Anne Bonds

Economic Development, Racialization, and Privilege: “Yes in My Backyard” Prison Politics and the Reinvention of Madras, Oregon

This article draws from geographic engagements with theories of racialization and NIMBYism to explore connections between economic development and the relational construction of racial identities. I investigate the discourses of local white leadership surrounding two interconnected economic agendas crafted with the goal of remaking the central Oregon town of Madras into an upscale, white community, including (1) entrepreneurial prison development, and (2) an urban renewal project emphasizing high-income residential construction and the removal of “blighted” housing. Community leaders framed these developments as essential to changing perceptions of Madras based on its racial makeup and entrenched poverty. White officials promoted prison recruitment and upscale housing development through a normative racial framework that reaffirmed the privileged status of whites, stigmatized Latinos and Native Americans, and (re)produced unequal spaces. Through this empirical focus, I call attention to the centrality of race in economic practices, emphasizing how racialized privilege and marginalization are reproduced through development agendas that give shape to geographies of opportunity and (dis)advantage.

Beyond white privilege: Geographies of white supremacy and settler colonialism

This paper builds from scholarship on whiteness and white privilege to argue for an expanded focus that includes settler colonialism and white supremacy. We argue that engaging with white supremacy and settler colonialism reveals the enduring social, economic, and political impacts of white supremacy as a materially grounded set of practices. We situate white supremacy not as an artifact of history or as an extreme position, but rather as the foundation for the continuous unfolding of practices of race and racism within settler states. We illustrate this framework through a recent example of a land dispute in the American West.

Articulations of Place, Poverty, and Race: Dumping Grounds and Unseen Grounds in the Rural American Northwest

This project extends poverty research by addressing the lack of knowledge about place and race differences in poverty processes (Blank 2005). Rural places experience a range of modes of articulation within the global division of rural labor and we observe three distinct modes of articulation in the American Northwest: “playgrounds,” “dumping grounds,” and “unseen grounds.” We attend to the recursive relations between political-economic restructuring and the discursive production of social difference across class and race lines. Poverty is produced in the reciprocal relations among local historical, ecological, and social processes and the articulation of those places with new rounds of capital accumulation under neoliberal restructuring. Our empirical investigation focuses on white and Latino poverty across nonmetropolitan counties of the American Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana). We first map county-level patterns of white and Latino poverty in relation to county-level economic restructuring during the 1990s across the region. We then employ in-depth comparative case study research to explore the intersections of specific forms of neoliberal restructuring with place-based historical, ecological, and social processes to understand rural white and Latino poverty in the region.

Confronting White Supremacy and a Militaristic Pedagogy in the U.S. Settler Colonial State

We argue that understanding contemporary geographies of race and militarism is predicated on understandings of settler colonialism and white supremacy. Settler colonialism is a continuously unfolding project of empire that is enabled by and through specific racial configurations that are tied to geographies of white supremacy. In a U.S. context, settler colonialism begins with the removal of first peoples from the land and the creation of racialized and gendered labor systems that make the land productive for the colonizers. In this context, settler colonialism is an enduring structure—an interrelated political, social, and economic process that continuously unfolds—requiring continued reconfigurations and interventions by the state. Such a framing connects landscapes of militarism and geopolitics with everyday forms of violence, social difference, and normalized power hierarchies and relationships of oppression. Building from these insights we argue that theorizations of U.S. militarism must be connected to the spatialities of white supremacy and grounded in the U.S. imperial settler state. Finally, we end by engaging with a broader discussion on the ways in which the discipline and academic institutions are complicit in practices that contribute to white supremacy, poverty, inequality, and the continuation of settler colonial practices. For these reasons it is necessary to cultivate a broadly conceived and militantly uncompromising peace agenda premised on antiviolence and the rejection of the racism (and its intersections with gender, class, and sexuality) implicit in the settler colonial state.

