In today’s class and this week’s readings we went deeper in the urban renewal era and its legacies.  Mindy Fullilove’s text re-frames urban renewal as “negro removal” by highlighting its discriminatory premise that African American communities were slums its and disproportionate impact on those communities.  We discussed the way in which Fullilove challenges urban renewal’s premise, by lifting up the hidden history of thriving, if challenged and segregated, African American communities; and, we talked about the long term consequences those communities in terms of various types of harm, including financial, psychological, physical/illness, social/cultural, and political.  Fullilove’s contributions to our understanding of these issues include: her method of analysis (i.e. connecting policies and structures to individual lives and places), her critical intervention of hidden histories, and her use of the concept of “root shock” to portray the experience and long-term consequences of displacement for African American communities. We situated this discussion within the historical timeline we’ve been constructing since the start of the semester, and in specifically relation to Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, who were active during the urban renewal era.   Finally, we discussed the cultural (i.e. racist/classist stereotypes, ethnocentric biases) as well as political economic (post war labor and capital surpluses) that played a shaping role.