Recognizing Strategies of Color-Blind Racism: Remaking Place to Make Racial Hierarchies in Interaction

• In Event: Historicized Bodies-in-Place: Toward a Political and Relational View of Embodiment in Learning

Abstract

A significant body of work has shown how relationships of race can be understood as relationships of space (cf. Lipsitz, 2011; Pulido, 2000). The “design, construction, administration, financing and policing” of space skew life opportunities along racial lines and legitimize whiteness as “natural, necessary, and inevitable” Lipsitz (2011). This line of scholarship has illustrated that while the particular dynamics of race and racism may change over time, racialized inequities and injustices are relatively stable since they are rooted in space. We draw on this work to explore a distinct phenomenon: how do people figuratively re-make place and draw on the “racialization of space” (Lipsitz, 2011) in interaction to make racial hierarchies salient?

Massey’s (2004) distinction between place and space is helpful in our analysis. Massey (2004) argues that places (the local) constitute both themselves and space (the global). In her analysis, the global does not only exert its influence on the local, but places are also the moments through which space is “constituted, invented, coordinated, and produced” (Massey, 2004, p. 11). Identities of place then become “products of relations which spread way beyond them” (Massey, 2004, p. 11). Extending Massey, racialized identities are thus both locally constituted and products of global processes.
Through the analysis of a classroom interaction, we explore how figuratively re-making place, allowed a student to draw on spatial relationships to make racial distinctions and hierarchies salient. The analysis focuses on a 2-minute video of a high-school classroom interaction in which students were asked to choose groups for their final projects. There were two key actors in this interaction: Eddy, a student who identified as Korean American and Asian American and Alonzo, a student who identified as Mexican American and Latino. After Alonzo made an indirect bid to join Eddy’s group, Eddy figuratively re-made place through his stances so that Eddy and Alonzo no longer inhabited a classroom with students vying for group members. Eddy re-made place into an easily recognizable scene in a parking lot where he was hiring Alonzo as a day laborer. Place, as it was figuratively re-made by Eddy, was so powerfully and readily recognized because of the “racialization of space” (Lipsitz, 2011) and the spatialization of Latino labor in the U.S. Through a turn-by-turn analysis of the interaction, we demonstrate how Eddy re-made place through existing spatial relationships to make a dimension of his racialized relationship with Alonzo salient.
Particularly within the contemporary context of "colorblind racism" (Bonilla-Silva, 2003) racialized language is often not explicit and overt. This analysis demonstrates the importance of understanding how place is re-made and how space is drawn upon in interaction as a strategy for engaging in colorblind racism. This paper makes an analytical contribution by developing a lens to recognize these racializing strategies. Building on Massey’s (2004) attention to the possibilities of constituting the global through actions and identities in place, we also explore the pedagogical potential of re-making place in interaction toward greater equity and justice

Author

• Thomas M. Philip, University of California - Los Angeles