Neighborhood revitalization without the local: race, nonprofit governance, and community development

In this paper, we explore a “grassroots” neighborhood revitalization effort engendered at the national scale without regard to local geographies of race and class. Specifically, we examine the Harambee Great Neighborhood Initiative, convened by the well-known nonprofit Habitat for Humanity together with Milwaukee’s Local Initiatives Support Corporation, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Drawing from participant observation, analysis of print and digital media, volunteer surveys, and interviews with area residents and local nonprofit representatives, we demonstrate the ways in which the six-year program of planning and neighborhood development was conceived and driven by an extra-local nonprofit with significant blind spots to local and organizational politics of race and without sufficient collaboration with the Harambee community. Our analysis points to the importance of race in nonprofit governance and community revitalization efforts. Moreover, we contribute to urban geographic scholarship on nonprofit governance by examining the dynamics of privilege, inclusion, and exclusion as they relate to practices of engagement and volunteerism in nonlocal “grassroots” projects.

Race and ethnicity I: Property, race, and the carceral state

In this report, I focus on property, particularly housing, as an essential race-making institution and consider its connections to the carceral state. I examine renewed attention to property within geography and some of the ways that scholars are engaging with property regimes as a means to theorize race. Situating property within the context of racial capitalism and critical carceral studies, I draw from struggles over segregation and open housing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to illustrate the linkages between the city’s housing crisis and policing. A robust body of literature documents the inseparability of race and crime, but I further contend that both are conjoined with the politics of residential property.

Property and whiteness: the Oregon standoff and the contradictions of the U.S. Settler State

ABSTRACT On 2 January 2016, armed anti-government protestors took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge (MNWR) in rural Oregon. The takeover of the MNWR is part of a larger, much longer set of movements called the Sagebrush Rebellion that has come to define contemporary white contestations about the federal regulation of lands in the American West. Specifically, we argue that the armed takeover of MNWR is revelatory of the way white supremacy intersects with place in important and consequential ways. In addition, we examine the politics of place and property to interrogate the way settler imaginaries affords settlers a perceived right to property and the land. We contend that this perception, illustrated by the events at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, is enmeshed within particular conceptions of property, the frontier, and whiteness. The MNWR takeover illuminates how discourses of whiteness and property rights are essential to the ongoing production of white supremacy within the US settler state.

Refusing resilience: the racialization of risk and resilience

ABSTRACT In this short essay debating the politics of resilience, I draw from the circulation of resilience discourses following the Milwaukee Uprising of 2016 to argue that critiques of resilience planning in such cities of the global west must be situated within the context of racial capitalism. I further contend that resilience-informed urban projects are often underpinned by an uncritical embrace of notions of public safety and crime that bolster racialized logics of securitization and carcerality. I conclude by suggesting that rather than seeking to recuperate resilience, we instead should refuse it, embracing planning approaches that emphasize structural change rather than adaption.

Where do Black lives matter? Race, stigma, and place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin:

This article analyzes how the spatial metaphor of 53206, a zip code within the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, connects with crises in the legitimacy of policing and politicians’ claims to care about Black lives. It examines how, in the context of deepening racialized poverty, ongoing mobilizations against police violence, and increasing rates of violent crime, liberal and conservative rhetoric about 53206 largely obscures the roles that decades of deindustrialization and labor assaults, metropolitan racial and wealth segregation, and public school and welfare restructuring play in producing racial and class inequality to instead emphasize racializing tropes about ‘Black-on-Black crime,’ broken homes, and uncaring Black communities. Situating the examination within critical analysis of urban poverty, geographic scholarship on the racialization of space, and critical criminology, the authors consider the salience of the term territorial stigmatization as a means to understand how historical and contemporary processes of racialized capitalism shape Milwaukee’s urban and social divides. They argue that discursive constructions of 53206 and the rhetorical posture of saving Black lives deployed by elected officials have had the effect of entrenching policing power while further rendering neighborhoods like Milwaukee’s Northside as already dead and dying.

Poverty, Geography of

This article examines themes in geographical research on poverty. Given the highly contested nature of the term, I begin with an overview of debates about definitions of poverty. This discussion contrasts absolute and relative poverty measures and critically assesses some of the assumptions embedded with dominant poverty definitions. Next, the article considers the place of geographic research on poverty in critical development studies, emphasizing how the idea of poverty has been fundamental to projects of development. The article then charts shifts in poverty dynamics associated with economic restructuring and welfare reform in the United States. Finally, I analyze the discursive construction of poverty and consider how ideas about poverty categorize and differentiate impoverished places and the poor.