Race, Space, and Electric Power: Jim Crow and the 1934 North Carolina Rural Electrification Survey

Abstract

Some scholars have recently put forward the concept of energopower—the harnessing of electricity and fuel—as a way to rethink the energetic basis of biopower. In this article, I refine this idea by tracing the use of race in rural electrification planning in North Carolina during the New Deal 1930s. Drawing on archival fieldwork that examines and reconstructs the 1934 North Carolina Rural Electrification Survey, I chart the ways in which race was used to readjust and reshape projections of electricity consumption and the planning of electricity distribution line construction. This is particularly clear in the use of a metric called the correction factor that allowed electricity planners to negotiate the contradictions between the materiality of networked electricity service, based on connections, and the prevailing attitudes toward race, which were built around disconnection. Although the overall influence of the 1934 Survey on the location of electricity distribution in North Carolina remains an open question, this work highlights the ways an energopolitical project—rural electrification—intersects with a key biopolitical technology—state racism, thus providing a better understanding of the relationship between energy and social power.