White in Design: Toward an Antiracist Architecture

This piece is titled after the Harvard Graduate School of Design African American Student Union’s Black in Design, a biannual conference and organizing space founded in 2015. Since attending the 2017 conference, I have been inspired to answer the question, “What is my place in this world, as White?” Though I am much more than that - including as male, cis, gay, Protestant Christian of Lutheran and Jewish heritage, with generational wealth - I have been inspired to write this piece by the salience of my racialized identity in the work of design for racial justice.

As I press ‘Publish’ from New Orleans, Louisiana, I begin by acknowledging my presence on land stolen from Indigenous people - including the Houma, Chitimacha, and Choctaw - in a city, state and nation built by the labor of enslaved Africans. Though principles of decolonization can be applied as a theoretical framework, there is no true decolonization without redistribution of land and resources to the Indigenous people whose lands we occupy, and there is no true racial justice in America without reparation to the victims of enslavement and Jim Crow.

Decolonization and antiracist intersectional feminism, like architecture, are practices; not ‘finished’, always in progress. We cannot rid ourselves of our socialization completely nor root out these oppressive systems from the world entirely. Instead, as bell hooks writes,

“We must constantly work to undermine the ways in which we are socialized to perpetuate domination.”

I. Here Stands Architecture

The Plan Obus, Le Corbusier’s 1933 proposal for the redevelopment of Algiers, is a seminal piece of the architectural canon. The scheme proposed by the Swiss-French ‘Father of Modernism’ calls for the construction of megastructures in and over the North African city. Corbusier is explicit about their meaning.

“Here is the new Algiers. Instead of the leprous sore which had sullied the gulf… here stands architecture… Architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of shapes in the light.”

The architect pathologizes the African city. If his proposed intervention is ‘correct’, Algiers is wrong. If the Plan Obus is ‘magnificent’, the product of centuries-old design traditions is insignificant. If his architecture is ‘masterly’, who is the Master, and over whom is he maintaining colonial domination through his practice of architecture?

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From elementary school onward, architecture is all I’ve wanted to do. But I wasn’t asking these questions in second grade. I grew up in Austin, Texas, in a very White professional-class neighborhood of the southwest side. The main street into my neighborhood, until 2017, was called Robert E. Lee Road. But I did not think about that, or how it was connected to the near-exclusive Whiteness of Barton Hills and its elementary school.

Not until seventh grade, at a public magnet school created under federal court order to fulfill the mandate of Brown v. Board, did I have a teacher – Amber Gratten – who inspired me to ask. For an oral-history project, I interviewed my Grandma Ellen, who raised my mom and her sister in 1950s Montgomery, Alabama. I learned that she and my grandfather had experienced discrimination as a result of their Southern Jewish identity, and that they were conscious of the Black freedom movement happening around them. Ellen taught public school, including the last segregated and first integrated classes, and chose not to remove her daughters from the system despite social pressure to do so. And yet, at their 1951 wedding, my grandparents seated Lene Brown, the ‘maid’ who raised my grandmother from birth – their only Black guest - separate from all the others, at a table by herself in a corner the Thomas Jefferson Hotel ballroom.

It was through the lens of this history I came to understand the presence of segregation in my own life. At the magnet Kealing Middle and LBJ High Schools, I existed in a White, Latinx and Asian-American bubble of peers who came from neighborhoods west of ‘the color line’, Interstate 35, but had very little academic interaction with the Black kids in whose East Side neighborhoods the schools were located.

At LBJ, the magnet academy classrooms are located on the second floor while the ‘comprehensive school’ is below. Upstairs is predominantly White, Latinx and Asian-American; downstairs is almost exclusively Black and Latinx. Students from one school can’t take classes at the other; we had separate passing periods and lunchtimes. Sometimes metaphors write themselves.

Because of this academic apartheid, only through track and football did I come to know Black people my age, and to understand through conversation and investigation how they were systematically ‘tracked’ into less rigorous classes even though they were just as smart as my non-Black classmates at the magnet school. I began to learn, in the face of all the subtle and overt conditioning in White racial superiority a White American child receives, that something didn’t add up.

I spent Saturday, February 26th, 2012 representing LBJ High School at a track meet. George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin that night. Monday at practice it was not hard to see Trayvon in my teammates, and to understand that I was not to be shot on the basis of my skin color. The nation I was taught treated everyone equally was allowing, and excusing, murder.

