Race, Language and the Urban Landscape: On Material Effects of Racialized Identity Formations

Abstract

An immense body of work already exists with respect to the relationship between race and the modern landscape which demonstrates the depths of the racial dimension of America’s urban development. Statistics show that in the decades since the Civil Rights Movement, segregation and particularly the hyper-segregation of whites has grown. Distance between racial groups is evident in practically every area of social life, from housing, employment, and education to health, political access and representation, and involvement with the criminal justice system. Over a century of de jure white supremacy in the United States has effectively resulted, in keeping with the 1968 prediction of the Kerner Commission, in “two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal.” Racialized residential discrimination and the struggles both to enact and dismantle it have had an extremely influential effect on America’s degeneration into its standard form of a racially-dual society.