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

Abstract

Chinese

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.

Keywords

race/ethnicity diversity/cohesion/segregation agglomeration/urbanisation social justice displacement/gentrification critical race theory Du Bois

Ideas and institutions

The origin story of urban sociology centralises the Chicago School (CS) as the first scientific sociological department to focus on studying social problems in urban cities (Abbott, 1999: Hunter, 2013; Kurtz, 1984; Yu, 2001). The CS is profoundly influential, and many scholars and disciplines understand the city, space, place and its inhabitants via their work (Yu, 2000). This article traces the academic gaze of the CS from its foundation to the contemporary period, based on its obsession with the ‘Negro problem’, race and race relations, (im)migration and the consequences of that work. The CS established an American sociological tradition that imposed a White institutional gaze that normalised White supremacy as a largely unnamed reference point. The CS cemented an unnamed Whiteness by racialising and minoritising spaces and places, thus marking the bodies of non-Whites to specific geographical areas. For example, when speaking on the division of labour and segregation in the city, Burgess ([1925]1967: 56–57) states, ‘for segregation offers the group, and thereby the individuals who compose the group, a place and a role in the total organization of city life’– assigning a role to non-Whites based on spatially tied characteristics created a unified representation of them, benefiting Whiteness, White supremacy and the continual settler colonial emplacement. Until we can name, point out, understand the violence and realise the implications between institutions and the expert knowledge produced (Foucault, 2003), urban studies will not divest from global White supremacy.

Whiteness in the city has always been a referential yet unstated category. Whiteness informs conceptions of proper citizenship and marks some places and bodies as the ‘Other’. It is essential to note that ‘White’ is situated in place and time (Haney López, 1996). Whiteness is the cultural, social, economic, behavioural, material and emotional embodiment of White supremacy that strategically functions by asserting its normalcy and invisibility (Clarke and Garner, 2009; DiAngelo, 2018; Frankenberg, 1997; Roithmayr, 2014) or as Fields and Fields (2014) write: it is taken as social institutions. The initial referential category of Whiteness and citizenship only included Northern European, other White ethnicities were incorporated later. Whiteness is inseparable from conceptions of the city, social problems and characterisations of (im)migrants (Lipsitz, 2011; Powell, 1997; Pulido, 2017), as they are marked by differences based on social institutions.

Understanding race and race relations by the CS began from a biological (social Darwinist) perspective, replaced by a cultural–biological (psychosocial and psychobiological) perspective focusing on temperaments, cycles, zones, mentalities and accommodation. They were later supplanted to a purely cultural analysis focusing on Black behaviour and culture, succeeded by a class analysis, which ultimately maintained its initial pathology-driven understanding of non-Whites based on a bio-cultural perspective.

While it may seem that Whiteness and citizenship are stable categories, critical race theory (CRT) has shown that such categories have remained helpful because they are malleable and fluid, bending to protect the interests of White supremacy and the settler class. The central objective is to problematise urban studies’ conceptions and foundations by highlighting the role of an (un)marked Whiteness deeply embedded in urban literature. By fixating on non-White communities, the CS, in partnership with city officials, institutionalised violence by converging on their Otherness while ignoring the taken for granted ‘normalcy’ of White middle- and upper-classes, thus, institutionalising their difference in the studies generated and their utilisation in city policies and programmes – slum/ghetto clearances, welfare reform policies, urban renewal, over-policing, mass incarceration – concretising the relations of space, place and bodies.

Part I narrates the history of the CS and focuses on some of the key founding members, Small, Park and Thomas. This history is vital as it sets the tone for what would become the basis for thinking about the urban, its inhabitants and how scholars of colour were incorporated into the CS. Part II elaborates on the theories deployed, focusing on non-Whites while measuring them using White middle-class standards, focusing on the ghetto and the underclass. Part III centres on Du Boisian sociology and race-critical approaches as alternative frameworks to rethink urban studies. Lastly, Part IV offers a suggested research agenda.¹

Part I. Chicago School: Institutionalisation of difference and power

The roots of modern sociology and urban sociology relate to the CS’s development in the early 20th century (Abbott, 1999; Anderson in DuBois, [1899]1996; Clark and Wu, 2021; Morris, 2015; Sassen, 2010). This narrative is how scholars conceive of the rise of American Sociology (AS) and how the CS’s work spearheaded the foundation of a scientific discipline (for more, see Abbott, 1999; Baldwin, 2004; Morris, 2015; Steinberg, 2007). The CS explored the city using ethnographic techniques to solidify a scientific AS grounded in empirical research. The main theoretical concentrations were social psychology, social organisation and ecology.