In 2012 I graduated and moved to New Orleans to attend architecture school at Tulane University. In a city under the gaze of Jim Crow-era statues honoring enslaving ‘heroes’, I first learned of antiracism through the organizing work of the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), against the background of nationwide organizing which asserted Black people’s right to exist free from the threat of state-sanctioned murder. 

It was in Tulane’s political science program where I met the people who would pull me out of studio one night in the run-up to fourth-year fall final review to march in dissent to the decision of a St. Louis County grand jury not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown.

Student activists in the Black Student Union organized protests echoing the demands of University of Missouri students for institutions to prosecute hate speech, fund organizations and spaces for Black students, and institute culturally relevant curriculum. In this context, I had the privilege to attend a Tulane School of Architecture where one, not two, but three Black American professors – Scott Ruff, Dr. Amber Wiley and Maurice Cox - taught on the ways race, gender, sexuality, class and culture shape the built environment.

A remarkable project on which Professors Ruff and Cox, and LSU landscape architecture professor Austin Allen along with graduate student Matty Williams, collaborated was the Mardi Gras Indian studio, in which students worked with with practitioners of an Afro-Caribbean masking tradition to record and re-present a specifically Black spatial experience as architecture. I saw another way of practicing design – one that does not subjugate, but affirms; does not destroy, but preserves and perpetuates; is not neutral, but enacts change in the interest of justice and equity.

It was in Professor Ruff’s Gender, Space and Architecture class that I was introduced to the feminist writer and cultural critic bell hooks. hooks writes extensively on the landscape of her native Kentucky, and on the nature of physical, political and cultural space, laying out much of the language – including the phrase “White supremacist capitalist colonialist cisheteropatriarchy” – which makes this conversation possible.  She asks probing questions which architects and designers should consider.

“Do we position ourselves on the side of the colonizing mentality? Or do we… stand in political resistance with the oppressed, ready to offer our ways of seeing and theorizing, toward the revolutionary effort that seeks to create a space where transformation is possible?

Some architects and designers are considering these questions already. The Tanzanian-born Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, a part of the team which designed the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), observed to Architect magazine at the NMAAHC’s September 2018 symposium, ‘Shifting the Landscape: Black Architects and Planners’,

“Architecture is still full of colonial language. It’s one narrative… This idea of a democratized landscape – a democratized knowledge base where everybody learns from each other – is profoundly powerful.”

II. Seeing White

Architecture in Service of the White Supremacist Colonialist Cisheteropatriarchy

We begin with an understanding of the problem at hand. It is not ‘racism’, it is not ‘sexism’, it is not ‘homophobia’ or ‘capitalism’ alone. Legal scholar Dr. Kimberle Crenshaw lays out a framework through which we can talk about oppressions as overlapping and intersecting:

“Intersectionality implies that it is impossible to extract one aspect of individual oppression without considering the others at play. A deeper interrogation is required to understand the way race, class, sexuality and other identities play into the unique needs of each group.”

For example, I am a gay White college graduate of Southern American, Hungarian and Alsatian Jewish heritage with intergenerational wealth. I do not experience oppression on the basis of my sexuality in the same way as a professional-class Irish-American lesbian, or a working-class Black trans woman. We all have multiple identities which can be more or less apparent as we occupy physical and political spaces.

One of the central pillars upholding spatialized systems of political and social oppression is a denial of our identities, our histories and the injustices which created the present built environment. Postcolonial feminist scholar Dr. Sherene Razack writes,

“A White settler society is one established by Europeans on non-European soil. Its origins lie in the dispossession and near-extermination of Indigenous populations by Europeans. A quintessential feature of White settler mythology is the disavowal of conquest, genocide, enslavement and the exploitation of the labor of peoples of color.”

Most Americans learn about White settler colonialism in middle-school Social Studies, except we call it “Manifest Destiny.” In a famous 1872 image by John Gast, a White woman symbolizing American civilization guides pioneers left across the landscape, pushing cowering Native people off the canvas as in the far right distance the then under-construction Brooklyn Bridge rises above the buildings of New York. Architecture is presented the last step in the process begun by violent displacement.

The movement to decolonize spaces and places in what we call the United States is vibrant, particularly in creative fields not too distant from architecture. The artist-activist collective Decolonize This Place holds actions at locations like New York’s American Museum of Natural History, where they protest the museum’s control over objects sacred to Indigenous people and the position of honor in which it holds an anti-Indigenous, imperialist president in its soaring Classicist Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall.

