“Where Are All the Black People At?”: Landscapes of Erasure in the Flower City

Abstract

In Rochester, New York—a highly segregated midsize postindustrial city in the US Rust Belt—the social and physical erasure of Blackness is built into the landscape. Blending experimental and traditional ethnographic exposition, this article interrogates several ways that urban racial exclusion is achieved through modes as wide ranging as policy, demolition, community‐engaged design processes, city mapping, and cultural and historical preservation. The conceptual frameworks of racialized space and Black geographies illuminate the importance of attending to historical and contemporary reverberations of racialized spatial exclusion. A “report back” from ongoing multimodal fieldwork that began in 2018, this article lays groundwork for further exploration of the entanglements of enduring historical racialized patterns of dispossession, contemporary techniques of exclusion, and imagined future respatializations in segregated urban environments.