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In this paper, I bring together scholarship on racial capitalism and critical energy studies to investigate how electrification contributes to racialized uneven development. I work toward a theory of racialized electricity capital as a state-supported circuit of accumulation through corporate provision of electricity, which is basic need essential to everyday life. I develop a case study of the electrification of Atlanta, Georgia to examine the historical–geographical formation of the relationship between the city’s electric utility, Georgia Power, and the state agency that regulates the Company, the Georgia Public Service Commission. I ask how regulation functioned simultaneously to expand and differentiate electricity consumption across Atlanta and in so doing reinforce a racialized labor hierarchy and unequal access to affordable electricity. This case study emphasizes the importance of analyzing the central role of the state in allowing and perpetrating systems of energy provision that create racialized and gendered poverty. Drawing from the most recent hearings regulating electricity rates before the Commission in 2019, I bring to the fore the work of energy equity activists leading a campaign to Fight the Hike who enact demands for racial justice and a democratic energy system.
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Southern politics, southern power prices: Race, utility regulation, and the value of energy
Abstract For many middle‐income households, paying the electricity bill is a mundane, even mindless, act. But for an ever‐increasing number of low‐income families, the electricity bill—filtered through the racialized materiality of poor‐quality housing stock and antidemocratic price regulation—represents something more ominous: looming disconnection, eviction, and a deep spin of vulnerabilities. This article explores the materiality of race in the US South through the prism of southern utilities and maps the political landscape on which contestations over the value of energy are taking place. I ask, how do different conceptualizations of value by utilities, regulators, and energy justice advocates figure into the price of energy and racialized dispossession in the Deep South? I draw attention to the highly elaborated narrative politics of the value of Georgia Power's energy. In conversation with recent anthropological debates about value and “the just price,” I argue that Georgia Power's monopoly on public power engages and reinforces the racialized political economy of the South to produce high home energy prices for low‐income families. But it also provokes a decryption of these energy prices by energy justice advocates that connects the silent violence of energy injustice to people's everyday experiences of extractive utility bills.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2218064
- PAR ID:
- 10416641
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Economic Anthropology
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 2330-4847
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 197-212
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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