The architectural style of buildings communicates the political ideals of the people who create them. For example, it is said that Greco-Roman Classicism’s use in centers of American power illustrates the extent to which we value the precepts of ancient Athenian and Roman government. Architect Charles Bulfinch’s dome for the United States Capitol, built by enslaved people in 1823, is modeled on the Pantheon erected 1700 years prior.

In mid-19th century New Orleans, the Classical style was popular as the Americanizing city sought to express its power as the capital of the most profitable slave society in human history. As Samuel Wilson Jr., “dean of New Orleans architecture history”, put it in 1977,

“After all, these civilized Greeks and Romans were also slave-holding societies, virtual proof that a city could hardly have a civilized existence without a few black slaves and a garnishing of white temples.”

To some, a style which implied Black presence was not White enough. As Dr. Mabel O. Wilson writes in her essay on the design of the NMAAHC, ‘Other Monumentalities’, Indiana Congressman Robert Owen preferred the Smithsonian Castle be built 1855 in a Northern European style because it represented “a purer development of structure and form” than the Egyptian Revival. Owen called the Egyptian style “lazy and indolent”, qualities he associated with Africans, failing to note that it was enslaved Black descendants of Africans who built the “purer” building.

In his 1910 essay ‘The Souls of White Folk’, scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois laments,

“I am given to understand that Whiteness is the ownership of the Earth, forever and ever.”

Du Bois wrote as United States imperialism, having consolidated control of the North American continent, sought dominion over Cuba and the Philippines, while at home revanchist White nationalists intervened into growing post-Reconstruction cities.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, a block of the Black neighborhood of Vinegar Hill was knocked down in 1920 by former Klansmen for Robert E. Lee Park and a statue that would become famous as the center of the 2017 riot. The spatialization of White supremacy through Jim Crow inspired the Nazis and South Africa’s Nationalists, who modeled their apartheid system on existing conditions in America.

A useful description of the Jim Crow mentality is offered by sociologist George Lipsitz, who observes that

“a White spatial imaginary, based on exclusivity and augmented exchange value, functions as a central mechanism for skewing opportunities and life chances in the United States along racial lines.”

Lipsitz goes on to describe a conflicting mode of experience,

“a Black spatial imaginary, based on sociability and augmented use value, privileges solidarities within, between and across spaces.”

III. Antiracist Spatial Imaginaries

How can we imagine architecture as the practice of decolonization? Racial and economic justice?

The phrase “antiracist spatial imaginary” is my response to Lipsitz’s delineation of two conflicting racialized categories. Though I may hold values expressed in the Black spatial imaginary, I experience the world through my White socialization and in a White body, and I cannot be otherwise. I believe Whiteness itself is premised in and inseparable from White supremacy, or colloquially, racism. Thus, to be White but reject the values of the White spatial imaginary is to view space through the practice of deconstructing racialized oppression; in other words, to practice an “antiracist spatial imaginary.”

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The articulation of antiracist political positions in space may take the form of an explicit challenge to White supremacy as expressed through designed elements of the built environment. On May 7, 1954, New Orleans activists responding to the Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board and subsequent ‘massive resistance’ to integration on the part of Louisianans targeted a symbol of segregation in Lafayette Square. John McDonogh, one of New Orleans’ wealthiest enslavers in the mid-19th century, donated funds for the city’s public school system upon his death on the condition that the schools be segregated.

Every year on May 7, McDonogh’s birthday, schoolchildren honored his wishes by laying flowers at his statue in front of City Hall – on a segregated basis, with Black children waiting for hours in the hot sun while White children went first. Rather than participate in the segregated ritual, activists staged a boycott, keeping 30,000 Black students home for the day. Within two years, the celebration was integrated.

The intervention by four North Carolina A&T students, who staged the first lunch counter sit-in at a Greensboro Woolworth’s on February 1, 1960, was an occupation of space. By sitting at a White-only lunch counter, the Black students asserted their right to exist in space equally to White people. The act was replicated by students around the country, and the sit-in movement contributed to pressure for the guarantee of equal access to public accommodations under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Architectural history often ascribes the birth of activist consciousness in our profession to civil rights leader Whitney Young’s blistering 1968 condemnation of our “thunderous silence and complete indifference” to the civil rights movement. In reality, antiracist spatial imaginaries have been practiced in American architecture since the early days of the profession’s history.

