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The Free Southern Theater was a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) initiative that wanted to bring theatrical performance to rural communities in the deep Southeastern United States. To interpret the critical praxis and broader analytical importance of the Free Southern Theater, we develop and apply two conceptual frameworks: radical placemaking and epistemic violence/justice. As we assert in this paper, the theater program was demonstrative of the fundamental but radical ways SNCC sought to remake places and institutions and create new ones that would respond to the struggles of poor Black southerners, build community capacity for social change, reaffirm visions of Black belonging, and provide respite and self-care for racism-weary communities. The Free Southern Theater also reflected the value that SNCC placed on mobilizing information, communication, and the politics of representation to combat white supremacy, while also articulating and legitimizing an explicitly Black vision of society and space.

Responding to recent work in critical cartographic studies and Black Geographies, the purpose of this paper is to offer a conceptual framework and a set of evocative cartographic engagements that can inform geography as it recovers the seldom discussed history of counter-mapping within the African American Freedom Struggle. Black resistant cartographies stretch what constitutes a map, the political work performed by maps, and the practices, spaces, and political-affective dimensions of mapping. We offer an extended illustration of the conventional and unconventional mapping behind USA anti-lynching campaigns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, highlighting the knowledge production practices of the NAACP and the Tuskegee Institute’s Monroe Work, and the embodied counter-mapping of journalist/activist Ida B. Wells. Recognizing that civil rights struggles are long, always unfolding, and relationally tied over time and space, we link this look from the past to contemporary, ongoing resistant cartographical practices as scholars/activists continue to challenge racialized violence and advance transitional justice, including the noted memory-work of the Equal Justice Initiative. An understanding of African American traditions of counter-mapping is about more than simply inserting the Black experience into our dominant ideas about cartography or even resistant mapping. Black geographies has much to teach cartography and geographers about what people of color engaged in antiracist struggles define as geographic knowledge and mapping practices on their own terms—hopefully provoking a broader and more inclusive definition of the discipline itself.

Scholars are increasingly studying memory-work as an essential place-defining force within cities, but few scholars have analyzed urban redevelopers as agents of memory-work. Using the Mont...

This article advances three interrelated arguments. First, by focusing on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) Research Department, an undertheorized chapter in the civil rights m...

To understand and contextualize Donald Trump's election as President of the United States, we must place his election in the context of a white counter-revolutionary politics that emerging from the specific geographic configurations of the US racial state. While academics and political commentators have correctly located the election of Trump in the context of white supremacy, I argue we need to coordinate our understanding of white supremacy and the electoral politics that fueled Trump's rise in the context of anti-Black racism by examining how the US racial state turns to whiteness to prevent change. Throughout the development of the United States, whiteness has long stood as a bulwark against progressive and revolutionary change so much so that when the US racial state is in economic and political crisis, bourgeoisie capitalism appeals to the white middle and working classes to address that crisis.

We revisit Martin Luther King Jr’s famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail (2013 [1963]), using his words to frame our thinking about the promise, limits, and efficacy of dialogue. The life and death politics of everyday oppressed people should directly inform any consideration of the merits of scholars engaging in (or disengaging from) dialogue, what they ultimately say, and with whom they engage in dialogue and political action. The stakes are too high—for the academy, broader society, and especially for those groups who bear the direct burden of injustice—not to engage in scholarly dialogue and debate. It is also important for scholars to communicate in resonant ways and enhance the value of their academic dialogue to oppressed groups. The most significant threat to scholarly dialogue is not necessarily from extremists; rather, the challenge lies in creating consequential dialogue with those who remain silent and indifferent in the face of what King called ‘the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed’.

This special forum, derived from a featured session at the 2017 meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in Boston, seeks to carry out a grounded discussion of public intellectualis...

Through our engagement with the ‘Freedom Singers’, we advocate for approaching the archive through the racial politics of atmosphere to understand both the affective, emotion-laden practices of the past and the affective work carried out by contemporary researchers within the archive. This atmosphere provides an important pathway for identifying and analyzing the relationality and encounters that advance a fuller study of the black experience and define what (and who) constitutes critical actors in that story. The Freedom Singers and their politico-musical legacy, while lost to many members of the public and even many scholars, offer an important lesson in broadening our appreciation of civil rights practice, as well as the practice of archival research itself. This piece contributes to broader understandings of the archive as an affective space and the role of affect in analyzing archive materials.

