Academic literature on the topic 'Racialized Geography'

AbstractResearch has shown that white Americans oppose welfare spending in part due to their racial prejudices. Yet, this conventional wisdom ignores the importance of local geography in determining whether whites are likely to view welfare in racialized terms. This article demonstrates that the effect of prejudice on whites’ welfare preferences depends on the salience of welfare's racialized image in a given geographic context. I present a novel application of the racial threat hypothesis—conceptualizing both prejudice and place as multidimensional—to argue that the racial geography of an area amplifies the effect of traditional racial stereotypes on welfare preferences, whereas economic geography amplifies the effect of symbolically racist attitudes. I test these propositions using geocoded data from the years following the 1996 U.S. welfare policy reforms. My analysis reveals that racial attitudes are more predictive of welfare preferences not simply where the stigmas of welfare are salient due to a large black population or high poverty rate, but more specifically where residential segregation makes black or poor households more visible from the viewpoint of whites. These findings highlight the subjectivity of the white perspective, and call for more scholarship theorizing whites’ agency in seeing racialized issues as threatening to white interests.

In this introduction to the Critical Sociology symposium, “The Flint Water Crisis and the Failure of Neoliberal Governance,” the authors outline the social and cultural conditions for the racialized underdevelopment of Flint and Detroit in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We begin with an examination of the racially coded rhetoric of Oakland County manager, L. Brooks Patterson, and the manner in which those racial codes reveal the deep roots of white suburban anxiety and racism in the history of economic and spatial apartheid in Michigan. Turning to Flint itself, we draw upon Andrew Highsmith’s recent history of the city, Demolition Means Progress (2015), and examine 20th century red-lining, school segregation, and neoliberal policy decisions as they interacted, effectively rendering Flint’s African American population invisible and, finally, through emergency management, nearly powerless. We close with a survey of the articles within the symposium. Each contribution to the symposium finds that even within the structural and political limitations imposed by neoliberalism, residents and activists continue to find productive spaces for resistance.

In this paper I examine aspects of the notion of performativity as related to race. I propose that the experience of ‘mixed race’ identity can offer opportunities for the performance of racialized identities. Drawing from qualitative interviews, I suggest that some ‘mixed race’ women put into play racialized performances, demonstrating a desire to create new meanings out of imposed hierarchical and dualistic racial orders. They effectively take advantage of multiple, dynamic, and ambiguous racialized spaces. I begin by critiquing recent examinations of performativity in geography, pointing out that, although they contribute towards a greater understanding of the relationship between gender and performance, processes of racialization in regards to performativity have not yet been fully unravelled. Through the stories of some ‘mixed race’ women, I chronicle racialized performances in the social landscape in order to ground the notion of performativity through a racialized lens.

This essay analyzes racialized exclusions in sociology through a focus on sociology’s deep epistemic structures. These structures dictate what counts as social scientific knowledge and who can produce it. A historical analysis of their emergence and persistence reveals their connections to empire. Due to sociology’s initial emergence within the culture of American imperialism, early sociological thought embedded the culture of empire’s exclusionary logics. Sociology’s epistemic structures were inextricably racialized, contributing to exclusionary modes of thought and practice along the lines of race, ethnicity, and social geography that persist into the present. Overcoming this racialized inequality requires problematizing and unsettling these epistemic structures by (1) provincializing the canon to create a transformative epistemic pluralism and (2) reconsidering common conceptions of what counts as “theory” in the first place.

While critical attention has recently turned to racialized police violence in US cities, another quiet development in urban policing is taking place. Hundreds of police departments have begun to wed database software with geographic information systems to represent crime cartographically. Focusing on the Chicago police’s digital mapping application, CLEARmap, the article interprets this development from the standpoint of racialized carceral power. It puts critical geographic information systems theory into discussion with critical ethnic studies and builds the case that CLEARmap does not passively “read” urban space, but provides ostensibly scientific ways of reading and policing negatively racialized fractions of surplus labor in ways that reproduces, and in some instances extends the tentacles of carceral power. CLEARmap’s data structure ensures that negatively racialized fractions of surplus labor, the places they inhabit, and the social problems that afflict them are only representable to state authorities and the public as objects of policing and punishment. CLEARmap is also used at police–community meetings and via the Internet to adapt public perceptions of crime to that of the policing apparatus, and mobilize the public as appendages of police surveillance. By tracing these phenomena, the article casts a heretofore untheorized dimension of the carceral power into sharp relief.

