Deconstructing White Placemaking
Marker at the site where Viola Liuzzo was murdered by White supremacists, US Highway 80, between Selma and Montgomery, AL
White space, like Whiteness itself, is defined by exclusivity. Spatial-racial exclusivity is enforced by physical violence, or the threat of it, against people racialized outside Whiteness. People racialized and stereotyped as criminal-Black, foreign-Asian, violent-Mexican are defined by people who need to believe ourselves White, and human, outside the boundary of what we pretend to be humanity.
Of course, it’s not that ‘they’ can’t be in ‘our’ spaces at all. Only and unless they’re in temporary, precarious, hidden roles without which racial capitalism as we’ve structured it could not stand, can people we racialize ‘Other’ set foot in the spaces we racialize for ourselves.
Who delimits White space? Daniel Burnham, Frank Lloyd Wright, Philip Johnson, Patrik Schumacher, Bjarke Ingels. John C. Fremont, Madison Grant, George Zimmerman, Darren Wilson, Derek Chauvin. W.E.B. Du Bois saw through us, in the closing paragraphs of Black Reconstruction in 1935, as quoted by political scientist Ella Myers:
“Such is the silent revolution that has gripped modern European culture in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its zenith came in Boxer times: White supremacy was all but world-wide, Africa was dead, India conquered, Japan isolated, and China prostrate, while white America whetted her sword for mongrel Mexico and mulatto South America, lynching her own Negroes the while.”
White space, like Whiteness itself, is created through violence. The genocide of Native people in the Americas, imperialist invasions into India, China, South, West, East and Central Africa, the Philippines, later Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, has been a project of White worldbuilding naturalized as “spreading democracy”. Dylann Roof’s incursion into the Wednesday night Bible Study class at Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston to take the lives of Clementa Pinckney, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance; Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders; Daniel Simmons; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton and Myra Thomson was an attempt at racial purification on a localized scale, and he might have gotten away with it too if he hadn’t posed for photos with the Confederate and Rhodesian flags. Robert Aaron Long, murderer of Soon Chung Park; Hyun Jung Grant; Suncha Kim; Yong Yue; Delaina Ashley Yaun; Paul Andre Michels; Xiaoje Tan and Daoyou Feng, and untroubled by such associations, still might.
Unlike Cecil Rhodes, Dylann and Robert weren’t able to carve their legacies into stone plinths. Unlike Bjarke and Patrik, we don’t tend to think of them as shapers of the built environment. Their acts of mass murder were successful interventions of White placemaking. I’m far from the first to identify White placemaking and its deadly implications; read Amina Yasin’s ‘Whose Streets? Black Streets’ and follow her for tweets on how we can get to ‘ban[ning] White urbanism’. But I argue that the men who look like me, the Dylanns and Dereks and Darrens, the Patriks and Bjarkes, the fellows of the AIA Academy of Architecture for Justice, are active agents of Black death.
Can we choose to be otherwise?
I don’t know yet. I do know Viola Liuzzo did. A Detroit mother of five born and raised in rural Pennsylvania poverty, Liuzzo was deeply affected by anti-Black violence perpetrated by Whites trying to keep African American migrants out of ‘their’ neighborhoods. In 1965, Viola drove to Alabama, where she participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march. While driving back to Selma with 19-year-old Leroy Moton after the protest’s culminating rally on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol, Liuzzo was run off the road by a carful of White supremacists, who shot her in the head. Moton survived by playing dead.
I remember standing in the space held by the memorial marker where Liuzzo died, on the grassy bank of Highway 80. I hope I don’t have to die. But as I think about what makes ‘antiracist space’, as opposed to White space, I recognize that it too often comes in the aftermath of someone’s murder. The marker in Liuzzo’s honor, erected by the Black women of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the support of the predominantly White Teamsters union for which her husband worked, is a rare exception; most of the time, these spaces are created by Black people to memorialize a stolen Black life.
What’s happening at George Floyd Square in Minneapolis, Marcus-David Peters Circle in Richmond, and Injustice Square in Louisville is an act of collective love, collective mourning, collective reclamation. It’s a specific genre of Black placemaking, one designed to affirm that the Black life taken matters. It’s more than writing ‘Black Lives Matter’ in the street; it’s unplanned, syncretic, adaptive, free. These interventions must be taken seriously as acts of placemaking, and seen as precedent on a site scale for the world those who seek Black, female, queer, trans liberation are struggling to bring into being.
We can’t think that antiracist space stops with the arduous reclamations at sites of pain and suffering. To do so is to understand only half the picture. Vast geographies of Black spatial agency and Black spatialized joy exist, often hidden below the surface of White perception as a matter of safety. That’s a whole other essay, especially from my perspective; until I can get to it, check out Sara Zewde’s always-inspiring work on Black urbanism, and Marcus Hunter’s wonderfully thorough book ‘Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life’. I’ll end these observations with an affirmation: White space, like Whiteness itself, is killing humanity. People racialized as White can learn how to see, how to speak about, and how to destroy both.