This commentary uses the Black Geographies Symposium, held at UC Berkeley from October 11-12, 2017, as a point of departure to discuss the political and intellectual limits of calls for dialogue. We focus specifically on the historical exclusion of Black scholars and Black thought from human geography and understand the academy as a site for the reproduction of epistemic violence against women and people of color. Calls for dialogue within the academy that neglect to consider historically sedimented power relations—including human geography’s own entanglement with colonialism and racism—therefore commit the grave error of substituting equity for true justice. We argue instead for nonhierarchical and nonlinear modes of study that can attend to the complex geographical itineraries and interconnected struggles that continue to shape our understandings of the relations of capitalism, racism, and sexism structuring the modern world. Specifically, an intellectual praxis that begins from a place of Black humanness can enable us to tap into a wider epistemological network, one that refutes cursory lip service to Black scholarship and engages deeply with its consequences for our political and intellectual interactions.

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In this article, we show how routine policing is conscripted into the project of maintaining and reproducing spatial racism in urban settings through an intersecting set of macro-level processes and micro-interactional practices. Our analysis of ethnographic interviews conducted with over 40 police officers during 20 ride-alongs in the Western United States identifies person- and place-specific heuristic classifications that police officers rely on to manage routine encounters. We find that officers use membership categorization devices to sort people and places in the city into distinct categories (e.g., nice places, normal people, the projects, and people in the projects), which, in turn, prefigure different orientations to action at the start of and throughout their encounters with the public. Our findings provide an empirical basis for thinking of professional police knowledge as encoding systemic racism in routine policing, rather than being a break from it.

Development campaigns in Oakland, California advance gentrification in the city through the use of Black visual cultures. Black communities that produce this culture are in turn displaced by processes of gentrification. This article proposes two concepts, the "Black geographic image" and "emancipatory framing", to explain methods for interrupting this visual exploitation and reclaiming space for Black visual culture in Oakland. I analyse the connections between visual aesthetics, geography, and racialised identities by drawing on ethnographic interviews and the photographic works of Oakland artist and entrepreneur, Sunflower Love. I suggest that her photos exemplify a Black geographic image-making process; these images rebuke a two-dimensional production of space in favour of a trialectic form of representation that highlights the value of a Black experience of place. How Sunflower uses these images to advance her business is a form of emancipatory framing, in which she unsettles hegemonic racialising images while still working within capitalistic strictures to generate income for herself. The paper concludes by arguing that these visual negotiations are integral to ongoing contestations over the identity of, and therefore spatio-political claims to, Oakland as a Black city.