In this article, we reflect on the pernicious nature of rhetoric aimed at soliciting Black community support for predatory urban development schemes. Highlighting recent examples of Urban One Casino + Resort’s development campaign in Richmond, Virginia, and the messaging leveraged by political leaders on behalf of SoFi stadium and the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California, we find that discursive moves made by public and private stakeholders reflect what we call the “predatory rhetorics of urban development.” We argue that these rhetorics intend to enlist divested Black communities as supporters of development projects that concentrate wealth and power in the hands of economic and political elites. They do so by playing on Black desires for social and economic inclusion into American middle-class community life. Four common threads of predatory rhetoric appear across both contexts. They are 1) seizing the real needs and concerns of stigmatized places, 2) relying on representational politics to mitigate issues of trust, 3) the neoliberal framing of American internal colonization as a problem that requires extractive private development solutions and, finally, 4) dissimulating intra-community class interests to consolidate “Black needs.” We reflect on the outcomes supported by these rhetorics across both development projects and raise several points of further consideration as we hope for more organized responses to such rhetorics in the future.

在本文中，我们反思了旨在争取黑人社区支持掠夺性城市发展计划的言论的有害本质。重点介绍最近弗吉尼亚州里士满市的 Urban One Casino + Resort 开发活动的例子，以及政治领导人代表 SoFi 体育场和加利福尼亚州英格尔伍德 Intuit Dome 所传达的信息，我们发现公共和私人利益相关者的言论举动反映了以下内容：我们称之为“城市发展的掠夺性言论”。我们认为，这些言论旨在争取被剥夺的黑人社区成为将财富和权力集中在经济和政治精英手中的发展项目的支持者。他们通过利用黑人对社会和经济融入美国中产阶级社区生活的渴望来做到这一点。掠夺性言论的四个共同线索出现在这两种背景下。它们是 1) 抓住受污名化地区的真正需求和关切，2) 依靠代表性政治来缓解信任问题，3) 新自由主义将美国内部殖民化视为一个需要采掘性私人发展解决方案的问题，最后，4)掩盖社区内部阶级利益以巩固“黑人需求”。我们反思了这两个发展项目中这些言论所支持的成果，并提出了一些进一步考虑的要点，因为我们希望将来对此类言论做出更有组织的回应。