This final report highlights the increasing attention to precarity, including academic precarity, within geography. After briefly discussing the implications for approaches to agency, I argue for attention to debates about racialized and racial capitalism from labour geographers. I suggest that theorizations of racial capitalism emerge from particular standpoints, and that geographers are well placed to explore racial capitalisms in a plural sense if we are willing to grapple with the standpoints from which we theorize in labour geography itself. I draw on the ‘infrastructural turn’ to illustrate how labour geographers can start to think with relational approaches to racial capitalism.

This thesis examines the role of racialized practices in the discourses and processes that alter place identity. Drawing on ethnography from the East Village of Buckhead, a once vibrant nightlife district in Atlanta, I examine how discourses of danger, colorblindness, and the race card have been employed to “whitewash” the discussions about the redevelopment of the Village. In effect, the business and civic elite of Atlanta (and Buckhead) deployed racialized conceptualizations of group identity. In particular, they utilized “public safety” discourses to influence the Atlanta city government to support the redevelopment effort. This led to the elimination of the establishments that attracted African American partygoers in large numbers. Using interviews with government agents, night club operators, and Buckhead civic and business leaders, combined with archival analysis of newspaper accounts, I implemented a hybrid content-discourse analysis to explore the ways in which the discourses of race and place concerning the East Village changed between 2000 and 2008.