Small’s power: Social disorganisation and AJS

Albion Small, the Department of Sociology founder at the University of Chicago (UC) and founder of the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) set out to build his vision of a Christian sociology department (Greek, 1992). ‘At Chicago’, Greek (1992) argues, ‘Small attempted to mold American sociology into a holistic discipline that would aid in bringing about the Kingdom of God on earth’ (p. 106). Greek (1992) states that in early Christian sociologists’ work, ‘Kingdom’ is interchangeable with the concept of ‘society’. Thus, social gospel thought informed many early sociologists’ work by focusing on achieving God’s society on earth, marking the significance of the Protestant Ethic in establishing AS of pivotal importance (Anderson, 1996; Greek, 1992).

Small’s theoretical stance extends from social Darwinism to the disorganisation of the city based on cultural traits. For Small, an individual’s worth depended on a person’s contribution to the social whole and was socialised through a natural division of labour. ‘Socialization’, as defined by Small, ‘referred to the attempt to replace selfish individualism with social cooperation’ (Greek, 1992: 108). By replacing a social Darwinist perspective with ideas about social disorganisation and organisation, Small and the rest of the CS studied the distinction between urban prosperity and poverty (Baldwin, 2004). While Small did not condemn nor enslave Native Americans and Black people, he believed these groups held ‘weaker elements’ and were in an early stage of civilisation (Baldwin, 2004). Therefore, the development of a morality system called for early sociologists to work on facts, or expert knowledge, which could help make sense of the sharp distinction.

Small founded AJS in 1895 and served as the chief editor until he died in 1926, and it was his definition of sociology that was printed and disseminated. The work of Small, Thomas and Ward, among others, concretised the movement from biological to psychobiological and psychosocial that would become the emphasis of the CS (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1974). A case in point is the work of Thomas, whose sociological theories were not only sexist but racist (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1974: 291). Thomas’ work on the subjugation of women parallels his work on race. As one of the first proponents of objective sociology, ‘Thomas’ theoretical explanation of “higher and lower races” and sexual differences hinged on “historical incidents” that led to sexual differences in temperament’ (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1974: 316), which Park later used to discuss the Black populations’ dispositions, based on biological legacies. Park ([1918]1950) defined temperaments as ‘consist[ing] in a few elementary but distinctive characteristics, determined by the physical organization and transmitted biologically’ (p. 280). Park’s focus on temperaments suggested the stage of civilisation for racial and ethnic groups. While scholars have argued about the importance of Park’s work on temperaments (see Baldwin, 2004), this kind of thinking perpetuates the idea that the ‘Other’ is different from the unnamed White standard. Small’s hegemonic control of AJS, the relationship between the CS and Chicago city officials and Park’s theoretical framework influenced classic urban sociology and urban studies in profound ways.

The ecological model: Thomas, Park and Burgess

The ecological model, exemplified by the concentric zone theory, is the foundational tool used to introduce an American scientific sociological study of the city. Park’s race relations cycle was animated by Burgess’ concentric circles model that explained the ‘conveyor belt of civilization’ (Connell in Morris, 2015: 125) by mapping vice, pathologies and the bodies of the ‘Other’, devoid of an analysis of power differentials. Using the ‘natural’ ecological metaphor, the implied invasive species disturbs an ordered community creating disorder, Park and Burgess developed studies that mirrored plant and animal organisation but centred their analysis on urban social (dis)organisation (Kurtz, 1984). Burgess ([1925]1967: 51) outlined an ideal type for the nature of a city, represented by concentric circles that expand radially. Through the utilisation of an ecological model, the concentric circles consist of zone I, ‘The Loop’, zone II in transition, zone III workingmen’s homes, zone IV residential and zone V commuter. This model represented the process of disorganisation and organisation, closely tied to Small’s work, which naturally, following the naturalistic metaphor, would work to reach equilibrium or progress.

Park’s race relations cycle stages mirrored the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft (Morris, 2015). Park’s ([1918]1950: 735) cycle comprises contact, competition, accommodation and assimilation. This process corresponds directly with economic, political, social and cultural institutions and their relation to the city’s layout. The goal, and main narrative deployed to the American masses, was one of assimilation, defined as ‘a process of interpretation and fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments, and attitudes of other persons and groups, and by sharing their experiences and history are incorporated with them in a common cultural life’ (Park, [1918]1950: 735). This perspective rested on the extension of Thomas and Small’s work on social (dis)organisation and the ethnic paradox (Thomas and Znaniecki, 1917), in which, through ethnic organisations/institutions like the print press, groups exercised industrial and ‘civilized’ traits to develop their individualisation (Baldwin, 2004). This perspective was profoundly influential, even if deeply flawed (Lal, 1987; Lyman, 1968; Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1974); the Green Bible, that is, The City (Park and Burgess, [1925]1967), is still considered a foundational text in urban studies.

