Race, Energy, and the Patterns of Not Mattering: Infrastructure and Organized Abandonment in East Africa and the US South

An analysis of two diverse landscapes—the partial electrification of villages and homes in rural central Tanzania and the disproportionate electricity bills that consume people’s paychecks in the US South’s Black Belt—highlights the role of energy infrastructure in “organized abandonment” (Gilmore 2008). The triaging of racialized places and people distributes and extracts energy resources, enhancing life and labor for some, while rendering others more vulnerable to premature death. The ongoing reactivation of infrastructural sedimentations of inequality constitutes “race-making,” so that it is not only infrastructure that is racialized; racemaking also becomes infrastructuralized.