“A better place to be”? Black Mecca, White democracy, and the contradictions of neoliberal cityhood in Atlanta’s Black suburbs

In November of 2016, the City of Stonecrest was carved out of Atlanta’s suburban Black Mecca. The hope was that the new city’s “brand” might bring development and increased wealth to an area which has borne the brunt of uneven development, racialized urban secession, and racial capitalism for many decades. The case of Stonecrest points to several interesting tensions, contradictions, and necessary reckonings around race, class, and neoliberal urban space in Atlanta. We reconsider the historical politics of the Black Mecca alongside contradictory geographies of racialized housing policy, arriving at an analysis of Stonecrest as a project of White democracy that fails to challenge the material and ideological conditions of its own subordination. We build from this analysis to argue that abolition democracy in Atlanta must work to transcend not only the particulars of its own history (and that of Atlanta more broadly) but the hegemony of neoliberal racial capitalism as well.