Chocolate Suburb, Vanilla Power: Race, Space and Civil Unrest in Ferguson

Abstract

In this article, I argue that the demographic and political restructuring of city−suburb dynamics in the United States is key to understanding what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014. Ferguson, a once-vanilla suburb where the overwhelming majority of residents were white Americans, was deterritorialized from the 1970s onward into a suburb where black Americans became the majority group. However, the whites, as a demographic minority, were still in control and tried to reterritorialize the black suburb. I maintain that the inevitable result of this disjunction between the chocolate suburb and vanilla power was racial antagonism, which exploded in Ferguson in 2014.