The United States and South Africa, exemplars of "archsegregation," have been constituted within an arc of historical racialized delineations which began with the centering, and subsequent overrepresentation, of European maleness and whiteness as the sole definition of Man. Globally present and persistent, these racialized delineations have been localized and spatially embedded through the tools of urban planning. This arc of racialized otherness, ineffectively erased, continues to inform the racially differentiated geospatial, health, social, and economic outcomes in contemporary urban form and functions for Black communities. It is within this historical arc, and against these differentiated outcomes, that contemporary urban discourse and contestation between individuals and institutions are situated. This historical othering provides not just a racialized geo-historical contextualization, but also works to preclude the recognition of the some of the most vulnerable urban community members. As urbanists and advocates strive to co-create urban space and place with municipalities, meeting the needs of these residents is imperative. In order to meet these needs, their lived experiences, and voices must be fully recognized and engaged in the processes and programs of urban co-creation, including in digital spaces and forums. Critical to achieving recognition acknowledging and situating contemporary digital discourses between local municipalities, Black residents, and Black networks within this historically racialized arc is necessary. In doing so, explore if, and how, race, specifically Blackness, is enacted in municipal digital discourse, whether these enactments serve to advance or impede resident recognition and participation, and how Black users, as residents and social network curators, engage and respond to these municipal discursive enactments. This exploratory research is a geographically and digitally multi-sited incorporated comparison of Chicago, Illinois, and Johannesburg South Africa. Using Twitter and ethnographic data collected between December 1, 2019, and March 31, 2020, this research layers digital ethnographic mixed methods and qualitive mixed methods, including traditional ethnographic, digital ethnographic, grounded theory, social change and discourse analysis, and frame analysis to explore three research goals. First, explore the digital discursive practices and frames employed by municipalities to inform, communicate with, and engage Black communities, and, if and how, these frames are situated within a historically racialized arc. Second, identify the ways in which Black residents, in dual discursive engagements with local municipalities and their own social networks, interact and engage with the municipal frames centering on Blackness. Third, through ethnographic narratives, acknowledge the marginalized residents of the Central Business District of Johannesburg, South Africa as "agents of knowledge," with critical and valuable knowledge claims which arise from their lived experiences anchored within racialized place and space. In doing so, support the efforts of these residents in recentering the validity of their knowledge claims in the co-creation of urban place and space. Additionally, in situating the city within a historically racialized arc develop novel frameworks, the racialized palimpsest city and syndemic segregation, through which to explore contemporary urban interactions and engagements.
Doctor of Philosophy
The United States and South Africa, exemplars of "archsegregation," have been constituted within an arc of historical racialized delineations which began with the centering, and subsequent overrepresentation, of European maleness and whiteness as the sole definition of Man. Globally present and persistent, these racialized delineations have been localized and spatially embedded through the tools of urban planning. This arc of racialized otherness, ineffectively erased, continues to inform the racially differentiated geospatial, health, social, and economic outcomes in contemporary urban form and functions for Black communities. It is within this historical arc, and against these differentiated outcomes, that contemporary urban discourse and contestation between individuals and institutions are situated. This historical othering provides not just a racialized geo-historical contextualization, but also works to preclude the recognition of the some of the most vulnerable urban community members. As urbanists and advocates strive to co-create urban space and place with municipalities, meeting the needs of these residents is imperative. In order to meet these needs, their lived experiences, and voices must be fully recognized and engaged in the processes and programs of urban co-creation, including in digital spaces and forums. Critical to achieving recognition acknowledging and situating contemporary digital discourses between local municipalities, Black residents, and Black networks within this historically racialized arc is necessary. In doing so, explore if, and how, race, specifically Blackness, is enacted in municipal digital discourse, whether these enactments serve to advance or impede resident recognition and participation, and how Black users, as residents and social network curators, engage and respond to these municipal discursive enactments. This exploratory research is a geographically and digitally multi-sited incorporated comparison of Chicago, Illinois, and Johannesburg South Africa. Using Twitter and ethnographic data collected between December 1, 2019, and March 31, 2020, this research layers digital ethnographic mixed methods and qualitive mixed methods, including traditional ethnographic, digital ethnographic, grounded theory, social change and discourse analysis, and frame analysis to explore three research goals. First, explore the digital discursive practices and frames employed by municipalities to inform, communicate with, and engage Black communities, and, if and how, these frames are situated within a historically racialized arc. Second, identify the ways in which Black residents, in dual discursive engagements with local municipalities and their own social networks, interact and engage with the municipal frames centering on Blackness. Third, through ethnographic narratives, acknowledge the marginalized residents of the Central Business District of Johannesburg, South Africa as "agents of knowledge," with critical and valuable knowledge claims which arise from their lived experiences anchored within racialized place and space. In doing so, support the efforts of these residents in recentering the validity of their knowledge claims in the co-creation of urban place and space. Additionally, in situating the city within a historically racialized arc develop novel frameworks, the racialized palimpsest city and syndemic segregation, through which to explore contemporary urban interactions and engagements.