Robert Robinson Taylor, the first Black graduate of MIT and the first Black registered architect in America, headed South in 1892 to lead the design-build of the Tuskegee Institute, quite literally from the ground up. As architect and educator Mario Gooden details in his 2015 book Dark Space, Amaza Lee Meredith, a Black lesbian architect practicing in Virginia in the early-to-mid 20th century, created in her home Azurest South a humanizing alternative to the White male gaze of Adolf Loos’ contemporary design of a much-celebrated home for dancer Josephine Baker in Paris. In New York, the activist designers and planners of the interracial Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH) modeled the practice of community design as community organizing beginning in the early 1960s, and transitioned to a Black-led ‘Black Power planning’ practice in the late 60s and early 70s.

Forty years later, American architecture has changed. Energy use and sustainability considerations shape a profession which professes to care about the planet. In some ways, however, it hasn’t changed at all; In 2012, as the nation re-elected its first Black president, the profession was 82% male, 92% White, 2% Black, and wholly uninterested in engaging with the implications of these facts.

As in the 1960s, it was Black architects and other architects of color who began to raise consciousness. Less than a month after the murder of Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012, architect and educator V. Mitch McEwen wrote,

“If we take on the way we have taken on climate change, stormwater runoff, or any other host of problems that once seemed outside our field, I know we can contribute to making this better. Architects and urban designer in the United States and worldwide: hoodies up!”

Activists again led the way, with antiracist praxis centering spatial intervention. On June 27, 2015, in the aftermath of the massacre at Charleston, South Carolina’s Mother Emanuel AME Church, as legislators debated how to remove a state-mandated Confederate battle flag – erected on State House grounds not in 1865 but in 1955, as a part of massive resistance to school integration – educator and filmmaker Bree Newsome took it down herself.

In New Orleans activists, educators and designers inspired by Newsome and by the South African #Fallist movement, which had in March 2015 succeeded in removing a statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes from the University of Cape Town, formed #TakeEmDownNOLA in July 2015. The group’s early actions included a projection onto the sixty-foot-tall column of the New Orleans’ Robert E. Lee monument of photographs of enslaved people, scarred from the violence of their captivity, and a narrative written by a man Lee enslaved detailing his treatment under the mythically ‘chivalrous’ general.

#TakeEmDownNOLA organizer and educator Michael ‘Quess’ Moore spoke on the meaning of Lee’s monument and other commemorations of colonizers, enslavers and Jim Crow supporters in New Orleans:

“These monuments are altars to the blood sacrifice of Black lives, today as much as two hundred years ago. Everywhere you go in New Orleans, you see these symbols which tell you your life does not matter.”

In 2015, architects in New Orleans were not silent or indifferent. The National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) held its annual conference in the city in October, where designers and organizers Bryan Lee Jr. and Imani Jacqueline Brown hosted the inaugural Design as Protest workshop in the shadow of the Lee monument.

Lee, now director of design at the New Orleans design justice practice Colloqate, speaks on the connection between architecture and injustice.

“We first need to think about the physical environments that hold those injustices up or allow them to be perpetuated. For every injustice, there is an architecture that perpetuates it.”

In the fall of 2015, New Orleans activists, advocates and politicians alike voiced a desire to remove White supremacist monuments. Activists organized to maintain pressure on elected officials to follow through with their stated intentions, taking up a cause which had been carried by Black community leaders in the city since the 1950s. In December, the council invoked a public nuisance ordinance and, on a 6-1 vote, ordered the removal of monuments to Lee, Jefferson Davis, General P.G.T. Beauregard and a Reconstruction-era militia called the White League.

For the activists, the fight was never about monuments alone. Take Em Down leader and educator Angela Kinlaw articulated the movement’s goals:

“We call for the removal of White supremacist symbols as a much needed part of the dismantling of the systems which oppress Black people in this country.”

Opposition to removal ran strong among the city’s wealthy White population, and outside the city. Former KKK leader and 2016 Senate candidate David Duke showed up to counterprotest Take ‘Em Down NOLA’s actions targeting the famous statue of genocidal enslaver Andrew Jackson.

Duke did not win his election, but Donald Trump did. Days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, a federal judge ruled that the city could move forward with removing the four monuments, a task which was completed under heavy police protection that May. By the time the Robert E. Lee statue came down on May 19th, the eyes of the nation were on New Orleans. 

IV. Design Just Futures

What does design pedagogy and practice for decolonization, racial, gender and economic justice look like?

As we seek to build amidst movements to deconstruct symbols and systems of White supremacist colonialist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy, we must be conscious of how these oppressions are baked into the foundational assumptions of architectural practice. But we must also remain hopeful, and find in our histories the inspiration to create new spaces and places through the practice of just and equitable design for a future that affirms our common humanity.

