Water Infrastructure as Intrusion: Race, Exclusion, and Nostalgic Futures in North Carolina

Abstract

In the late 1990s, the predominantly white community of Morningside, North Carolina, prevented annexation into the larger majority-minority city of Greensboro, citing their desire to “preserve their way of life.” This case demonstrates how a white, affluent town incorporated, resisting annexation, and with it, centralized water service connections. More than twenty years later, many residents in Morningside continue to reject centralized water and sewerage, fearing it will facilitate in-migration and erode the town’s “community character.” These decades-long dynamics maintain the high degree of racial residential segregation between Morningside and neighboring Greensboro. Morningside stands in stark contrast to many Black communities in North Carolina, which are underbounded and excluded from municipal water and sanitation. This case contributes to environmental injustice and water security scholarship in three ways. First, we enrich the meaning ascribed to water infrastructure and the purposes that it serves—as a connection (an improvement) and as an intrusion. Second, by situating these current contests within a larger historical context, we highlight the social constructedness of water. In this dialectical relationship, water is both the outward mechanism to marginalize, hiding the actors behind the process, and the object of corruption for people who are marginalized. Third, we demonstrate how water infrastructure advances exclusionary futures that rely on erasure and discursive coding. Overall, we caution how the depoliticization of centralized water infrastructure can enable the persistence of racial residential segregation in the United States.