaches throughout the city, and the city began to fill with water. Although the flooding was widespread, the impacts were disproportionate to the Black population. Before Katrina, the city’s White population was about 28 percent, and the African American population was around 67 percent. The effects of the flooding were concentrated within the Black population. The floodwaters affected 76 percent of the Black residents in the city and about 20 percent of the White residents (Campanella 2007). These statistics are made possible by and through historically grounded processes that have long located vulnerable peoples in vulnerable locations and have also invested in infrastructures that have come to protect those with the most resources from losing those resources. The creation of vulnerable landscapes, like what occurred in New Orleans, resulted from initial investments by the state in an enslaved labor force that was strategically deployed to create White wealth and protect that wealth from the river’s ravages. The flood “[r]evealed a region whose African American communities were always subject, in one form or another, to the plantation and social militarization and a disarticulated economy geared toward cheapening the value of labor” (Woods 2017, 258).

Recall that the plantation exists in both time and through space, so when McKittrick (2013) and Woods (2017) referred to the plantation as both a thing grounded in a particular moment—the period of slavery—they were simultaneously calling attention to the ways that the plantation lives on through the geographies that were created through the system of plantation management. This geography lives within the urban form and structure of infrastructure and how infrastructure continues to create wealth and privilege (Cowen 2020). Port facilities that once were central to the triangle trade and the movement of goods and peoples from Africa to North America in exchange for raw materials and manufactured goods continue through modern globalized trade networks. Rail lines that once moved cotton from Alabama and Mississippi to those ports still carry goods and products from ports to markets and from fields to ports generating billions of dollars in economic impact in the region and nation.

What was true in Louisiana is also true throughout the South, as enslaved people were used to build railroads, maintain roads, and support the public good in ways large and small across the region. Within Georgia, the idea of “public hands” was essential to the state, especially as settlers pushed into the interior of Georgia and began creating the broader political economy of the state (Hall 2019). Early state efforts focused on slavery as an economic necessity. Indeed, as Hall (2019, 23) noted, the state government did not want to use “hired labor” because of the cost and expense of paying workers. Instead, state leaders focused on the enslaved to build up the economy. As Governor George Gilmer noted in a speech in 1830, “expensive canals, turnpike and railroads ‘might befit foreign political economies,’ but government-owned enslaved people posed the ‘best that can be adopted in the state’s present situation’” (quoted in Hall 2019, 23). This passage points to the realities of enslaved labor within the United States. Slavery was seen as a cheaper and more cost-effective means of building up the infrastructure in the U.S. South and state governments throughout the South owned slaves and employed enslaved people to build up their economic capacity. In Georgia, these enslaved peoples were known as public hands, central to the regional economy and national economic development. Georgia also used these public hands to raise revenue, and those revenues were reinvested into the “public good” (Hall 2019).

In a similar situation to Louisiana, enslaved labor used to improve the state’s infrastructure created a political economy in which the majority of the White population in Georgia were invested in slavery—regardless of one’s ability to own slaves—because slavery created the infrastructural improvements that improved the lives of average White Georgians. Jennison (2012) explained that the state’s first use of enslaved labor focused on waterway improvements on the Oconee River. The program soon expanded, and by 1820 enslaved labor was working to improve almost all of the state’s navigable waterways. The program was so successful that it soon expanded to include roadway construction, and with this expanded workforce, the state soon appointed a state engineer, Hamilton Fulton, to oversee the program. In 1829 the state expanded the program again, “centralizing control over the state’s internal improvement projects and doubling its investment in slave labor” (Jennison 2012, 250). The state also relocated the public hands workforce, moving them from river stations and deploying them in large towns to improve urban areas throughout the state. Jennison (2012) explained:

The law [from 1829] mandated the number of enslaved people for each [region]: Columbus, twenty-five; Macon, twenty-five; Milledgeville, fifteen; Savannah, twenty-five; Flint River, twenty-five; Augusta, seventy-five. An overseer selected by local authorities managed each site and possessed the power to designate where the enslaved people were deployed. By the early 1830s, the state had spent more than $100,000 on its public hands’ program and owned more than two hundred enslaved people. (250)

Apart from the projects and other improvements, this force of enslaved labor undertook building infrastructure and improving the state’s infrastructure, thus benefiting broader White society. This drastically expanded the power of the plantation bloc in Georgia and the region and created a political economy where slavery was central to building economic wealth and power in the region and nation.

Critically and despite the public hands program ending in the mid-1830s, Georgia relied on slavery for a range of public works projects, including canal building and railroad construction. As in Louisiana, enslaved people were seen as more desirable than free labor. First, because enslaved people were owned property, they could exercise less control over their working conditions. Second, because their owners often leased enslaved people to companies, this created a condition where enslaved people could be made profitable when the planting and agricultural production needs of plantation owners were not as high as during planting and harvesting season. This benefited planters in that significant infrastructural improvement—railroads that allowed the cotton crop to make it to ports, for example—would create additional revenue streams for planters who were chronically cash strapped, and the hiring out of enslaved people to the state or private rail companies could improve the financial position of plantation owners. These examples illustrate the deeply imbricated nature of slavery within the landscape of the U.S. South. The mobile slave force in Louisiana and the distribution of public hands throughout the major cities in Georgia illustrates how slavery touched every aspect of the region, from the most prominent and wealthiest plantation owner to public merchants who relied on the rail lines, roads, and ports for their goods and services to everyday White southerners who used these roads and waterways to move throughout the region.

