With this concluding article, we build off the scholarship from this two-part special issue on white space to recommend meaningful interventions that seek to challenge and dismantle white spaces at the organizational, institutional, and structural levels of U.S. society. We focus on two broad arenas of social space, one geographical (residential neighborhoods) and one institutional (education), in the hopes of generating more engagement from scholars of race and racism in conversations about policies that can meaningfully transform white space. We share experiences from the Systemic Justice Seminar and student activism at Harvard to highlight some innovative ideas about challenging, disrupting, and resisting white space. We suggest ways to think about policies and actions that make visible the tacitly exclusionary mechanisms within white spaces and create ways for BIPOC people and communities to take up space. Lastly, we encourage academic and public communities to continue exploring the best methods for deconstructing white space on the way to creating a more racially equitable society.
The Palestinian "Great March of Return" in 2018, marked by the Israeli government's brutal attacks on Palestinians who were demonstrating at the Gaza border, nearly coincided with the Trump administration's "Zero Tolerance" policy in which the unauthorized border crossing of Latinx immigrants came under an ever severe attack. This article offers a comparative content analysis of the "border security" discourses of the two settler-colonial states of the United States and Israel by examining American and Israeli government officials' public comments on state violence at borders. We place our study within a settler-colonial framework to provide a historically grounded analysis of the U.S. and Israel's racial ideologies and the colorblind rhetoric of "border security." Through a content analysis of the speeches, interviews, social media posts, and press releases of American and Israeli government officials, we identified a settler-racial ideology shared by the two states comprised of three distinct and overlapping frames: (1) obscuring settler colonialism, (2) vilification of those constructed as non-native, and (3) glorification of the state. By bridging theories of settler colonialism and structural racism, we demonstrate that a settler-racial ideology is central to maintaining the ongoing systems of border violence within settler-colonial states.
In this article, we argue for the importance of investigating cultural spaces in connection to social inequalities. Within cultural spaces, culture in both material and nonmaterial forms is used in ways that bolster privilege, provide means for people and groups to navigate inequalities, and offers avenues for contesting inequalities. We critically examine some of the past and present ways that culture and inequalities have been studied together. We identify three trends that have arisen from the current scholarship on culture and inequality in the United States: space and place, embodiment, and performativity. In addition to examining understudied contemporary cultural spaces, the articles in this special issue contribute to and expand on the identified trends of studying cultural spaces as sites of inequality maintenance and resistance.
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