“White man's road through Black man's home”: decolonial organizing in the metropole

Abstract

ABSTRACT Between 1965 and 1973, a coalition of local Washington, D.C., activists, organized as the Emergency Committee on the Transportation Crisis (ECTC), prevented construction of two freeways that would have destroyed neighborhoods and reshaped local communities. This essay reads their rhetorical practices as an example of decolonial delinking. To do so, I first re-tell the story of Washington, D.C., as an ongoing project of coloniality characterized by three dominant colonial habits: fostering division between local residents, articulating technocratic reasoning, and denying a local sense of place. Then I show activists overcoming those colonial logics by (1) building a multi-racial, cross-class coalition that modeled self-governance; (2) reclaiming the city as an organic being; and (3) engaging in rhetorical placemaking to imagine D.C. as home. This example of the ECTC orients our attention to de/coloniality as layered, ongoing processes, as well as the way that coloniality has facilitated our democratic imaginary symbolized by the nation's capital.