On March 1, 2023, Maarten Zwiers presented “Race Land: The Ecology of Segregation” as part of the History Is Lunch series.
Race Land is a joint research project of the University of Mississippi, the Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, Tulane University, and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands with funding from the European Commission that examines how exploitation and entanglement upheld the white supremacist Jim Crow society of the U.S. South. While that region has often been considered an out-of-step backwater, Race Land places the South at the center of U.S. policymaking and racialized innovation in the post-World War II period.
“Segregationists not only exploited (and destroyed) human beings, but also the environment—human and natural resources were systematically mined to uphold the ecosystem of Jim Crow apartheid,” said Zwiers, senior lecturer at the University of Groningen. “This resource extraction happened through geopolitics and the intersection with industries and commercial activities that were not always explicitly racial in nature, for instance the implementation of the Marshall Plan in Europe, oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean sugar trade, and the development and application of pesticides and herbicides.”
The project maintains the website racelandproject.com with links to a blog and published articles.
Maarten Zwiers is Senior Lecturer of Contemporary History and American Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, and is a visiting fellow with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University. He is author of the book Senator James Eastland: Mississippi’s Jim Crow Democrat and co-editor of Profiles in Power: Personality, Persona, and the U.S. President. Zwiers earned his PhD in history from the University of Groningen, an MA in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi, an MA in American Studies and an MA in the History of Political Culture, both from the University of Groningen.
History Is Lunch is sponsored by the John and Lucy Shackelford Charitable Fund of the Community Foundation for Mississippi. The weekly lecture series of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History explores different aspects of the state's past. The hour-long programs are held in the Craig H. Neilsen Auditorium of the Museum of Mississippi History and Mississippi Civil Rights Museum building at 222 North Street in Jackson and livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook.
