A White Will to Improve: On the Depoliticization of Community Concerns and Aspirations

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Policies, Politics, and Community Praxis

Abstract

This study examines one urban renewal effort rhetorically designed to serve the needs of families and youth of color. Drawing on critical development and critical whiteness studies, we ethnographically explore how urban planners depoliticized community concerns using an array of strategies such as: color-evasive approaches to engaging local residents, austere mapping pedagogies, and invitations to diversify bureaucratic agencies without divulging actual decision-making power to such entities. In alignment with this year’s annual theme, this paper reveals the social processes through which the values, hopes, and aspirations of minoritized communities are ceremonially included, yet systematically undermined. We illustrate how existing racialized inequities of educational and social opportunity are reproduced and elevate conceptual and practical possibilities to guide their potential undoing.

Authors

• Ethan Chang, University of Hawaii - Manoa

• Shun-Nan Chiang, University of California-Santa Cruz