In Rio de Janeiro, excavations for infrastructure improvements in 2011 unearthed the long-buried Valongo Wharf. This site was the point of disembarkation for hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans brought by the Portuguese to Brazilian shores, a history unaddressed in the public history presented at the time – a monument to, of all people, the Portuguese colonizers.

Landscape architect and urban designer Sara Zewde, a native of New Orleans experienced in cultural preservation and storytelling in Afro-diasporic communities, proposed an intervention for Valongo Wharf which employed plants found in both coastal West Africa and Brazil to tell the story of trans-Atlantic connection through landscape. Zewde’s proposal includes both contemplative spaces and active areas, which seek to memorialize the struggle of Black people to survive the horrors of the site’s history by affirming the right of present-day Black Cariocas to thrive in public space.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is home to one of America’s largest and oldest collections of public art. Historian and curator Paul Farber and information scientist Laurie Allen embarked on a public art and public history project to democratize the process of creating public commemorations through Monument Lab, a project conducted through Mural Arts Philadelphia. Canvassers collected thousands of proposals for new monuments from Philadelphians, and artists created temporary installations in public spaces. Hank Willis Thomas’ ‘All Power to All People’, a 12-foot-tall Afro pick with a raised-fist handle, was placed in dialogue with an existing statue of anti-Black former Philadelphia police chief and mayor Frank Rizzo in the plaza outside the city’s Municipal Services Building.

Inspired by the work of Monument Lab, Take Em Down NOLA and student activists at Yale University, a group from Tulane University’s National Organization of Minority Architecture Students (NOMAS) chapter, including myself, created ‘Movement: revealing hidden White space on the campus of Tulane University’ in the spring of 2017. This installation, erected in dialogue with an existing monument on the predominantly White university’s New Orleans campus, presented information on the namesakes of campus buildings along with a timeline of events in women’s histories and Black histories extending back to the birth of Tulane’s namesake, wealthy enslaver Paul Tulane. The installation also presented students with an opportunity to write proposed interventions into the university’s structure using attached Sharpie markers, which dozens did over a period of three weeks.

Also in the spring of 2017 at Tulane, I completed my graduate thesis, Building Up and Taking Down: a critical pedagogy for the deconstruction of the White supremacist patriarchy.’ This thesis proposed a Freedom School of Design, inspired by an organizing project undertaken by Black Freedom Movement activists in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. The FSD is a space for the teaching of architecture and design as antiracist, intersectional feminist theory and practice.

For the purpose of the thesis project, the School was sited at what was then called Lee Circle in New Orleans, and included a proposal for the proverbial ‘museum’ which many had proposed for removed Jim Crow monuments, but few actually delineated. Through the creation of signs and banners, the project also provided support for the organizers of Take Em Down NOLA in rallying New Orleanians to demand immediate removal of the Lee monuments and additional White supremacist symbols as a part of systemic changes to the city’s treatment of poor and Black people.

How the theoretical approach of the Freedom School of Design can be applied to a built project produced for actual people will be the defining question of my career as an architect. Fortunately, shortly after graduating, I had the opportunity to explore this question in collaboration with Bryan Bradshaw, a classmate at the Tulane School of Architecture. Along with clients Wayne Jones and Cody Duet, Bryan and I collaboratively designed an 1100-square-foot clothing store for New Orleans streetwear brand Likesushi. Likesushi was an opportunity to explore collaborative design for an intentionally specific cultural community of New Orleans streetwear designers and consumers. For me, it was also a deeply thought-provoking exercise of my appropriate role in creating a Black cultural space, one which raised more questions than answers.

Fortunately, opportunities arose for me to continue thinking and exploring these questions. As an attendee of the Harvard Graduate School of Design African American Student Union’s second Black in Design conference, I had the opportunity to experience firsthand a specifically Black design discourse, and to critically consider the shortcomings of the White-dominated discourse on ‘diversity’ in American architecture. My experience at Black in Design pushed me to advocate more intentionally for the allocation of resources by White-dominated institutions in support of Black designers and other designers of color, and I am grateful to the organizers and speakers for making space for people like me to learn from their experiences.

One of the most important lessons that Black in Design affirmed to me was the inherently collaborative nature of racial justice work in the design profession. It is no coincidence that the project which has most shaped my thinking on just and equitable design over the past year and a half has been a deeply collaborative project.