The United States and South Africa, exemplars of "archsegregation," have been constituted within an arc of historical racialized delineations which began with the centering, and subsequent overrepresentation, of European maleness and whiteness as the sole definition of Man. Globally present and persistent, these racialized delineations have been localized and spatially embedded through the tools of urban planning. This arc of racialized otherness, ineffectively erased, continues to inform the racially differentiated geospatial, health, social, and economic outcomes in contemporary urban form and functions for Black communities. It is within this historical arc, and against these differentiated outcomes, that contemporary urban discourse and contestation between individuals and institutions are situated. This historical othering provides not just a racialized geo-historical contextualization, but also works to preclude the recognition of the some of the most vulnerable urban community members. As urbanists and advocates strive to co-create urban space and place with municipalities, meeting the needs of these residents is imperative. In order to meet these needs, their lived experiences, and voices must be fully recognized and engaged in the processes and programs of urban co-creation, including in digital spaces and forums. Critical to achieving recognition acknowledging and situating contemporary digital discourses between local municipalities, Black residents, and Black networks within this historically racialized arc is necessary. In doing so, explore if, and how, race, specifically Blackness, is enacted in municipal digital discourse, whether these enactments serve to advance or impede resident recognition and participation, and how Black users, as residents and social network curators, engage and respond to these municipal discursive enactments. This exploratory research is a geographically and digitally multi-sited incorporated comparison of Chicago, Illinois, and Johannesburg South Africa. Using Twitter and ethnographic data collected between December 1, 2019, and March 31, 2020, this research layers digital ethnographic mixed methods and qualitive mixed methods, including traditional ethnographic, digital ethnographic, grounded theory, social change and discourse analysis, and frame analysis to explore three research goals. First, explore the digital discursive practices and frames employed by municipalities to inform, communicate with, and engage Black communities, and, if and how, these frames are situated within a historically racialized arc. Second, identify the ways in which Black residents, in dual discursive engagements with local municipalities and their own social networks, interact and engage with the municipal frames centering on Blackness. Third, through ethnographic narratives, acknowledge the marginalized residents of the Central Business District of Johannesburg, South Africa as "agents of knowledge," with critical and valuable knowledge claims which arise from their lived experiences anchored within racialized place and space. In doing so, support the efforts of these residents in recentering the validity of their knowledge claims in the co-creation of urban place and space. Additionally, in situating the city within a historically racialized arc develop novel frameworks, the racialized palimpsest city and syndemic segregation, through which to explore contemporary urban interactions and engagements.
Doctor of Philosophy
The United States and South Africa, exemplars of "archsegregation," have been constituted within an arc of historical racialized delineations which began with the centering, and subsequent overrepresentation, of European maleness and whiteness as the sole definition of Man. Globally present and persistent, these racialized delineations have been localized and spatially embedded through the tools of urban planning. This arc of racialized otherness, ineffectively erased, continues to inform the racially differentiated geospatial, health, social, and economic outcomes in contemporary urban form and functions for Black communities. It is within this historical arc, and against these differentiated outcomes, that contemporary urban discourse and contestation between individuals and institutions are situated. This historical othering provides not just a racialized geo-historical contextualization, but also works to preclude the recognition of the some of the most vulnerable urban community members. As urbanists and advocates strive to co-create urban space and place with municipalities, meeting the needs of these residents is imperative. In order to meet these needs, their lived experiences, and voices must be fully recognized and engaged in the processes and programs of urban co-creation, including in digital spaces and forums. Critical to achieving recognition acknowledging and situating contemporary digital discourses between local municipalities, Black residents, and Black networks within this historically racialized arc is necessary. In doing so, explore if, and how, race, specifically Blackness, is enacted in municipal digital discourse, whether these enactments serve to advance or impede resident recognition and participation, and how Black users, as residents and social network curators, engage and respond to these municipal discursive enactments. This exploratory research is a geographically and digitally multi-sited incorporated comparison of Chicago, Illinois, and Johannesburg South Africa. Using Twitter and ethnographic data collected between December 1, 2019, and March 31, 2020, this research layers digital ethnographic mixed methods and qualitive mixed methods, including traditional ethnographic, digital ethnographic, grounded theory, social change and discourse analysis, and frame analysis to explore three research goals. First, explore the digital discursive practices and frames employed by municipalities to inform, communicate with, and engage Black communities, and, if and how, these frames are situated within a historically racialized arc. Second, identify the ways in which Black residents, in dual discursive engagements with local municipalities and their own social networks, interact and engage with the municipal frames centering on Blackness. Third, through ethnographic narratives, acknowledge the marginalized residents of the Central Business District of Johannesburg, South Africa as "agents of knowledge," with critical and valuable knowledge claims which arise from their lived experiences anchored within racialized place and space. In doing so, support the efforts of these residents in recentering the validity of their knowledge claims in the co-creation of urban place and space. Additionally, in situating the city within a historically racialized arc develop novel frameworks, the racialized palimpsest city and syndemic segregation, through which to explore contemporary urban interactions and engagements.