The ecological model and assimilation theories still currently deployed by urban scholars are theories influenced by an adjustment and submission paradigm, influenced by Booker T Washington’s approach to understanding race (Schwendinger and Schwendinger, 1974), which foundationally represented White interests. Washington’s influence on Park can be seen in the naming of ‘race relations’ because it evokes mutual interactions, devoid of power differentials. Connell (1997) states that to explain the conveyor belt of civilisation, Park used his race relations work rooted in progress narratives tied to empire building in the city. Connell (1997: 1518–1519) states, ‘Sociology was formed within the culture of imperialism and embodies a cultural response to the colonized world’. Thus, the CS set into motion a system of theories and methods that relied heavily on an empire-building framework rooted in progress/origin narratives to explain the city.

Race and race relations: Park’s legacy

Park’s ([1935]1950) background linked Thomas, Small and Washington. In 1903, after completing his PhD at Harvard, Park took a position with the Congo Reform Association (CRA) as a publicist and later ascended to secretary (Baldwin, 2004; Raushenbush, 1979; Steinberg, 2007). As the publicist, he often ghostwrote articles for members of the board and in 1904, he composed ‘Cruelty in the Congo Country’ for Washington, the CRA’s vice president (Steinberg, 2007). Park’s work mirrored Washington’s politics, which were profitable and worked within the social and political context by blaming Black people for their institutional oppression. Du Bois (1968) argued that Washington represented an old system of belief that emphasised adjustment and submission, making Park a palatable candidate to represent an American sociological perspective.

Washington understood the power of the media and could control and influence Tuskegee University’s coverage, as the founder and first president, and could therefore suppress any counter-publicity with the help of Park. At the same time, Park could network with Washington’s connections. Their collaboration produced several books (Washington, 1909, 1911; Washington and Park, 1912), making Steinberg state that ‘to write these [works] amounts to a subtle form of “blackface,” as Park, as a ghostwriter, got into the skin of his illustrious leader’ (2007: 26). Raushenbush (1979), Park’s assistant, stated that he wrote, ‘I became, for all intents and purposes, a Negro myself’ (p. 49).

Thomas met Park at The Education of Primitive Man, a conference at Tuskegee University, financed by Washington but conceived of by Park (Steinberg, 2007). The two men developed a deep personal connection that led to an invitation to give a course on the Negro at the UC (Raushenbush, 1979). Small offered Park a position in his sociology department and his first course in the department, The Negro in America, which was the first course of its kind in the historically White university. His race relations work emphasised a progress narrative via an order-disorder-order frame which mirrored Small’s social gospel and Thomas’ psychobiological and psychosocial perspectives. The pernicious legacies of Whiteness are inscribed in the demonising of non-Whites by imposing disorderliness onto their bodies through the CS concentration on the ‘Other’, made visible via ethnography.

Building empire at home: Ethnography, experts and its limitations

Connell (1997) argues that American sociology conflated metropole problems with American cities’ problems. The CS, from 1920 to 1950, solidified the objective study of society, social difference and social disorder within metropole (Connell, 1997), and its main objective was to study the totality of society empirically, focusing on mapping neighbourhoods, ethnographic studies emphasising participant observation, and quantitative methods (Kurtz, 1984). Participant observation, borrowed from anthropology, was utilised to help explain the unfamiliar and provide outsiders with an insider’s perspective with the help of native informants (Yu, 2001). Like anthropologists abroad acquiring knowledge of foreign lands, sociologists at home worked to gain knowledge of the hobo, gangs, Catholics, Black people, Asians, (im)migrants and other categories outside of the White middle and upper class. Sociologists translated the knowledge gained from native informants into institutionalised ‘White knowledge’ based on established forms of thinking about the ‘Other’. The CS actively recruited ‘native informants’ to build this knowledge.

Baldwin (2004: 419) argues that ‘it is not until white scholar Park stewarded Black students that we witness a begrudging acceptance of not just a sociology of race relations but Black scholars as producers of sociological knowledge’. The sociology department at UC could have utilised Du Bois’s expertise to lead the work on race and ‘race relations’ but instead selected White knowledge as the focal point (Itzigsohn and Brown, 2021; Morris, 2015). Scholars of colour were incorporated within the CS only if they were willing to produce knowledge about the communities they came from or were thought to represent. This predicament had two distinct trajectories for those that chose to participate, (a) use the techniques of Whiteness/empire to make sense of the Other/themselves (like Washington, Reid, Johnson, Lee) or (b) use the frameworks of Whiteness/empire while aiming to change the understanding of the communities under the academic gaze (such as Drake and Cayton, Frazier, Siu, Shibutani). Unfortunately, both alternatives reduced the scholarship of non-White scholars to nothing more than their race, leaving Whiteness as the standard.