A number of U.S. universities are embroiled in debates over the longtime commemoration and valorization of white supremacy through the campus landscape. Recognizing place naming as a legitimate political arena, activists have called for—and in some instances succeeded—in removing from university buildings the names of historical figures shrouded in racial controversy. For the broader public and even sympathetic higher education officials, there is a lack of understanding about why these demands are important and even less recognition about the violence that racially insensitive place naming inflicts on the belonging of marginalized groups. Instead, the renaming of campus landscapes is understood as merely an act of political correctness and thus campus authorities have offered uneven and incomplete solutions in the name of progressive reform. Applying recent innovations in race and memory studies, specifically the ideas of wounded places and memory work, we situate ongoing university place naming ...

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.

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.

This manuscript engages with the U.S. civil rights movement and offers reflections on how critical scholarship and pedagogy can benefit from a robust engagement with the African American freedom struggle. While widely studied in other disciplines and despite the work of some very committed geographers, the U.S. civil rights movement has enjoyed less critical scrutiny within the broader discipline. More specifically, I outline a set of broader concepts that can be utilized and which illustrate the power of grass-roots social movements to change oppressive social conditions. This has implications not only for social and cultural geography, but also for the ways we engage in the hard and often unrewarded work of classroom engagement and teaching.

Across the United States, communities encumbered by violence, economic injustice, legacies of oppression and continued social, economic, and political marginalization are increasingly turning toward truth and reconciliation commissions (TRC) to address and remedy persistent inequality. While modeled after the international truth movement, TRCs in the United States are often not state-sanctioned and characterized by fundamental differences that beg the question: How are peace and justice dialectically linked to, and flow from geographic specific understandings of violence? Drawing from the TRC experiences of Greensboro (NC) and Detroit (MI), this paper examines the way communities that were burdened with a history of violence are turning toward TRCs as viable vehicles for addressing violence and inequality in contemporary US society. This paper furthers our understanding of the geographic ruptures violence creates in communities and the often hidden realities that the legacy and memory of violence has for oppressed people in the United States.

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...

This article explores spatial mobility as a form of African American resistance and self-determination. We argue for examining the everyday activism and “countermobility work” of ordinary people of color as they move in ways that subvert, negotiate, and survive white supremacy. These ideas are developed through a historical case study not typically identified with the black civil rights struggle, specifically the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) and the “hard driving” of Wendell Scott. The first and only African American driver to win at NASCAR's top level, Scott raced throughout the segregated South and faced considerable discrimination in what was otherwise an all-white sport. We offer a critical (re)reading of Scott's racing career as antiracism mobility work and focus on the bodily, social, and technological practices he employed to maintain and even enhance his mobility around tracks and to and from races. Scott did not represent his efforts in terms of civil rights activism, b...

On 17 June 2015 Dylann Roof, a self-avowed white supremacist, walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church and sat down for a Bible study. After spending forty-five minutes attending the service, he pulled a Glock 41.45 caliber handgun from his backpack and opened fire, killing nine people. Roof then fled and was ultimately arrested twenty-four hours later in North Carolina. Of the nine killed the oldest was 87 year old Susie Jackson, and the youngest was 26 year old Tywanza Sanders. After his arrest Roof claimed that he assassinated the members of Emanuel AME Church in the hopes of igniting a broader race war. Indeed, photographs later emerged and went viral of Roof engaged in racist exhibitions and hate speech in the past, in particular the flying of the controversial and insensitive Confederate battle flag. In the aftermath of the Charleston massacre, we saw renewed efforts to remove Confederate symbols from across the South's public spaces, with South Carolina legislators finally voting to remove the flag from the state capitol grounds. In addition, the nation witnessed the grace of survivors in forgiving Roof. These were meaningful and symbolic steps that, thankfully, had the opposite effect than the one the white supremacist shooter had intended. While it is undeniably tragic that nine innocent people had to die before political leaders realized what many African Americans have known and lived with for generations, it is also indicative of a nation that whitewashes the connections between the material realities of white supremacy and its grounding in historical memory. The Confederate flag is a highly charged reminder of legacies of racism that have long been employed by racists to intimidate the black community and to oppose those struggling for racial equality. The banner of the secessionist, pro-slavery southern government had largely faded from memory and sight in the years after the Civil War, but it reappeared not coincidentally after World War II as a symbol of [End Page 9] conservative white resistance to what was then the nascent Civil Rights Movement. African Americans who famously protested segregated bussing in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 have vivid memories of being pelted with balloons filled with urine, which were thrown from cars and trucks decorated with Confederate flags. In 1959, in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, school officials in Fairfax, Virginia named and opened a new high school after Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart (Shapiro 2015). Many communities carried out similar not-so-subtle strategies of defending white supremacy under the guise of southern heritage and pride. The landscape has retained major traces of these racist symbols and, as a result of the Charleston Massacre, these symbols are being challenged well beyond the removal of the Confederate flag. As activists and others from across the United States recognize, challenging the legitimacy of publicly displaying Confederate flags and other symbols that legitimize the defense of slavery and white supremacy is certainly the right thing to do. Yet these calls should not be mistaken for a solution to structural inequality. In particular, while state legislators from across the South should be applauded for taking down Confederate symbols, that is not the same thing as addressing the deeply entrenched social and spatial conditions that allow white supremacy to permeate not just the Charleston AME church but wider swaths of American life. This contradictory reality--addressing the symbols of a racist heritage without challenging the foundational histories and geographies of racism--raises questions about the relationship between violence, race and memory (Tyner et al. 2014). These questions are seldom discussed in our post-Charleston Nine social world. Language: en