In this dissertation, I explore ‘green’ urban development and urban agriculture projects from the perspective of residents of an African American majority neighborhood in Kansas City—who reside in an area referred to as a ‘blighted food desert’ by local policy makers. In Kansas City, extensive city government support exists for urban agricultural projects, which are touted not just as a solution to poverty associated issues such food insecurity and obesity, but also as a remedy for ‘blight,’ violence and crime, and vacant urban land. Specific narratives of Kansas City’s past are used to prop up and legitimate these future visions for, and development projects in, the city. This dissertation lays out an argument for how, in Kansas City, the dominant narrative surrounding urban sustainability, agriculture, and history came to be constructed and informed by white voices, and documents how these narratives, primarily constructed by upper-middle class white local ‘foodies’, are harnessed to support green development projects that marginalize and displace people of color and the poor. Specifically, I draw on 26 months of ethnographic fieldwork to explore how this narrative was constructed and elevated in local policy circles, document the lived consequences of this whitened narrative from the perspective of residents of “food deserts,” and describe historical and current minority-led agricultural projects—which aren’t included in dominant accountings of Kansas City’s development. I also explore agentive actions of racialized groups in opposition to this dominant whitened discourse, documenting how one neighborhood council in Kansas City strategically utilizes urban food project funding to acquire other, more urgently needed, community resources. I bring light to important acts of resistance by some black and brown urban farmers, who explicitly work to shape city space by reinscribing spatialized histories of displacement and racism in Kansas City. In this project I understand racialization and representation as active, not passive, processes, that have the power to determine whose voices are heard, and who has power to shape city space and its use. By untangling the racialized construction of history and space, and drawing on narratives shared by oft-silenced groups, this dissertation project contributes to scholarly work committed to disrupting hegemonic spatialized whiteness (McKittrick 2011).

This chapter takes up the early writing of Richard Wright and Peter Abrahams that starkly traces out the caustic terms of race and place in their formative years. The unmistakable similarities between Wright's and Abrahams' famed autobiographies, Black Boy and Tell Freedom, highlight the significant impact of their respective racial landscapes. The chapter reads both texts for the central role that racialized place played in forming the consciousness of these young men. Moreover, it argues that place also prominently affected the stylistic and aesthetic modes of the two autobiographies. This approach draws attention to rather different locales: for Wright, the American South from which he fled; and for Abrahams, the exilic space of Europe to which he fled. The resonances of their texts result from intersecting, rather than merely parallel, lives. As both writers fled the racism of their native lands, they crossed paths in 1940s Europe, a key locus of black transnational engagement. It was during their short-lived but generative friendship that Abrahams wrote and revised Tell Freedom, a process with which Wright was involved.

This book explores the intersection of race, gender, sex, and geography in Chicago. It examines the relationship between people and place, as well as the geographic lessons Black Chicagoans learned during the twentieth century and the role housing and architecture, politicians and police played in those lessons. Through an analysis of interracial sex districts, cramped apartments, project housing, street gangs, urban planning, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Chicago, the book reveals the workings of spatialized blackness in Chicago. It argues that policing, surveillance, and architectures of confinement were used to “spatialize blackness” in the city, with racialized and gendered consequences for Black people, especially on the South Side. The book also considers how parts of Chicago's South Side were confronted with daily forms of prison or carceral power that effectively prisonized the landscape. The effects of carceral power on Black masculinity are discussed, from its entrance into Black Chicago from the first leg of the Great Black Migration to the end of the twentieth century. This introduction provides an overview of the chapters that follow.

This chapter discusses the manner in which the author's own gendered, racialized, and communally marked body was read by different Tanzanian Asian communities in various social sites in the city of Dar es Salaam, and how these encounters shaped the knowledge she was able to produce about Asian communal politics in that city in the early 1990s. The second part of the chapter turns to questions of reciprocity, power, trust, and ethical engagement in research relationships by focusing on examples of two life historians who participated in her study. The first was Frances, a Goan taxi driver with strong views about gender and race; the second was Nargis, a divorced Shiite feminist professional who returned to Dar es Salaam from London to fight a property case on behalf of her father. To offer an example of the kind of feminist “ethno-geography” that this self-reflexive methodological exploration helped the author create, the chapter ends with a sidebar drawn from excerpts from an unpublished chapter of her dissertation that focused on the politics of languages and mother tongues in Dar es Salaam.

This chapter provides a transnational analysis of the ways in which migrant workers are placed at the sharp end of migration control based on gendered and racialized notions of domestic labour. Migrant women from the Philippines to Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia are routinely subjected to an extensive and diffuse process of surveillance and social sorting beyond the geographic border and criminal justice system. In their country of origin, women’s mobilities are conditioned by their willingness to produce a documented identity as good women and disciplined workers. In their countries of destination, they are subjected to a range of state and non-state monitoring processes that seek to racially assign and keep different sorts of migrant women in their place as foreign residents and disposable workers. Ultimately, differential inclusion remains underpinned by a criminal justice system that can bear down heavily on migrants through the threat of criminalization, detention, and deportation.

