To move forward, we must look back: White supremacy at the base of urban studies

Abstract

The concretisation of the Chicago School solidified and inscribed in the city their obsession with the ‘Negro Problem’, race, race relations and (im)migration. Their fixation not only framed modern sociology with an emphasis on the ‘Other’ but cemented a taken-for-granted undergirding of Whiteness at its base. As a discipline, until we can name, point out, understand and highlight that form of violence, urban sociology will be deficient in understanding the city, particularly, but not limited to the US. As an alternative, I offer Du Boisian sociology, critical race theory, and global critical race and racism to aid in moving away from an unstated Whiteness. This article shows how Whiteness is at the base of the urban question and its consequences via the trajectory of the first sociologists of colour trained at the Chicago School, the work on the ghetto, underclass and the effects of such work.

Between Stuart Hall and Cedric Robinson: Capturing Imaginaries of Racial Capitalism

“…In this way, the book ushers in a different path for urban ethnography. While the Chicago school’s approach has prevailed in our discipline, it was anchored in the central premise of studying “social problems,” which in reality often meant studying “the unfamiliar other” of urban spaces, that then had to be translated to a sociological middle-class audience (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020; McKee 1993; Montalva Barba 2022; Rodríguez-Muñiz 2015). Even well-intentioned scholars who sought to show how the “strange other” was still like “us” replicate a colonial fallacy: How does, as Trouillot (2021) reminds us, the question of whether they are human just like us , not replicate the same foundational debates of colonizers, who asked if indigenous peoples of the Americas “were human just like us?” The conversation back then was between colonial intellectuals who articulated the futures on behalf of the native other, and perhaps not much has changed.…”

Surrounds surrounding the South

“…Thus, the periphery (the rest) is always catching up with the metropolis (cf. Houssay-Holzschuch, 2020; Montalva Barba, 2022; Patel, 2018). My own work has highlighted for example, how the notions like ‘world-class’ in planning discourse have been rendered as an aspiration of the periphery to catch up with the metropolis, while a simple reading of usage of world-class in planning documents reveal its rooted, contextual, and local origins (Palat Narayanan, 2020).…”

The trajectory of the colour line in a US immigrant gateway: hyperdiverse spatialization in Los Angeles

“…By contrast, migration scholars sought to update assimilation theory in the face of rapidly changing US demographics, especially the exponential growth of Latino and Asian populations. Even as urban and migration studies diverged, however, scholars in both fields remained centrally concerned with neighborhoods and with integration into an often-reified White mainstream (see Jiménez and Horowitz 2013;Korver-Glenn et al 2021;Montalva Barba 2022). Our goal in this paper is to use the neighborhood as an analytical bridge for studying urbanization and migration while avoiding teleological or normative assumptions about convergence towards Whiteness.…”