“It is the innocence which constitutes the crime”: Political geographies of white supremacy, the construction of white innocence, and the Flint water crisis

Abstract

Using the Flint, Michigan water crisis as a backdrop, this review piece explores the concept of white innocence. The concept of white innocence presents us with an analytic tool to understand the frustrating endurance of white supremacy within the U.S. settler state and how white supremacy operates through a range of geographically grounded practices. This paper makes an explicit link between work on settler colonialism and white innocence outlining how the burgeoning work on settler societies opens space to a productive engagement with the concept of innocence. I contend that white innocence as a concept needs to be more fully grounded in work that engages with settler colonialism and within the United States specifically. White innocence also inculcates the agency of whites in a society that is built through the explicit exploitation of persons of color as well as the way white institutions continue to expose persons of color to a range of negative impacts. This paper begins with a review of the literature on whiteness within geographic research. The last several years has seen a series of important interventions in the literature and geographers are increasingly turning to the concept of white supremacy to explain racism in 21st century U.S. society.

The Flint, Michigan Water Crisis as a Case Study to Introduce Concepts of Equity and Power into an Analytical Chemistry Curriculum

“…In 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan was thrust into the national spotlight over elevated levels of Pb in the municipal drinking water . Details as to how such a humanitarian crisis could arise in a 21st century American city continue to unfold to this day . Through an initial 2 to 3 h guided class discussion, the problem of the Flint water crisis was introduced from the perspective of macrolevel systems (i.e., governmental decision makers) impacting people at the personal level of reality (i.e., water quality) and how that is possible in contemporary America.…”

The Fires Within Us and the Rivers We Form

“…As explained by Inwood (2018), the point is not to downplay the importance of white privilege, but to highlight the ways the topic of white privilege makes it easier for white people to talk about racism, by allowing them to consider involuntary socialization in isolation from historical continuities and individual accountability with regard to racism (Inwood, 2018, p. 5). Thus, while some white people would simply be racist, others consider themselves quasi-helplessly exposed to the consequences that they are privileging from.…”

“…18 When white innocence or innocence in proximity to whiteness (in terms of citizenship, cisnormativity, class etc.) is claimed, it is often a means to avoid responsibility (Inwood, 2018). Many of us have experienced Anthropology, especially in Northern European cultural contexts, as a discipline that relies on white innocence.…”

Geographies of capital punishment: New directions and interventions

“…There are several related areas in which geographers work where a focus on the racist political geographies of capital punishment fits. First, is recent work on the connections between settler colonial states and white supremacy (Bonds & Inwood, 2016; Inwood, 2018; Velednitsky, Hughes, & Machold, 2020). This work suggests that settler colonialism is an ongoing “project of empire enabled by white supremacy” that “focuses on the permanent occupation of a territory and removal of indigenous peoples” (Bonds & Inwood, 2016, p. 716).…”