Conversing with Dutt’s and Dutta’s chapters suggests that activist scholars in psychology seeking to accompany women as they construct more just and inclusive communities might benefit from engaging dialogically with critical transitional justice, toward articulating and performing a more holistic “bottom-up” vernacularization of intersectional human rights. Within distinctive geographic and historical sites with contrasting possibilities vis-à-vis women’s protagonism and leadership, Dutt and Dutta share a commitment to engage with local women to document and understand multiple experiences of violence and violation in their everyday lives. Both authors collaborate with women in rural and/or remote areas of Nicaragua (Dutt) and India (Dutta) where women’s lived experiences are constrained by racialized and gendered economic and political structures that frequently exclude them from accessing their basic needs. Both authors help us to discern distinctive possibilities of women’s political engagement through the lens of civic participation (Dutt) and protagonism in the everyday (Dutta).

Chapter 3 focuses on first-generation students who fit a Play Hard geography. Although academic achievement is important for many Play Hard students, it is less of a driver in students’ lives than for those in other geographies. Students arrange their lives more around leisure, participating in high-status social venues of athletics and/or Greek Letter Organizations where they meet more peers from more affluent and continuing-generation families than those in other geographies. Most who entered a Play Hard geography participate in athletics and/or attended a private high school. The small percentage of first-generation students who make their way into a Play Hard geography includes the greatest variation of experience along gender and racialized lines. Students located in a Play Hard geography experience varying levels of comfort, often participating at a steep cost to their sense of self-esteem or enjoyment.

Chapter Two begins by illustrating how technologies of the life of paper articulated a distinctive regional geography that diverged from the Eurocentric telos of development. This chapter further investigates the production of “coaching letters,” or documents educating people on how to “pass” Immigration interrogations, examining how the act of ordering and representing knowledge on paper forced a confrontation between different systems of thought that transformed what, and how, people thought of themselves and the world. A final series of close readings demonstrates social transformations occurring through the life of paper, returning to the overarching point: that such movements constitute a creative reinvention of human connectivity under the constraints of racialized alienation and confinement—a poetics, or process of collective self-making, creating an unapparent place inside and between material realities.

Rubber plantations necessitated extensive medical studies of human biology and diseases. Researchers at the Pasteur Institute carried out numerous studies of mosquitoes and plasmodia, and to a lesser extent other pathogens, among plantation workers. Race served as an important analytic category for these researchers even as anthropologists were beginning to question the coherence of racial categories. Chapter 4 investigates the racialized society that the architects of industrial agriculture imagined they were creating. It also discusses the interactions in Indochina between the burgeoning tropical sciences and government and transnational capital, focusing on human disease environments to examine how “rubber science” was applied to the surrounding countryside. If plantations were microcosms of the global colonial society, they were also laboratories where solutions to colonial problems were worked out. Tropical agronomy, geography, and medicine, linked by an ecological view of climates and soils, helped naturalize racial distinctions for the colonizers. Yet the colonial subjects who were the targets of these projects did not act in ways that race makers expected. While these subjects could not control the discourse of race, they could appropriate it for their own ends, and they attempted to do so before the outbreak of World War II.

This chapter uses the Indies mentality to relearn British racial discourse, focusing on Julius Soubise, the Afro-British assistant of celebrity fencing master Domenico Angelo. During his own lifetime, Soubise's celebrity rivaled that of his better remembered Afro-British contemporaries, Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho. Soubise's “life geography” overflowed the borders of the Black Atlantic: born in Saint Kitts, he grew up in London and spent the last two decades of his life in Calcutta. The chapter first details his time in London, where he catalyzed tropologies of Eastern royalty in order to fashion himself as a “Black Prince,” thereby carving out a racialized but still exalted place for himself in the beau monde. It then follows Soubise to Calcutta, tracing how his racial self presentation altered in his journey from metropole to colony, from the circum-Atlantic to India. While British ideas about race certainly traveled from the former to the latter, India's colonial racial formation was also shaped by Mughal precedents. Indeed, aspects of the subcontinent's Indo-Persian racial formation even migrated westward through imperial networks, influencing the evolution of racial ideologies in the British Atlantic world.

