Tearing Down to Take Up Space: Dismantling White Spaces in the United States

Abstract

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.

Nice for Whom? A Dangerous, Not-So-Nice, Critical Race Love Letter

“…As behavior, this resentment is named by Carter et al [29] as whitelashing. Specifically, whitelash refers to "individual, institutional, and/or structural countermeasures against the dismantling of white supremacy (the racial status quo) or actions, real or imagined, that seek to remedy existing racial inequities" [15] (p. 258).…”

“…Overt cases of whitelashing, for example, can appear as physical aggression through the mobbing on 6 January 2021 at the U.S. Capitol [15]. On the surface such a display of white nationalism and white supremacy was encouraged by the 45th to provoke an insurrection against the results of the 2020 election that he lost.…”

“…Within this letter, I critically analyze and respond to empirical data in the form of discourse-specifically, racist messages sent directly to me as a result of my previously published article entitled, "A Love Letter to Educational Leaders of Color: CREWing UP with Critical Whiteness Studies" [6]. My analysis will be driven by Critical Race Hermeneutics [12] with white emotionality [13,14] and whitelashing [15] used as interpretive lenses. It is my hope then that in this critical race love letter that you presently read, you will be affirmed in your own anti-racist work where you have also likely received racist messages at a minimum, if not more overt assaults such as death threats or the threat of being fired from your institution.…”

To move forward, we must look back: White supremacy at the base of urban studies

“…Embrick and Moore (2020) extend that White space makes White supremacy possible, or as stated by Lipsitz (2019), the perpetual investment in Whiteness maintains a racist structure. Embrick et al (2022: 2) write:White institutional, organizational, geographical, and cultural spaces normalize the existing racial order, enable white fantasy(ies) of complete dominion over place and space, perpetuate (global) anti-Blackness, and facilitate white entitlement to maintain coercive control over BIPOC individuals and communities, and provide credibility to the rhetoric of the current whitelash.…”

“…2. See Yancy (2016), Massey and Denton (1993), DiAngelo (2018), Embrick and Moore (2020), Embrick et al (2022), Bonilla-Silva (2003), Valle (2017), Lipsitz (2011Lipsitz ( , 2019, Oliver and Shapiro (2006), Gilens (2000), Frankenberg (1997), among many others.…”