Nicholas Lawrence Caverly

NICHOLAS CAVERLY, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, received a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship to aid research and writing on “Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Takes Place.” Funding made it possible to complete and submit a book manuscript entitled “Demolishing Detroit: How Structural Racism Takes Place.” In recent decades, wrecking crews have leveled hundreds of thousands of empty buildings in Detroit. Because the city’s empty buildings index white flight and capital extraction, residents and policymakers alike have articulated demolitions as key to moving forward in the wake of racism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and policy analysis around Detroit’s empty building removals, this manuscript demonstrates how demolitions reproduced racially unequal systems of economic opportunity and environmental contamination. Inequitable distributions of profit, precarious work and housing, and hazardous materials were not caused by deliberately biased policies, administrators, or contractors. Instead, they reflect how white supremacy becomes embedded in and reproduced through systems like heavy machinery operations, regulatory procedures, and housing affordability calculations — often despite efforts to the contrary. In conversation with demolition workers, neighbors, and administrators, “Demolishing Detroit” shows how racism is not merely a social problem to be toppled, but a persistent landscape that must be rebuilt in the service of repair. At the time of this report, the manuscript was under contract for publication at Stanford University Press.