In many liberal predominantly white neighborhoods, white residents view their communities as inclusive yet they also engage in racialized surveillance to monitor individuals they perceive as outsiders. Some of these efforts center on people of color in neighborhood open spaces. We use a diversity ideology framework to analyze this contradiction, paying particular attention to how residents of color experience racialized surveillance of their neighborhood’s publicly accessible parks and swimming pools. This article draws on data from neighborhood documents, neighborhood digital platforms, and interviews with residents of a liberal, affluent, predominantly white community that was expressly designed with public spaces open to non-residents. We find that resident surveillance of neighborhood public spaces is racialized, occurs regularly, and happens in person and on neighborhood online platforms where diversity as liability rhetoric is conveyed using colorblind discourse. These monitoring efforts, which are at times supported by formal measures, impact residents of color to varying degrees. We expand on diversity ideology by identifying digital and in-person racialized surveillance as a key mechanism by which white residents attempt to enforce racialized boundaries and protect whiteness in multiracial spaces and by highlighting how Black and Latinx residents, in particular, navigate these practices.

This paper examines women’s use of the notable red and white handmaid costume from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale at political demonstrations following the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Drawing on ten in-depth ethnographic interviews with women who participated in handmaid chapters, my study finds that interviewees began to wear the handmaid costume at political protests because they increasingly saw parallels between the United States and Gilead—the totalitarian society in Atwood’s novel—as a result of the 2016 election. Participants viewed the costume as a feminist symbol that enabled them to increase awareness about women’s issues, particularly related to reproductive justice. Additionally, interviewees saw the anonymity of the costume as a way to represent all women, especially those who were unable to participate in such protests. This study extends existing scholarship on social movements and women’s activism in the United States by exploring women’s reasons for involvement in this new form of protest and their use of dystopian popular culture as the basis of their performance activism.

Prior studies have focused on ways that White residents in predominantly White neighborhoods monitor their community for suspicious people and how these practices are racialized. However, only limited attention has been given to how residents of color in such neighborhoods experience these surveillance efforts. In this article, we explore how mostly White neighbors conduct on-the-ground monitoring of people of color in their daily lives, a process that we call “racialized coveillance.” Using data from neighborhood digital platforms, neighborhood materials, and 24 interviews with residents of color of an affluent, predominantly White community, we find that residents’ racialized coveillance sometimes misidentifies residents of color as suspicious outsiders. These efforts take the form of posts uploaded to the neighborhood’s social media sites, calls to the police, and in-person encounters. Such practices occur regularly and affect residents of color to varying degrees with Black male residents bearing the brunt of such efforts. As a result, we argue that racialized coveillance creates hostile territories for some residents of color in predominantly White neighborhoods, which contributes to the reproduction of these settings as White spaces.