Laura R. Barraclough

South Central Farmers and Shadow Hills Homeowners: Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles∗

This article draws from the recent relational turn in geography to develop a model of relational racialization. It argues that racism functions through the legal and discursive production of linked, interdependent, and unequal places. By comparing two social movements in Los Angeles, the South Central Farmers and the Shadow Hills homeowners, I examine two spatial discourses through which race is relationally reproduced: unequal abilities to mobilize the entitlements of “property rights” and unequal claims to represent hegemonic forms of local heritage. When materialized and naturalized in land use policy, these discourses re-create racial disparities in wealth and poverty and reproduce the qualitative nature of the physical places on which racism depends.

U.S.-Mexico Border Studies Online Collaboration: Transformative Learning Across Power and Privilege

In response to the national conversation about the U.S.-Mexico border and immigration in recent years, we created an online partnership between students in concurrent border studies courses at our two campuses: a public Hispanic-serving institution in South Texas and a private, small liberal arts college in Michigan. We explored whether and how the tensions between privileged and disadvantaged students documented in the traditional classroom would manifest online, and how we could use virtual technologies most effectively to structure transformative learning, defined as recognition and articulation of the structural and cultural systems that frame individual experience and meaning-making, across difference. As we document in this essay, tensions around racial, class, and educational inequality did occur in our partnership. Yet these tensions were crucial in creating the conditions for transformative learning because they generated “disorienting dilemmas” that challenged students’ assumptions and knowledge. Our intentional integration of critical multiculturalist curriculum and pedagogical practices (especially embodied, facilitated online interactions) capitalized upon those conditions. By the end of the partnership, both groups of students experienced significant—but distinctive—trajectories of transformative learning that unsettled not only their individual understandings, but also the dynamics of power that characterize the higher education landscape. Given the polarization wrought by border and immigration discourse and educational policies that will likely produce increasingly segregated campuses in years to come, such online partnerships show promise for critical multiculturalist educators seeking to create opportunities for learning across difference and inequality.

The Western Spirit of ’76: The American Bicentennial and the Making of Conservative Multiculturalism in the Mountain West

This article explores the dynamics of bicentennial planning and celebration in the Mountain West. Amid the charged political climate of the 1960s and 1970s, the Bicentennial facilitated the emergence of a western version of conservative multiculturalism, which adopts the language of diversity and inclusion without changing structures of power.

book review: Cities of Whiteness. By Wendy Shaw. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 2007. xii + 218 pp. £19.99/

Cities of Whiteness makes several interventions in the transdisciplinary study of whiteness. Its most valuable contribution is to show how whiteness is constituted in reference to indigeneity, thus deepening connections between postcolonial studies and critical race studies. Human geographers are poised to mine such linkages by analysing spatial processes of land access, entitlement, and exclusion, and Shaw has taken an admirable step toward this goal. She conducted ethnographic, media, and archival research in the gentrifying neighborhoods surrounding ‘The Block’, an Aboriginal settlement formed in 1973 in Sydney’s deindustrializing core. Since Sydney’s neighborhoods and labor markets are less obviously organized by race than the US or Britain, which have dominated studies of whiteness, Shaw’s geographic focus enables investigation of whiteness’s greater subtleties. Shaw’s primary goal is to move beyond an understanding of ‘whiteness as ethnicity’ that she (perhaps exaggeratedly) claims has dominated its study. Instead, whiteness is conceived as constituted through ‘processes that privilege’ consisting, in this study, of discourses and activisms embedded in urban transformations. The media and residents in the neighborhoods surrounding The Block express fear and besiegement by Aboriginal poverty, unemployment, and drug use based on presumptions of indigenous savagery, ‘natural’ place in the Outback (i.e., not in urban areas), and impending extinction. Gentrifiers enact these discourses through resident action groups focused on preserving Victorian terrace houses and attendant constructions of colonial heritage, while simultaneously purchasing loft-style apartments marketed using fantasies of ‘Manhattanization’. Both discourses absolve gentrifiers from responsibility for or connection to the here and now; theirs is a multiculturalism based solely on consumerism, guarded by fortress housing from the realities and inequalities of the street. Collectively, Shaw argues, these forces reproduce the spatiality of colonial formations – white entitlement and the exclusion, displacement, and impoverishment of indigenous people. Shaw’s conceptualization of whiteness as the outcome of ‘processes that privilege and/or dominate’ (p. 33) is provocative, but raises theoretical and methodological difficulties. If whiteness is everything that is privileged, it loses its specificity, instead becoming monolithic and abstract. Indeed, fractures by gender, class, sexuality, and citizenship are ignored in her study. Another tricky matter is that Shaw has chosen to virtually omit indigenous voices in order to expose the vagaries of whiteness, which are usually made invisible in representations of The Block. The effect, however, is to falsely render The Block’s indigenous residents passive spectators to gentrification with no theories on whiteness. Nonetheless, given their potential to realign several intersecting fields, Shaw’s theoretical arguments deserve serious attention from a variety of scholars.