Layered on top of this reality is the system of centralized control and state bureaucracy—the broader infrastructure of government—that was created to ensure that enslaved people were put to work on projects and activities that benefited as much of the broader White statewide population as possible. This created a political economy in which the totality of White society was touched by slavery in meaningful ways and in ways that concentrated the political power of the various plantation blocs that came to predominate in the region. As I argue in the next section, the infrastructural landscape that the enslaved helped create lives on in the contemporary infrastructure of the region and the nation. The infrastructural landscape created through slavery and that is still in service raises questions for modern U.S. society. These questions go beyond recognizing that slavery is still a part of the U.S. landscape and extends into broader discussions about reparations and continued economic development.

Conclusion: Contemporary Infrastructure and the Enslaved

For anyone who has spent time in the U.S. South and traveled on a road or waterway, or taken a trip to New Orleans, or Savannah or Charleston, or spent time in Atlanta or Montgomery or Jackson, undoubtedly you have traveled along roads or infrastructures that were initially built through enslaved labor. The work of public hands in Georgia or the state-employed enslaved labor force in Louisiana are two of myriad examples of how the Southern landscape was built through captured work. This reality has implications for how we conceptualize the role of enslaved people in our present, lived realities and landscapes. As scholars of plantation tourism note, we still live with the enslaved long after the end of slavery, as the enslaved are part and parcel of a tourist landscape of plantation tours throughout the region (Alderman, Butler, and Hanna 2016). As I have explained through this article, we still live with the labors of enslaved people in various places and landscapes that were improved or created through efforts at public improvements built through bondage. This labor lies within the landscape and stretches from the heart of the U.S. economic empire on Wall Street to the bayous and swamps of Louisiana. This labor is still in service to capital, and as a result, it is necessary to ask what we collectively owe to enslaved people and their descendants?

Kelley (2002) argued that we do not need to go back to the time of slavery to make a case for reparations. Instead, we can look to contemporary discriminations and the “myriad ways U.S. policies have enriched upper- and middle-class whites at the expense of Black peoples and other people of color” (129). Returning to the role of slavery in creating U.S. wealth and infrastructure, we can locate enslaved people in the here and now of contemporary infrastructure. By engaging in public works, Southern leaders not only created a labor system that simultaneously disadvantaged free labor while enriching planters, but also a system that supported broader White society so that all Whites had a stake in the maintenance of slavery. This system benefited the White middle and upper classes, eroded the power of working Whites, and ensured that the system of slavery would remain central to the operation of state government. This locates the work of enslaved people within a broad range of economic realities and allows us to view slavery as central to the broader political economy of the United States.

Because these infrastructures continue to animate capitalism—the ports, rail lines, levees, and roads are still in service—this locates the enslaved within the contemporary political economy of capital accumulation. Recall from the previous section, Woods’s notes that slavery is not anathema to capitalism, but a pillar of how capital develops and operates. Perhaps nothing illustrates this more forcefully than the reality of infrastructure built through enslaved labors that still produce profits for corporations and individuals (Schermerhorn 2015).

More so, we can also begin to disentangle the uneven geography of infrastructure. It is well documented, for example, that U.S. highway construction destroyed minority communities and that city after the city used highway construction and slum clearance money from the federal government to maintain the segregated nature of U.S. cities and communities. Archer (2020), a law professor at the New York University School of Law, argued in White Men’s Roads that highway reconstruction is an opportunity to advance racial equity. In a recent interview, she noted, “[o]ur transportation systems have led to racial disparities and discrimination which are reinforced daily from highways, roads, bridges, to sidewalks to public transit” (quoted in King 2021). She argued that our current infrastructure was designed to make it harder for Black people and other minority communities to take advantage of the transportation infrastructure. For Archer and other researchers, the roots of this inequality are rooted in efforts in the 1950s and 1960s when the United States undertook a major infrastructure building boom. By understanding the broader geography of enslaved labor and the fundamental role that enslaved people played in creating the broader infrastructure landscape, we can also locate this reality in a much longer history. The system of highway construction and other infrastructure improvements that took shape in the 1950s reflects longer and more dominant histories of slavery and the effort of infrastructure to protect, preserve, and create White wealth. Far from seeing the building of highways and slum clearance that came to predominate in the United States as central to the making of the U.S. urban form of inequity, we should see those realities as extensions of longer geographies of race and racism rooted within a political economy built through slavery.

Returning to the idea of reparations, any monetary remuneration must account for the monies wrenched from the uncompensated labors of the past, but they also need to reckon with the monies those labors continue to generate. Reparations that fail to account for the present reality of slavery and the ways that slavery lies within the landscape of U.S. cities and ports that carry goods from those ports will not be fully transformative and leaves outside of the scope of justice those individuals and corporations that continue to profit from the labors of the enslaved. This reading of the infrastructural landscape of the United States expands the scale and bounds of slavery and locates slavery not just on the plantation, but instead within the very idea of the “public good” itself. The use of state-owned labor forces in the South radically altered the scale and scope of slavery. It made the labors of the enslaved not only crucial for the plantation bloc, but also important to the everyday lives of free Whites throughout the region, even if those free Whites could not afford to own slaves. This expanded the power of the plantation bloc and extended its power throughout the region. By coming to terms with the reality of slavery to and for the region and nation, a more complete picture of the centrality of slavery to the U.S. political economy is possible. This affects the way we understand the building of the U.S. political economy and the way the U.S. economy continues to extract wealth from the legacy of slavery.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers who strengthened this article. I also want to thank Anne Bonds who read and commented on previous drafts of this article as well as my advanced undergraduate course in the spring of 2021, where I first put forward many of the ideas in this article. Omissions are my own.

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Joshua F. J. Inwood

JOSHUA F. J. INWOOD is a Professor in the Department of Geography and the Rock Ethics Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include the U.S. South, race, and the geographic configurations of race and racism within a U.S. context.