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 ...

Using one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s last public pronouncements as a foundation, we argue that access to public transportation is an important civil right in the United States and that public transportation continues to have a direct bearing on economic opportunities of poor people of color as well as their general right to the city and its many spaces and place-based resources. Almost fifty years since King’s assassination, public transportation systems also continue to be important arenas for reinforcing but also challenging racism and discrimination. This paper, written by geographers and a community activist, connects the broader African American experience to a critical understanding of the racialized politics of mobility. Through a case study of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, we argue that a contemporary challenge facing many communities is not just one of getting equitable access to public transportation or planning transport in a more opportunity-producing way, but the contemporary situation is even more dire as activists fight simply to keep public transportation a reality in cities across the United States. Abstract: Usando como base uno de las ultimas declaraciones publicas de Martin Luther King Jr., argumentamos que el acceso al transporte publico es un derecho civil importante en los Estados Unidos y que el transporte publico continua influyendo directamente en las oportunidades economicas de la gente pobre de color, asi como en sus derechos generales a la ciudad y sus muchos espacios y recursos basados en el lugar. Casi cincuenta anos desde el asesinato de King, los sistemas de transporte publico tambien continuan siendo importantes ambitos donde se refuerzan pero tambien se desafian el racismo y la discriminacion. Este articulo, escrito por geografos y un activista de la comunidad, conecta la experiencia afro-americana general a una comprension critica de la racializacion de las politicas de movilidad. A traves de un estudio de caso de Baton Rouge, Luisiana, sostenemos que el reto actual al que se enfrentan muchas comunidades no es solo conseguir un acceso equitativo al transporte publico o de planificacion de transporte en una manera que produzca oportunidad, sino que la situacion es aun mas grave ya que los activistas estan luchando simplemente para hacer que el transporte publico siga siendo una realidad en las ciudades de los Estados Unidos.

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.

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.

Although the critical turn in place name study recognizes the central and contested place that toponyms hold in people's 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 stree...

In 1967 Dr Martin Luther King Jr began organizing a “Poor People's Campaign” in an effort to bring 3000 families to Washington, DC to address widespread poverty in the US. King's efforts were the culmination of a political transformation that he underwent in the middle of the 1960s concerning his views on Vietnam and US global hegemony. I argue that by focusing on King and the US Poor People's Campaign we can better understand the changing coordinates of the US political economy, what has been termed the “state mode of production” or SMP Associated with the gradual decline of the Keynesian state, the SMP refers to new kinds of politicospatial arraignments that emerged during the 20th century and continue the process of capital accumulation. I maintain that in the United States the political-economic transformations encapsulated through the growth of the SMP are inseparable from the USA's racial legacy. Hence the failure of the US civil rights struggle to remake economic processes demonstrates the limits of social democratic movements to fully critique capitalism. For this reason King's efforts at leading the Poor People's Campaign are a model of social and political engagement that has purchase in the wake of current economic and political crises and is transforming contemporary economic processes across the globe.

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 app...

