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Framing infrastructure as the expression of a state’s care for its population, WHITE CARE explores the crucial role of race in the building, maintenance, scope, and quality of US infrastructure. Flyleaf will offer seating for up to 120 in-person guests, with priority access given to folks who purchase the book. Please indicate in the "Customer Comments" field (at checkout) if you’d like 1-2 seats held for you at the event!
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Infrastructure delivers to its users a range of benefits, from health, safety, and sanitation to mobility, energy, and education. It is, as Cotten Seiler argues, how modern states show care for their populations. White Care recounts the rise and fall of public infrastructure in the United States, unearthing its origins as an investment in those Americans deemed most highly evolved, showing the political stakes of its desegregation, and accounting for its current state of dilapidation.
From the late nineteenth century through much of the twentieth, government investments in physical (“hard”) and social (“soft”) infrastructure constituted a regime of care that Seiler calls “custodial liberalism.” This regime achieved legitimacy with the New Deal, which conferred upon white citizens a bounty of life-enhancing public works. But custodial liberalism began to unravel in the postwar decades, as Americans of color gained access to public schools, housing, swimming pools, parks, and other sites from which they had long been excluded. As the infrastructural commons were desegregated, white Americans withdrew from the social compact that had empowered them and turned toward neoliberalism, with its program of austerity and privatization. This racialized renunciation has deprived everyone—including themselves—of a cleaner, greener, healthier, safer, more affordable, and more functional environment.
Cotten Seiler's work focuses on U.S. cultural and intellectual history, race, feminist and political theory, and infrastructure humanities. He is the author of the books Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago, 2008) and White Care: The Impact of Race on American Infrastructure (Chicago, 2026), and the editor of Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies. His essays have appeared in journals such as American Quarterly, Public Culture, Social Text, Reviews in American History, American Historical Review, and History & Technology. He is a frequent media commentator on US politics, automobility, race, and infrastructure.
Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom is a professor in the School of Information and Library Science and Principal Investigator in the Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, NY Times opinion columnist, and 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Recent accolades include being named the 2023 winner of the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize by Brandeis University for her “critical perspective and analysis to some of the greatest social challenges we face today.” McMillan Cottom’s most recent book, THICK: And Other Essays (The New Press 2019), won the Brooklyn Public Library’s 2019 Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the National Book Award in nonfiction.
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752 Martin Luther King Jr Blvd (Historic Airport Rd, Next to The Root Cellar), Chapel Hill, NC, United States, North Carolina 27514
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