PA5206: The City of White Supremacy

The title of this course is meant to signal the objective of scrutinizing how systems of white supremacy have shaped the American city and how the American city functions in ways that reproduce and reinforce white supremacy. The colonization of the Americas coincided with the fabrication of racial identities that set the terms for membership in what became a white supremacist/racial state wherein all things, including spatial thinking and design, conformed to a racial calculus. As Lipsitz (2007: 12) tells us, “The lived experience of race has a spatial dimension, and the lived experience of space has a racial dimension.” The core of this class will, however, focus on later developments characteristic of the period of rapid urbanization from the Jim Crow era through the New Deal and Civil Rights periods to today. The first section of the course will focus on frameworks for understanding white supremacy generally, and as it relates to urban development specifically. The second section considers specific domains of urban policy and planning using white supremacy as the analytic framework. In these weeks we examine how white supremacy has been expressed across a range of urban development issue areas, including housing, transportation, the urban environment, education, criminal justice, and urban design, and how policies and planning practice have maintained or disrupted systems of white supremacy.

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