A substantial literature in social sciences, including law and society, examines the intersections of research ethics and institutional review board (IRB) frameworks. Although geographers have engaged this literature, we argue that further involvement in ethical and regulatory discussions will advance opportunities for better understanding and negotiating the complex subjectivities produced in the IRB structure. Drawing on illustrative experiences of researchers, we focus specifically on the institutions convening IRBs, the researchers, and the human “subjects” produced in the IRB process. We conclude with a call for greater open discussion of the power dynamics, subjectivities, and challenges of formal ethical research structures.

Recognizing the connections between the construction of urban space and racial identity, this article explores an urban redevelopment scheme launched in 2004 by Big Bethel ame Church in Atlanta, Ge...

The modern study of the American South has undergone a decade long resurgence in Geography and has come to be defined by questions of inequality and social justice. This resurgence represents an innovative approach to geographic scholarship, the outlines of which, contribute to a broadly theorized social justice/critical geographic engagement. Building upon this foundation this paper incorporates recent methodological and intellectual engagements with the American South through a focus on the 1901 Alabama State Constitution in an effort to outline scholarship grounded in social justice. The 1901 Constitution created the legal justification for the segregation of the races and was the product of white supremacist ideology. This in itself is unremarkable. Almost all state constitutions in the South were written under similar circumstances. Instead what makes the Alabama State Constitution an interesting case study is the fact that it was never rewritten. Thus the Alabama Constitution is an example of how the legacy of Jim Crow Segregation, and the white supremacy that formed a foundation for larger political, social, and economic inequality, continues to haunt the landscapes of the American South. Finally this paper is an opportunity to think about the broader legacies of inequality in the U.S. South and how legacies of displacement and racial segregation continue to operate long after the last vestiges of segregation were supposedly torn down. Abstract: El estudio moderno del Sur de los Estados Unidos ha experimentado un resurgimiento en la geografia a lo largo de una decada, y ha llegado a ser definido por interrogantes sobre desigualdad y justicia social. Este resurgimiento representa un enfoque innovador para la disciplina geografica, de cual las bases, contribuyen a los ampliamente teorizados justicia social / acercamiento geografico critico. A partir de esta base, el presente documento incorpora acercamientos metodologicos e intelectuales recientes con el Sur de los Estados Unidos a traves de un enfoque en la Constitucion del Estado de Alabama de 1901, en un esfuerzo por esbozar la actividad academica basada en la justicia social. La Constitucion de 1901creo la justificacion legal para la segregacion de las razas, y fue el producto de la ideologia de la supremacia blanca. Esto en si mismo es irrelevante. Casi todas las constituciones de los estados del sur fueron escritas en circunstancias similares. En cambio, lo que hace la Constitucion del Estado de Alabama un estudio de caso interesante es el hecho de que nunca se volvio a escribir. Por lo tanto, la Constitucion de Alabama es un ejemplo de como el legado de la segregacion de Jim Crow, y la supremacia blanca que dieron paso a una mayor desigualdad politica, social, y economica, sigue presente en los paisajes del Sur de los Estados Unidos. Finalmente, este trabajo es una oportunidad para pensar acerca de los legados generales de la desigualdad en el Sur de los Estados Unidos, y como el legado del desplazamiento y la segregacion racial siguen funcionando mucho tiempo despues de que los ultimos vestigios de la segregacion fueron supuestamente eliminados.

Utilizing redevelopment plans created by Central Atlanta Progress, this study explores the process of constructing a heritage tourist landscape on Atlanta's Auburn Avenue. Once home to the wealthiest African American community in the United States, Auburn Avenue went through a period of economic decline in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2000, planners for the City of Atlanta focused on redeveloping the Auburn Avenue corridor. At that time, Central Atlanta Progress began to update plans to convert Auburn Avenue into the United States' premier African American tourist destination. Utilizing those plans, this article argues that the city's redevelopment vision ties into particular aspects of African American identity, which link to neoliberal economic policies in an effort to turn Auburn Avenue into a "culturetainment" district. This vision is juxtaposed against the reaction of community residents who seek an alternative redevelopment vision.

