With Dr. Kevin Clay, we explore how political and economic elites in Black cities attempt to curry favor with Black voters for development projects that have consistently proven to be underwhelming at best and harmful at worst by deploying what we understand to be predatory rhetoric. Quoting Henry Louis Taylor (2020), we concur that “Black neighborhoods are sites of spatial exploitation where predatory development, segrenomics, and exploitation dominates,” (p. 17). Using case studies from multi-million dollar urban development proposals in Richmond, Virginia, (i,e., One Casino + Resort) and Inglewood, California, (So-Fi stadium and the Intuit Dome) we describe how these Black-led gentrification projects invoke the language of faith and religion, Black liberation, civil rights, and other histories of grassroots Black struggle (e.g., “Black power”) to advance economic and spatial projects that largely reproduce race and class relations.

Often under the guise of “Black progress,” these neoliberal rhetorics insidiously attempt to sway Black voters to see corporate interests as aligning with their own and mask the predatory nature of corporate development projects that facilitate gentrification, displacement, social disorganization, and concentrated poverty. While some experts have previously argued that Black communities are inherently skeptical of the promises of corporate reform, these cases show how narratives of racial progress, social justice, and Black pride can envelop the logics of neoliberalism to facilitate Black support.