Joshua Inwood

Whitewash: white privilege and racialized landscapes at the University of Georgia

This paper examines racialized landscapes at the University of Georgia to better understand the ways that whiteness—or more specifically white privilege—is positioned in and uses landscapes. Given a history of segregation, violently contested desegregation, and a contemporary student body that is disproportionately white (compared to the population of the entire state of Georgia), we investigate the meanings and contradictions of the Universitys historic ‘North Campus’. Using a multi-method qualitative approach—including open-ended interviews and ‘roving focus groups’—we argue that privileged, white landscapes operate through a kind of whitewashing of history, which seeks to deploy race strategically to create a progressive landscape narrative pertaining to ‘race’.

Street naming and the politics of belonging: spatial injustices in the toponymic commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr

Although the critical turn in place name study recognizes the central and contested place that toponyms hold in peoples lives and identity struggles, little work has explicitly analyzed place naming rights in terms of social justice, citizenship, and belonging. We introduce readers to the naming of streets for slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr and use two brief case studies from the southeastern USA (Statesboro, Georgia and Greenville, North Carolina) to discuss the barriers that hinder the creation of a landscape that truly reflects the teachings of King. Naming opponents, sometimes with the (un)witting cooperation of black activists, impose spatial, scalar limits on the rights of African Americans to participate in the street naming process and to appropriate the identity of streets outside of their neighborhoods, even though challenging historically entrenched patterns of racial segregation and marginalization is exactly the purpose of many street naming campaigns. The case of King streets prompts us to think about place naming as a mechanism of spatial (in)justice, demonstrating the fundamental role that geography plays in constituting and structuring the processes of discrimination or equality.

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.

Violence as fetish Geography, Marxism, and dialectics

The study of violence has increasing academic purchase. However, the academic treatment of violence imparts an ontological status that masks violence from critical scrutiny. We argue for the social sciences to (re)theorize violence and to develop a dialectics of violence. Our purpose is to provide a space for dialogue, to open a broader debate within the social sciences on the theoretical determination of violence. We advocate for a new approach to violence that eschews the development of essentializing typologies or generalized explanations of violence as an epiphenomenon of society.

Contested memory in the birthplace of a king: a case study of Auburn Avenue and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Park:

A critical element in the process of racializing place is the construction of memorial landscapes. Using the Martin Luther King Jr National Historic Site and the surrounding Auburn Avenue community as a case study this paper argues that the sites dedicated to Dr King along Auburn Avenue embody a normative Civil Rights discourse which emphasizes national unity and non-violence and serves to silence and reframe more radical interpretations of Dr Martin Luther King Jrs social thought and action. More specifically the King National Historic Site represents King as a mainstream leader who used the existing democratic structure of US society to affect social change. This is related to the role the King National Historic Site plays in the construction of hegemony. A critical aspect of this process is the way this normative Civil Rights vision is used to market an understanding of the City of Atlanta. Thus the King memorials along Auburn Avenue are important sites to examine the connections between race, place and nation and the way the memorial landscape dedicated to Dr King embodies particular social values and ideas about the historic legacy of race in the United States.

Righting Unrightable Wrongs: Legacies of Racial Violence and the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (GTRC)—the first truth and reconciliation commission ever funded and seated in the United States—was formed in 2000 in response to a Ku Klux Klan shooting of labor activists that occurred in 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Despite overwhelming video and photographic evidence of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party firing weapons into a crowd and killing five people, no one was ever held criminally liable for the deaths of the activists. In 1999 local community organizers began advocating for a truth and reconciliation process modeled after truth commissions in South Africa and Peru. In a broadly conceived qualitative approach that utilizes open-ended interviews and archival research, this project explores the truth process in Greensboro, focusing on the ways in which community members address legacies and memories of violence through reconciliation and grassroots politics. The research exposes the connections between the memory of violence and territoriality to wider academic scrutiny, examines the legacies of violence and race in North America, and contributes to larger discussions surrounding the impact that violence and race have in North American communities.

Neoliberal racism: the ‘Southern Strategy’ and the expanding geographies of white supremacy

This paper examines the US-based ‘Southern Strategy,’ an electoral scheme which created conditions that resurrected a broadly conservative agenda in the USA during the 1970s. While scholars have long studied the Southern Strategy from the standpoint of the electoral and political geography of the USA, its role in transforming the political economy of the USA is underappreciated. By reworking the nature of racism from the overt white supremacy of previous eras the Southern Strategy speaks to the changing socio-spatial manifestations of racism in the USA and the workings of the US political economy. By connecting the Southern Strategy with a broad economic argument this paper crystallizes the role race plays in the development of the US political economy as well as implications for understanding the way race and capitalism in the USA are co-constituted with one another. Through an examination of the Southern Strategy we can trace both the changing coordinates of the US political economy and race as the USA made the transition from Keynesianism to neoliberalism.

Theorizing violence and the dialectics of landscape memorialization: : A case study of Greensboro, North Carolina

The study of the memorialization of landscapes of violence is a vibrant field both within and beyond geography. Previous scholarship has highlighted the contestation that surrounds the memorialization of landscapes of violence as well as the politics of memory that are manifest on the landscape. To date, however, little work has explicitly theorized ‘violence’; this has a tremendous bearing on the understanding of how, or if, certain ‘violent’ acts are remembered or memorialized. This paper constitutes an attempt to denaturalize violence through a foregrounding of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ violence. Through a case study of racialized violence in Greensboro, North Carolina, we argue that geographers and other social scientists must articulate more clearly how violence, as a theoretical construct, is abstracted from the concrete realities of lived experience and represented discursively and materially on the landscape. We conclude that the potential for, and actual realized memorialization of landscapes of, violence is always and already a dialectical process of abstraction.

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.

The politics of being sorry: the Greensboro truth process and efforts at restorative justice

This paper examines the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (GTRC) to better understand the way the truth process in Greensboro, North Carolina intersects with conceptions of restorative justice and geographic understandings of the ‘right to the city.’ The GTRC was a grassroots truth process focused on a shooting of labor organizers in 1979 by Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party Members and the complicity of local officials in the violence. In 2006, the GTRC released its report to the citizens of Greensboro and its recommendations for the city touched off a contentious debate. Using a multi-method qualitative approach—including open-ended interviews and archival research—I argue the GTRC process engages with notions of right to the city activism that challenges the right to the city literature to focus on broader discussions of racism, activism, and white privilege that emerges from critical race scholarship and contributes to the growth of robust, multiracial anticapitalist coalitions; an approach to scholarship on the right to the city that has broad academic purchase for social geography and urban political engagement in general.