Black Self-Defense as Social Reproduction: Geographies of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency Amidst Racialized Uneven Development in Atlanta

Kayla Edgett

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2025, vol. 115, issue 5, 1088-1103

Abstract: This article argues that Black self-defense, understood as a component of struggles around social reproduction, challenges existing social relations emerging from and reproducing racialized uneven development. I analyze the Ron Carter Patrol, an armed community defense patrol during the Atlanta child murders in 1981, with a particular emphasis on the leadership of Black women public housing residents and relationships developed out of organizing for survival. As neoliberal austerity measures and policing left residents vulnerable to death, tenants self-organized to care for their community through mutual aid and self-defense. They insisted on the right of survival of their community and challenged the eroding foundations for social reproduction under neoliberalization. In response to public claims to self-defense—Black public housing residents taking up actual and symbolic space—the city administration and civil and political elites engaged counterinsurgency to facilitate continued capital accumulation. I argue that in the neoliberal era counterinsurgency operated not only to preserve normalcy but also to enforce the acceptance of a new standard for social reproduction that further threatened the survival of Black urban residents. This history suggests a need for further research on the relationships between Black self-defense projects and social reproduction, Black women and armed self-defense, and counterinsurgency and neoliberalization.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2025.2472010

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