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In this paper I examine the importance of 'race' and racialization in conflicts over the siting of human service facilities. Little consideration has been given to the way in which racialization shapes community reactions to client groups, and the idea that NIMBY reactions facilitate the reproduction of white privilege. I explore these issues using a case study of community opposition to 'special needs' housing in San Pedro, California. Analysis demonstrates that some facility opponents racialized client groups in an attempt to defend the socio-spatial privileges of whiteness. Opponents also used a romanticized and 'whitened' construction of community to mark 'special needs' clients out of place. However, other community members used European ethnic identities to mark the whiteness of middle-class opponents. The case study provides insight into the racialization of need, and the way in which whiteness is struggled over within specific social contexts. It also contributes to an understanding of how claims to European ethnicity may be used to veil and/or challenge white privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent symposium on the geographies of disability at the 2007 Association of American Geographers meeting attracted papers and panel contributions from 46 researchers. In this commentary, we draw on the content of the symposium to discuss recent developments in disability geography scholarship. We focus on three broad themes that ran through many of the contributions. These are: the evolving parameters of disability and chronic illness; the complex relationship between disabilities and technologies; and the struggle for citizenship.