I write, document, and research Black community life in the rural U.S. South.
In my scholarship, I use ethnographic methods to understand how Black communities in the U.S. South respond to structural change around them, whether new local industries or broader shifts in regional governance and development.
In my documentary practice, I use oral history, archival methods, and film to build a visual record of contemporary community life in the rural South—survival and leisure practices, institutional histories, and other stories highlighted by local people.
All of my work begins with the belief that the knowledge, experiences, practices, and histories of Black populations in the rural South are instructive for questions about race, place, memory, identity, inequality, and the American Story more broadly.
I have written two books: I Don’t Like the Blues: Race, Place, and the Backbeat of Black Life (2020) is an ethnography of blues tourism and Black knowledge systems in Clarksdale, Mississippi. It received two "best book" awards. Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight (2024) is a photo-essay collection made with photographer Richard Frishman.
I have also written and directed the three-part short film anthology We Do a Black South Way (with cinematographer Ethan Payne). The films have screened and won awards at U.S. and international film festivals. They are based, in part, on oral accounts collected through The Black Volumes, a digital oral history archive I founded as part of my archival practice.
Image: Noah Stewart
What I'm up to now.
I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. My research program engages scholarly conversations on race and place, Black knowledge production, and the cultural dimensions of racial inequality. Methodologically, I draw on ethnography, oral history, participatory mapping, and visual methods. I teach courses on race, place, popular culture, and qualitative research methods.
From 2021 to 2026, I served as co-editor of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, the flagship journal for sociological research on race. I am currently expanding The Black Volumes and writing a book about casino development in Mississippi.
Image: Christine Kreschollek
Back on the Record
I grew up in the rural Black South, surrounded by big fields, backroads, and what we would call—for reasons different from y’all—country people. And we grew up our country Black South way: loving our Grandmamas, working with our hands, football on Friday and church every Sunday. We were blues people, “makeshifting” a life good enough for the world to sample from, whether they understood it or not.
By middle school, I was trying to write that life into poems and short stories. By high school, journals, raps, and church plays. By Macalester College and the University of Mississippi, class assignments. And by my 30th day of grad school at the University of North Carolina, I had realized that the life I had been writing—the one of country people living a Black South way—wasn’t studied all that much by the one I was headed toward. And that if I thought it should be, then I would need to be one of the ones studyin’ it.
That became my mission: to help put the rural Black South (back) on all the records. To represent its people—responsibly, truthfully, and, in that way that Du Bois wrote and spoke about, Beautifully.
To Be in That Number
They are humans who, as Hurston wrote, “love and hate and fight and play and strive and travel and have a thousand and one interests in life like other humans.” All five million of them who live in rural and small-town communities across the South (Center on Rural Innovation). Descendants of chattel slavery and Jim Crow—those murdered and displaced, and those who lived.
They are cultural workers, keeping traditions that sustained generations before them and that continue to ground Black racial identity and American culture.
They are Black Americans, building lives and communities while navigating a place I would call—for reasons different from y’all—a changing same: changing in some of the ways the rest of rural America is changing: depopulation, worsening poverty. And the same in the ways scholars call the “legacies” and “afterlives” of slavery, and the “blues epistemology.”
Recording the rural Black South is about being one in that number — beside and with the five million, the "sociologists, reporters, counselors, advocates, preservers of language and customs, and summoners of life, love, laughter, and much, much more,” as Clyde Woods called them. And to taking seriously what their perspectives, experiences, memories, and histories reveal: that the rural Black South is not a footnote to American life, but one of its makers