Paper Monuments is a public art and public history project which asks New Orleanians to imagine new monuments representing the stories of people, places, movements, events and ideas which shape New Orleans. Inaugurated in the fall of 2017 with Stories at the Crossroads, a storytelling event held on the pedestal of the city’s removed Jefferson Davis statue, Paper Monuments is a series of events and interventions proposing that all people have a right to narrate their own histories in public space, and that those whose narratives have been under-centered must be given a megaphone to tell their own stories.

At the heart of Paper Monuments is the Public Proposal, a sheet of paper on which we invite New Orleanians to write about or draw the monuments they want to see in the city. We have collected over 850 proposals from a demographically representative sample of the population at events, in schools and in public spaces across the city, toward an eventual goal of 1500.

Curated Public Proposals are given as inspiration to New Orleans artists and to storytellers, ranging from academic writers to neighborhood experts. These individuals create Paper Monuments posters, which are distributed for free at community bookstores and galleries around the city, with a focus on Black-owned businesses, as well as at branches of the New Orleans Public Library. Posters are also installed by volunteers in the city’s public spaces adjacent to heavily-used bus stops, where they serve as conversation-starters and as a base for further Public Proposal canvassing.

Paper Monuments is a project of Colloqate, a New Orleans-based design justice practice which creates spaces of racial, social and cultural equity, and is co-directed by Bryan C. Lee Jr. and Sue Mobley.

Colloqate seeks to exist in a professional space akin to architecture and urban design nonprofit MASS Design Group, whose National Lynching Memorial designed for the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama captured the nation’s attention in 2018. This discourse presents architecture as much more than static objects, but as an integral part of movements for racial justice.

The memorial includes two sets of human-sized monuments commemorating the victims of racial terror lynchings, one set of which is to remain in Montgomery and another to be claimed by residents of each county in which a lynching took place. In the summer of 2018, residents of Charlottesville, Virginia - including high-school student and activist Zyahna Bryant, who began the movement to remove the city’s statue of Robert E. Lee on which the White supremacist riot of August 11-12, 2017 centered – took part in a pilgrimage from their city to the Memorial organized by UVA professor Jalane Schmidt and curator Andrea Douglas commemorating the 1898 lynching of Albemarle County resident John Henry James. It remains to be seen if communities across the nation will have to undergo what Charlottesville did before they reckon with their own histories of White supremacist terrorism.

The violence of August 11-12 had a profound effect on a group of architecture students at the University of Virginia whose professors, Elgin Cleckley and Barbara Brown-Wilson, connected them with members of the Paper Monuments team. We were invited to speak to the faculty organizers of the Design Futures Student Forum, an annual gathering of progressive designers with strong roots in Charlottesville and New Orleans. There, we presented as ‘Design Futures Architecture School’ our collective vision for design education as a tool for antiracist organizing and action.

Inspired by my experiences as a part of Design Futures Architecture School, at Black in Design, and in NOMAS Tulane, I have thought a lot about the obligation of predominantly White institutions like my alma mater to engage in substantive action toward racial justice and equity. One result of this has been ‘Tu White School of Architecture’, a theoretical intervention which serves as a set of guiding principles into my continuing work as an alumni to support current students and advocate for changes to curriculum and policy in the interest of recruiting and retaining Black students and faculty and other students and faculty of color. The name is no mere rabble-rousing hyperbole; the architecture school’s student population has averaged 77% White and 4% Black since 2000, and it has not employed a Black American associate or full professor since 2015, despite being the only architecture school in a 60% Black city deeply tied to the cultural and spatial practices of the African diaspora.

One form this advocacy takes is my work as part of NOMA Louisiana to produce the chapter’s Project Pipeline Summer Camp, a design justice-focused program hosted in 2018 at the Tulane School of Architecture. Design justice, a term brought to the architectural profession by advocates including Bryan C. Lee Jr., Rosa Sheng and Tya Winn, promotes the practice of design for justice and equity as a means to diversity – an inversion of the usual White framing of diversity, which seeks token representation without substantive changes to practice or reallocation of inequitably distributed resources.

Design justice is a collaborative endeavor. I was honored to be a part of the Design Justice Fellowship in the fall of 2018, one of 24 advocates advancing the practice in fields from landscape architecture to public health and political science.

Change for justice and equity in architecture cannot come through the work of individuals. I conclude by asking each of you to consider a few questions intended to build collective consciousness, and I refer you to the ‘H/T’ page of my website, which enumerates some – but by no means all – of the people organizations, and projects which inspire my work.

We are nothing if we do not listen to, and learn from, each other. Thank you for joining the conversation!

What people, projects, movements and spaces do you look to for inspiration?

How are you challenging structures of domination in your work?

How can we support each other in this work?