Conjuring Crisis

GEORGE BACA is a research scholar at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. He is the editor of Nationalism's Bloody Terrain: Racism, Class Inequality, and the Politics of Recognition, coeditor of Empirical Futures: Anthropologists and Historians Engage the Work of Sidney W. Mintz, and associate editor of Dialectical Anthropology.

"Baca provides a valuable window into the complex world of modern racism, in which it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the victim and the perpetrator. Highly recommended." (Choice) "Baca does a solid job of providing local and regional back story to the ongoing racial dramas in Fayetteville, North Carolina. His work make a very powerful statement about the care citizens have to take vis-a-vis the statements made by their political representatives regarding whose interests they serve."(Contemporary Sociology) "Conjuring Crisis is a gem. It takes us into the social drama around federal funding and racism at the twin communities of Fort Bragg and Fayetteville-giving us a rich exploration of the contradictions of 21st century America. George Baca teaches us about post-segregation racism, and also about the unusual role played by the military in and around southern cities." - Vijay Prashad (author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World) "This nuanced, carefully researched ethnography offers a sobering critique of civil rights reforms in Fayetteville. An important and troubling work." - Katherine McCaffrey (Associate Professor of Anthropology, Montclair State University) "This book is an impressive and significant contribution to the ongoing debate over how and why race matters in urban politics. Baca provides an extremely intriguing study of how racial hysteria follows a tradition of cultivating and mobilizing white racial anxiety that extends back to the era of slavery." - John Hartigan (Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas) "The book's unsettling message is that a new kind of racism has emerged to replace the 'overtly racist' system that the civil rights reforms of the 1960s were designed to overcome. A fascinating study."(Journal of Southern History)

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionChapter 1: Narrating a Racial CrisisChapter 2: Conspiracies and Crises on Cape FearChapter 3: The Cunning of Racial ReformChapter 4: Performing CrisisChapter 5: Threatening Images of Black PowerChapter 6: Power ShiftChapter 7: Outsiders and Special InterestsChapter 8: Single ShotConclusionEpilogueNotesBibliographyIndex