I’m low-key a little bit in love with the fight over racing at the fairgrounds. As someone who believes in historic preservation, and someone who would love for the rest of Nashville to care more about it, I’m finding it thrilling that both camps — “We should update the racetrack so we can continue to have car racing, because we’ve been car racing at that site since God created cars, and it’s our history, which we should preserve!” camp and the “This site was originally a green space, and we must restore it to its original purpose and get rid of car racing to preserve our history!” camp — are using the arguments of historic preservation to make their cases.
Apparently, from time to time, our arguments are persuasive enough that everyone at the fairgrounds wants to make them! Score one for the preservationists.
When I first came to Nashville, back in the 1900s, the people I knew who lived around the fairgrounds could be split into two camps when it came to racing: the poor people who hated it because it was so loud it shook their little square Monopoly houses and they couldn’t afford to live anywhere else, so they were hostage to the noise; and the poor people who turned their front yards and driveways into paid parking and benefited from the economic windfall.
Now, most of the houses of the people who hated racing have been torn down and replaced with houses three times the size for people making five times the income. And new construction is making its way through the streets where the people who loved it lived.
In other words, when the fight was just about what poor people thought, the rest of Nashville was fine with saying, “You moved in near a racetrack that has been there since before you were born. Suck it up.” But now that so many well-off people live in the neighborhood and so many rich people have a financial interest in the fairgrounds (cough, soccer, cough), Nashville is faltering on whether to continue to tell the people who moved in near the racetrack that they must suck it up.
LIUNA campaign launched as separate group seeks the continuation of racing at Fairgrounds Nashville
Fascinating. Usually, Nashville’s class discussions are how we talk about race. When Nashville talks about poor people, Nashville historically means Black people. When Nashville talks about "regular" Nashvillians, Nashville mean white people with some money. But because of our long history of segregation, both formally and informally, both car racing and enjoying the fairgrounds without car racing are historically white activities. (With, yes, some exceptions.) This is a genuine fight about class among white people. In public! Which we never do!
Low-account white people — white trash, rednecks, hicks, etc. — generate culture that “regular” people publicly find uncouth or immoral and stand in opposition to until it’s obvious that it’s fun and everyone likes it; then “regular” white people swoop in and become the thing’s biggest proponents. For instance: Ballet was once a place for degenerates to check out which girls they would buy, and now it’s a high-class art form; or hey, moonshine was the purview of inbred hillbillies, and now, if you’re an artisanal small-batch whiskey distiller, you are celebrated.
Once the rich white folks want something, the white trash is supposed to step aside and let the "regular" people own and champion the thing they used to didn’t want. And now the “better” class of white people wants the fairgrounds. I’m over here looking at the Fairgrounds Priorities page on the Restore Our Fairgrounds site, and the implication that it’s time for the yokels who like racing to give up the race track is pretty blatant.
Just starting with the name of the website, “Restore Our Fairgrounds.” Who is “our” in this case? If your goal is “restoring the speedway site to its original use as a community green space,” then we know that “our” does not include Black people. Hell, I just spent a half an hour looking through old newspaper articles about the fairgrounds, and it’s all, “This magnificent horse owned by this rich white person raced this magnificent horse owned by this other rich white person. The stands were full of rich white people. Here are their names.”
The other interesting thing is reading about what the “green space” was used for when there wasn’t racing going on: livestock auctions.
Imagine! Imagine if we had just one week of using the racetrack for this purpose right now. People think car racing is gauche — wait until the neighborhood smells like pig shit. Oh right, but they don’t really mean restoring it to its actual historical use. They mean pretending that South Nashville had some equivalent to the Warner Parks that car racing ruined.
But the truth is that this is something rich white people used to control, then they lost interest, and poor white people made fun use of it, but now they want it back.
Will it work? I don’t know. I do know that Motorsport is reporting that former racer Neil Chaffin filed a lawsuit at the end of February alleging that the anti-racing folks are being shady in their push to get the city charter amended, which is worth your time to read. I’m inclined to sympathize with Chaffin’s arguments, considering that the Restore Our Fairgrounds people seem to be playing a little fast and loose with history. Why wouldn’t they play a little fast and loose with their legal efforts?
