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With this concluding article, we build off the scholarship from this two-part special issue on white space to recommend meaningful interventions that seek to challenge and dismantle white spaces at the organizational, institutional, and structural levels of U.S. society. We focus on two broad arenas of social space, one geographical (residential neighborhoods) and one institutional (education), in the hopes of generating more engagement from scholars of race and racism in conversations about policies that can meaningfully transform white space. We share experiences from the Systemic Justice Seminar and student activism at Harvard to highlight some innovative ideas about challenging, disrupting, and resisting white space. We suggest ways to think about policies and actions that make visible the tacitly exclusionary mechanisms within white spaces and create ways for BIPOC people and communities to take up space. Lastly, we encourage academic and public communities to continue exploring the best methods for deconstructing white space on the way to creating a more racially equitable society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past two decades, social scientists have begun to explicitly interrogate the racialized economic, political, cultural, and ideological mechanisms of social space. This work interrogates the overt and covert racial organization of social spaces and the ways in which systemic White supremacy is facilitated by racialized space. Drawing on and synthesizing that work we explicate a critical theory of White space, explicating how geographical, physical, cultural, and ideological social spaces reproduce a racialized social structure organized by White supremacy. We argue that White spaces are integral to racialized social systems and global anti-Black racism in ways that not only normalize the existing racial and social order but ensures Whites' fantasy(ies) of complete dominion over place and space, as well as control over brown and Black bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we compare two nationally recognized museums located in Chicago and Boston: The Art Institute of Chicago and the Boston Fine Arts Museum. We find that while both museums are colonial projects and White sanctuaries, there are variations in the racial mechanisms in place that help maintain White supremacy. Specifically, we look at three such mechanisms and compare and contrast between the two museums. We contend our findings suggest that while White supremacy is universal in its national (global) depth and breath, place matters. We argue that the physical context of the museums—their location within each city, the lay out of their locations, and the physical space of the museums themselves—help explain this variation. We end with specific implications for our work, centering on how we might dismantle current ideas of high culture (read: White) in favor of museums that are more inclusive, recognize their colonial project histories, and have antiracism in their mission as socially responsible institutions for the cities in which they reside and the people who reside there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we relied on a mixed-methods approach to examine the contextual fluidities and nuances of racial discourse in a southwestern baked-goods workplace. Specifically, we extend upon previous findings on how stereotypes and slurs are racially unequal in a workplace setting, in order to investigate what is uniquely racist about the deployment of stereotypes and slurs and how racism shapes gendered and classed dimensions of these terms. Further, we empirically demonstrate how gender and class can be constructed along lines of racial ideology at micro-levels of interaction. Our argument is that racetalk does not operate independently or in isolation from other discourses like gendertalk and classtalk. Instead, racist comments are often expressed alongside classist and sexist comments by people, who simultaneously occupy multiple racial, class, and gender locations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a day when many are fatigued with discourse on racism, discrimination, and inequality but others face a socially and politically trenchant White backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement, race scholars are faced with the complex scenario in which they must simultaneously articulate (1) what, when, and where racism operates to exercise both deleterious and advantageous effects on differently racialized actors and (2) exactly why and how racism (especially its “color-blind” variant) functions toward the reproduction of the racialized social system. While scholarship on the former is well rehearsed, we see this special issue as a clarion call for new scholarship to interrogate the precise mechanisms by which color-blind racism and the racialized social system operate. New work on mechanisms gestures (at the least) toward the three directions laid out in this issue: the axiological (the study of values), ontological (the study of being), and epistemological (the study of knowledge) dimensions of social life. Race scholars would be well served to illumine how color-blind racism and the racialized social system hold specific properties and processes by which values, being, and knowledge function intimately and integrally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (NACCD) to examine the 1967 race riots that were taking place in Los Angeles, Chicago, Newark, and Detroit that erupted in the mid-1960s. That report, officially labeled the Kerner Report, outlined structural inequalities in America that privileged whites over other racial and ethnic groups; the report concluded that the United States was headed toward two separate and unequal societies: black and white. Forty-seven years after the Kerner Report where do we stand? In this article, I revisit recent events on police violence toward minorities and give consideration to some thoughts moving forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews how racialization enables an understanding of Muslim and Muslim American experience as racial. Race scholarship in the United States has historically been a Black/White paradigm. As a result, the experiences of many racial and ethnic groups who have become a part of the American landscape due to the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 have largely been ignored in race scholarship. By reviewing racialization and its application to Arabs and Muslims, it is apparent that scholars must continuously explore newer theories and languages of race. Racialization not only provides a way to understand the fluidity of race and racism but it also contributes to the advancement of race scholarship by reflecting on the current contextual influences on race. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent survey research suggests that heterosexuals’ attitudes toward lesbian and gay rights have become more progressive. However, we find in our research that negative attitudes and barriers against gay men and lesbians in workplaces still remain. Our project represents one case study of hidden animosity toward homosexuals, which varies from “overt disgust” to “don’t ask, don’t tell” policies that reinforce negative attitudes toward gay men and lesbians. As such, we contend that attitudes toward lesbian and gay rights are not becoming more progressive; instead various methods of discrimination are increasingly being used to exclude gay men and lesbians from the workplace. We argue that White working class men have constructed and maintained a form of White male solidarity, a collective practice directed toward women, People of Color, and non-heterosexuals that maintains racism, sexism, and homophobia in the local, national, and global context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In post-civil rights America, most whites believe the nation is "beyond race." If confronted with the reality of racial inequality, they proclaim they have nothing to do with it. Their goals in this paper are twofold. First, they suggest whites' new common sense reflects a new, more subtle racial ideology, the ideology of color blind racism. They use data from the 1997 Survey of Social Attitudes of College Students and the 1998 Detroit Area Study to document the central frames of this ideology and examine how most whites use them to explain a variety of racial matters. Second, they argue that racial stratification in the United States is becoming Latin America-like. Another example of this mainstream viewpoint is expressed in interviews where whites often go so far as to deny minority claims of discrimination suggesting that such attitude are helpful, un-American, or American racist. Specifically, they contend racial stratification is becoming tri-racial with a pigmentocratic component to it and that the ideology of color blind racism will bolster this trend. They use a variety of data to test on a preliminary basis our thesis. They conclude examining the implications of this new ideology and racial stratification system for the future of race relations in this country.