Consensus-based community development, concentrated rural poverty, and local institutional structures: the obstacle of race in the lower Mississippi Delta

Abstract

During the 1990s consensus-building approaches to community and economic development emphasizing local assets and social capital became dominant. These approaches have since been criticized for failing to pay sufficient attention to structural factors, particularly how variation in local institutional conditions affects implementation and outcomes. In this paper I use data collected through in-depth interviews with 73 leaders in four Mississippi Delta counties to address these shortcomings. The findings indicate that the Delta's racialized social structure systematically obstructs consensus-based efforts to construct interracial and inter-institutional relations of trust and cooperation. The paper contributes to literatures on community development, race, social capital, and persistent poverty by explaining the interaction between consensus-based approaches and the institutional structure of the Delta. It concludes with a discussion of how the findings speak to community development theory.

Keywords:

• community development
• concentrated rural poverty
• race
• community organizing
• local governance

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the respondents, whose participation made this research possible. He is also grateful to the Southern Rural Development Center and the philanthropic funder for their support. Finally, he thanks Roberto Gallardo for research assistance as well as Phillip Hough and the editors and anonymous reviewers for their insightful criticisms and suggestions.

Notes

1. See Harvey and Beaulieu (2010) for a detailed description of the initiatives, the implementing organizations, and their short-term impacts.

2. Black attainment of political power in the Delta is largely limited to the municipalities and school districts where large numbers of displaced tenants resettled during the 1970s and 80s. The planters tend to retain control of the more powerful county governments, often through black supervisors (see Duncan, 1999).

3. These perceptions were not unfounded as the administration was out of compliance with state reporting requirements with respect to its budget and its treasurer was under indictment.

4. Of course, the racialization of the business sector as white and the government-nonprofit sector as black does not mean that there are not black business elites or white government and nonprofit elites.

5. See Duncan (1999) and Wright Austin (2006) for detailed descriptions of the fractured nature of black political leadership in the Delta.

6. Race appears to unite the white community politically even more than it does the black, which is more fragmented (see Wright Austin, 2006). Indeed, “white candidates” often win elections in majority black counties by combining a unified white vote with a segment of the black vote.

7. The fact that it is unclear whether the remark was made by a white or black child highlights the complexity of race and racism in the Delta.

8. White elites, as well as many black elites, explain the poverty in the black community in terms of the “culture of poverty” thesis, i.e., they are poor because they no longer value work, family, and education. What is more, the federal welfare state is seen as the main causal force behind the loss of these values (see Lemann, 1991).