4 April 2008 marked the 40th anniversary of Dr King's assassination in Memphis, Tennessee. Since his murder we have seen Dr King's message of social justice, the growing threat of militarism, the threat the USA's burgeoning empire posed, and his goal of ending injustice boiled down to a few words spoken in Washington DC when he declared his dream to see his children grow up in a society free of race prejudice. This paper engages with Dr King's work and presents a more geographically sophisticated understanding of King's legacy than the oft repeated Washington speech. Through an analysis of Dr King's concept of the Beloved Community, I argue that Dr King's work stems from the experiences of the Black Atlantic world. Consequently, we should see Dr King's social theory as part of a larger anti-colonial struggle which sought to integrate African American and Western notions of community, which holds contemporary importance as a counterpoint to current neoliberal conceptions of community.

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 Jr's 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.

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 University's 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’.

Using Delaney’s conception of the legalized landscape, this paper seeks to understand the intersection of race and power in the everyday experiences of an African-American woman. Using Delaney’s theory to understand the Jim Crow-era experiences of Wilhelmina Griffin Jones and her interaction with a white police officer offers clues about how the visible, legalized landscape and the metaphysical, conceptualized legalized landscape are manifest in the everyday realm. Furthermore, by asserting the importance of the everyday experiences of African Americans and whites during segregation, this paper comes to a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which resistance and power became enacted through these interactions.

This response to Morrison et al.’s work on love focuses on the uncritical use of ‘the Other’ in geographic scholarship and in geographies of affect and emotion more centrally. While broadly sympathetic to the arguments outlined in ‘Critical geographies of love as spatial, relational, and political’, I am concerned that in trying to critique the social sciences for an uncritical account of love the authors may fall into the same essentialist trap. The accounting of a singular and amorphous ‘Other’ in geographic scholarship flattens out difference and creates exclusionary boundaries that reinforce theoretical and subjective divisions that become sutured to the workings of white supremacy both within the discipline and also in wider society.

Across the United States, people in communities burdened by economic injustice and political marginalization, violence, and longstanding legacies of oppression are turning towards truth and reconciliation commissions as an innovative way to address persistent inequalities. Such commissions have been organized under government auspices in other countries dealing with the aftermath of terrible civil wars and ethnic violence. In the United States, the process is driven from the grass roots rather than by government officials. How does this mechanism actually work in American communities as a form of community organizing for social justice?

In this article we highlight the changing geographies of race and racism, from the era of European colonialism to the present. We emphasize the co-constitution of race and space and highlight how epistemological understandings of ‘race’ greatly inform racist practice. Our objective in this article is to consider the legacy and malleability of racial discourse and how the construction of ‘race’ has material consequences. Special emphasis is placed on eugenics, racial formation theory, and critical race theory.

Scholarship in Geography and other disciplines understands race as a social construction (Inwood and Martin 2008; Melamed 2006; Hoelscher 2003; Nash 2003; Delaney 2002; Holloway 2000; Omi and Winant 1994). This line of reasoning argues that ideas about race are historically created and contemporarily recreated, enforced and manifest through everyday actions (Marable 2002). As geographers have increasingly focused on the ways in which the social construction of race is related to the construction of particular places and spatial relations, a consensus has emerged that place and race are inextricably linked (Kobayashi and Peake 2000). These connections between place and race have led Holloway (2000, p. 197) to observe that we need to uncover and unpack the relationship between race and place and conceptualize it within its historical and geographical frameworks. An integral aspect of placing the concept of race within a spatial context is the examination of the relationship between the construction of racialized identities and the racialization of place. With this broad recognition in mind, the idea for this special issue of GeoJournal emerged from a series of organized sessions at the 2007 Association of American Geographers meeting held in San Francisco, California. The sessions were organized around an exploration of the ways race is dialectically linked with constructions of place and space. Processes of racialization involve the use of biological criteria (i.e. phenotype etc.) to separate people into distinct groups for the purpose of domination and exploitation. For example, since modern U.S. society was historically founded on concepts of racial exclusion, race remains integral to the contemporary workings of state policy and affects the lives of all members of society. Goldberg (2002, p. 49) suggests, ‘‘[modern U.S. society] has been about increasingly sophisticated forms of racial formation, power and exclusion’’, which in turn require more sophisticated forms of analysis. Thus social scientists have sought to discern how and to what degree such processes of racialization have resulted in the construction of individual and group identities within specific historical and geographic contexts (e.g. Pulido 2006; Bonilla-Silva 2004). Racialization of place is a process of constructing particular geographic landscapes that help define and reinforce racialized social hierarchies, thus facilitating domination and exploitation. As co-editors of this issue, we worked collaboratively on this introductory piece. As such, we share responsibility for any errors or omissions.