Inner-City Children, Country Summers: Narrating American Childhood and the Geographies of Whiteness

Abstract

Opening up your home and hearts to an inner city child is a gift that lasts a lifetime.'' Fresh Air Fund volunteer (Rutland Daily Herald 2002)`F amilies throughout our county are looking forward to the annual arrivals of New York City children through the Fresh Air Fund. Youngsters come north to take a break from the heat and crowds of the city, to run barefoot through our grass and make new friends. '' editorial (Bennington Banner 2000)

De-centring White ruralities: Ethnic diversity, racialisation and Indigenous countrysides

“…The ambivalent position of such groups in the English countryside is demonstrated with reference to gypsy-travellers, a group whose representation as dirty and deviant has tainted their whiteness and provoked a variety of exclusionary acts (Holloway, 2004;Sibley, 1997). 2 In the US too, some White migrant groups have been more easily accommodated than others within the rural, with Vanderbeck (2006Vanderbeck ( , 2008 demonstrating that poor White incomers have been problematic for elite Whites because they undermine discourses of 'natural' White superiority, suggesting that whiteness and class intersect in distinct ways to construct ideas of proper rural life. As such, specific groups may be portrayed as 'white trash', embodying an impolite and uncivilized lifestyle that is unbecoming in the rural.…”

Geography Written in Lightning: Race, Sexuality, and Regulatory Aesthetics inThe Birth of a Nation

“…As elsewhere (Pred 2000;Gilroy 2002;G. Pratt 2004), racializing claims about places such as North and South in the United States often depend on active displacements of the attributes of race and the blame (if any) for racism in response to displacements of racialized bodies operating at multiple scales from the national to the intimate (Kurtz 2006;Puar 2006;Vanderbeck 2008).…”

“…A key fracture here is regional. One particularly prevalent yet contested vision of whiteness constructs itself as racially liberal and innocent, located in the North but representing the nation (Vanderbeck 2006). Here the North is progressive and the South backward, a geographical binary circulating in cultural productions since slavery.…”

‘Why can't I get married?’—Denmark and the ‘Twenty-four year law’

“…Somalia and Burundi), the former Yugoslavia (mainly Bosnia-Herzegovina) and to stateless refugees (mainly from Palestine). Denmark went from a population that was 0.4 per cent foreign in 1960 (Soysal 1994) ' (2002: 307), and other geographers have emphasized this historically-constructed and spatially-rooted conception of Whiteness (Dwyer and Jones 2000;Inwood and Martin 2008;Kobayashi and Peake 2000;Vanderbeck 2008). Second, Whiteness refers to 'a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed' (Frankenberg 1993: 1) and hence normalized as invisible.…”