This chapter highlights some of the moments and patterns that are illustrative of the particularities and peculiarities of the St. Louis region and are therefore important for understanding North St. Louis County. In many ways, the history of St. Louis in the latter part of the twentieth century closely follows the histories of most cities in the rust belt of the United States—in terms of de jure and de facto segregation in housing, education, and the labor force, as well as histories of suburbanization, discriminatory lending, and white flight. Moreover, the genealogies outlined in the chapter reflect the interconnected global histories of chattel slavery, colonial and imperial expansion, and capitalist development. In keeping with these histories, Black residents in the suburbs of North St. Louis County are disciplined as less-than-human, profit-generating bodies by tiny cities that have been stripped of resources and struggle to provide basic services except for an ever-expanding police force. A fierce desire for self-governance and municipal autonomy, a persistent tradition of parochial hierarchies, a peculiar reliance on the local courts, and the perpetual conflation of blackness and risk are legacies that result in specific forms of cultural politics and racialized practices across a highly fragmented geography.

Chapter 4 focuses on the literary registration of racismánd anti-racism in Scotland in Luke Sutherland’s Jelly Roll (1998). Sutherland’s novel is strongly marked by intertextual links to Irvine Welsh, and Jelly Roll attempts to re-materialise Black experience in the post-Trainspotting era of Scottish writing. The novel represents a new interpretation of the ‘Scottish journey’ undertaken by Romantics and Orcadians alike, where the cartographic objective is to represent the racialised topography of Scotland, to map its whiteness, and to imagine it as a violent ‘new geography of racism’. Central to that representation is the interrogation of anti-racism in Scotland, dominated by contradiction, machismo, and bourgeois posing that thwarts an effective resistance to racism.

This chapter aims to show that, behind the general exceptional academic pathways of Canadian students from immigrant backgrounds, some of these young people, belonging to racialized ethnic minorities, are less likely to access and graduate from postsecondary education. Its specific objective is to describe the general portrait of their educational pathways. A synopsis of some recent studies shows that that these students often face structural barriers at the institutional level. Comparative analyses between young Canadians of immigrant origins and their peers who are not recognize the remarkable success of Canadian immigrants, a rather exceptional phenomenon compared to what is observed internationally. However, this chapter stresses that this portrait must be nuanced: a number of studies highlight significant disparities among young people from immigrant backgrounds according to the ethnocultural and geographic origin of their parents. The situation is less favorable or unfavorable, in the case of certain racialized groups. Therefore, following an overview of the contribution of studies inspired by a postpositivist approach, this chapter highlights some dimensions that have been traditionally obscured. This allows for a better understanding of the relationship between the effects of various factors (individual, institutional, systemic) that structure and perpetuate inequalities and ethnic hierarchy among students from immigrant backgrounds.

This chapter provides an analysis of the work of Rita Segato and María Lugones’s assessment of Segato’s approach to gender and questions of decoloniality. The chapter examines the concepts of “patriarchy” and “gender” from within several critical paradigms among communities of color, including, specifically, indigenous and Afro-descendant communities within Abya Yala (a Puna term for the geographic lands of the Americas). Lugones proposes that terms of analysis such as “patriarchy” and “gender” undermine the complexity of the relations of power constituted in and through coloniality, including specifically the racialization of gendered terms. European women were racialized, but colonized females were not. Retaining the use of gender as a category of analysis thereby leaves decolonial activists and scholars working toward coalitional struggle with indigenous and Afro-descedent communities unable to sufficiently affirm the embodied, erotic, intersubjective, and otherwise distinct modes of communal relations not bound by dimorphic gender categories that continue to exist among these communities. The conclusion of the chapter then traces Lugones’s contributions to decolonial feminism, responding to the concerns she raises in the previous sections.