Colony Over-the-Rhine is a piece writtren by my dear friend Tom Dutton at The University of Miami at Oxford, Ohio. It documents his work and the work of his students in the Center for Community Engagement in Over-the-Rhine. In this article, Tom describes how blacks and people of colour who live in the inner cities of North America are having their communities pathologised as a precursor to the use of community development and revitalisation programs designed to force their relocation. In this process, State and federal Governments, City Hall and the development community all conspire to "clean up" the inner cities,, in the process displacing and "relocating" communities and families that haver lived there, in many cases, for several generations. Using Cincinnati as a model, Dutton suggests that:

"Cincinnati is no different than other cities whose downtowns are marked by corporate headquarters and office space, convention centers and hotels, sports stadia and financial institutions on the one hand, and on the other hand by impoverished communities of color that struggle to survive in the shadow of those skyscrapers where the world’s economic business is plotted and implemented. Such a geography, produced by and a reproducer of global forces, reflects a vast inequity along class and race lines that will likely continue. Indeed, as global forces play themselves out in the United States, “urban policy no longer aspires to guide or regulate the direction of economic growth so much as to fit itself to the grooves already established by the market in search of the highest returns, either directly or in terms of tax receipts” (Smith, 441). In essence, public funds now become the resources for private market expansion. There can be no social welfare because the market requires corporate welfare. This gives new meaning to gentrification, where “realestate development becomes a centerpiece of the city’s productive economy” (Smith, 443), facilitated by a new integration of state and corporate powers. Gentrification becomes straight-up urban policy, a new form of “urban colonialism” where private entrepreneurialism and urban governance become indistinguishable. Poor people, especially those of color, are not so much the victims of the new urban colonialism as they are targets for removal"

He and his students strive to document this process, to support communities in struggle, and to develop strategies of resistance and engagement that will halt the ethnic cleansing of America's inner cities. This work presents a benchmark in community engegement and critical praxis. 

The article was originally published in The Black Scholar, v. 37, # 3 (Fall 2007).

To download the PDF click here

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