This is a qualitative study outlining the links between white resident utterances and settler colonialism. Specifically, this article provides evidence of how settler colonialism continues to operate in a progressive community, despite the narratives of community and diversity shared by research respondents. This is primarily done by the cultural master narratives that respondents uttered to make sense of “community” and “diversity” in a borough that is undergoing gentrification. Because master narratives are created and reinforced by the socialization process where whiteness is the norm, white utterances continue the settler colonial project that invests in separate white communities to maintain racial privilege. While prior studies have detailed the tensions between community and diversity, this study contributes to this debate by adding a settler colonial frame that validates the idea that in a progressive neighborhood, diversity becomes a violation of settler emplacement. These findings are particularly significant given the vast literature on communities and diversity, but few have taken a settler colonial analytical approach to the debate.

The concretisation of the Chicago School solidified and inscribed in the city their obsession with the ‘Negro Problem’, race, race relations and (im)migration. Their fixation not only framed modern sociology with an emphasis on the ‘Other’ but cemented a taken-for-granted undergirding of Whiteness at its base. As a discipline, until we can name, point out, understand and highlight that form of violence, urban sociology will be deficient in understanding the city, particularly, but not limited to the US. As an alternative, I offer Du Boisian sociology, critical race theory, and global critical race and racism to aid in moving away from an unstated Whiteness. This article shows how Whiteness is at the base of the urban question and its consequences via the trajectory of the first sociologists of colour trained at the Chicago School, the work on the ghetto, underclass and the effects of such work.