Demarcating Difference: Racialized Space as a Contributing Factor Toward Racism

• In Event: 557 - Theory Section Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03. Race, Space, and Culture

Abstract

Although the notion of race as an immutable biological characteristic has been deconstructed in both natural and social scientific investigations, it continues to be a primary feature for how people in the United States naturalize their social world. Utilizing spatial theory from thinkers like Lefebvre, Soja, Harvey, and Mills this paper develops a conception of “racial space theory,” which elucidates how “black space” is perceived as an ontological “other” reinscribed and reproduced in everyday life. Social structures distribute material rewards in an uneven fashion, thus manufacturing the notion of black spatial inferiority that is reified within a discourse that conceals structural impediments and erases historical causes produced through residential segregation, urban deindustrialization, and other forms of racial oppression. In accordance with Barbara Fields notion of racial ideology as continually reproduced, a racist order in our minds is reinforced through lived experiences within a discourse premised on segregated spatial configurations.

Author

• Jeff McGraham