Park moved to Chicago to serve as the chair of The Urban League, called upon by the City of Chicago to investigate the causes of the 1922 race riots. In The League, Park met a Black researcher named Charles Johnson, whom he recruited to the UC. Park shadowed him while researching the riots. Johnson’s political position, a rejection of the new Black militancy, solidified his candidacy to become a ‘native informant’ that could reach areas of the Black population that were off-limits to those at the CS. Johnson added historical context, challenged misconceptions and addressed prejudices to his study on the causes of the race riots (Baldwin, 2004). Although Johnson left the UC before completing his degree, he would become the replacement for Booker T Washington, as he seemed to mirror racial accommodation politics. Johnson served as the Director of Social Research at Fisk University and later became the institution’s president, building the Robert Park Building of Social Sciences, where Park would eventually retire. Johnson developed Park’s theories and would remain a supporter of the benefits of industrial civilising to assimilate Black folks into White society.

Following Johnson and Reid (who specialised in Black immigrants), Oscar Brown and E Franklin Frazier would become the following informants to gain acceptance in the Black community. Brown would work with Park’s models and push them further by extending the pathway to assimilation to address Black rights through democratic strategies (Baldwin, 2004). Before starting at UC, Frazier was already an established public intellectual and scholar, and his work brought together Park and aspects of Du Bois (Platt, 1989). Frazier’s position on the roots of racism and his disagreement with some Black intellectuals with a growing interest in Africa made him a valuable addition to the CS (Baldwin, 2004). Having to work within the theories of the CS while actively criticising them, Frazier’s research focused on the Black family to understand (dis)organisation in the Black community (Platt, 1989). Frazier’s work on the Black family would bring to light Thomas’ transition from biology to culture (caste) to race studies (Baldwin, 2004; Kurtz, 1984; Platt, 1989). In The Negro Family in Chicago (1932), Frazier argues that the destruction of the Black family (enslavement, forced immigration and discrimination) (Platt, 1989) and the impact of the urban environment had caused

social disorganization and created a cultural crisis. In dealing with the crisis, whether the family is organized on a different pattern or new types of associations are formed, it is in the family that the new norms of behavior and new conceptions of life and new values will provide the basis of the new social organization. (Frazier, [1957]1997: 237)

The utilisation of Frazier’s work in the Moynihan Report legitimised Moynihan’s conclusions as legitimate and centralised the role of utilising native informants as the ultimate speakers of the truth regarding the Black family. Frazier ([1957]1997) would centralise the importance of class, noted in his work on the spatial mapping of family characteristics and the Black Bourgeoisie, but the work still centralised on Black behaviour.

The ‘Oriental problem’ was also in the minds of those in the CS, who looked for native informants to aid in gaining access to that community. Rose Hum Lee would become the central figure in helping to decode the Japanese and Chinese populations concentrated in pockets of the US. Park and his colleagues worked on this in the 1920s with little success (Lyman, 1968). Lee worked within Park’s theoretical models and was an advocate for assimilation to incorporate American Chinese into American society, adding that the final step in cultural assimilation was the disappearance of physical foreignness (Yu, 2001). The rest of her work focused on the status of Chinatowns in New York, San Francisco and Chicago.

Following Lee, Paul Siu would become the next native informant to understand Chinese men in the city. At the UC, Thomas suggested to Siu that he study Chinese laundry workers, as he would make an excellent participant-observer because of his social work background, he also spoke the same dialect and could enter the field (Yu, 2001). Siu worked within the CS’s frame but would develop an understanding of the sojourners in the city with an agentic perspective like Drake and Cayton in Black Metropolis ([1945]1967). Drake and Cayton utilised the methods of the Chicago School to show how they were of little consequence in helping to understand the lives of the Black experience once the methods were outside of the White academic gaze (Baldwin, 2004; Yu, 2001). The basis of the knowledge developed and disseminated by non-Whites rests on racist White theories and assumptions, as academe compounds knowledge, working from the past to the present. By focusing on the ‘Others’, those seen as culturally and socially distinct, the CS indirectly created a pure White character using White middle- and upper-class values to measure racial and ethnic otherness. What good does it do to work within White methods and logic if the problematic framework is still at the centre? This ultimately limits scholars of colour to nothing more than their race. We can further see the CS’s influential trajectory by looking at the research on ‘the ghetto’ and the ‘underclass.’

Part II. The legacy and influence of the CS

After the 1950s, the research agenda of urban ethnographers extended the CS’s focus on those individuals that seemed to reject the American Dream (Young, 2008): African Americans, Latinx people, the underclass and the culturally deprived. Those individuals did not fit White middle- or upper-class standards. Although contested, Lewis’ (1961, 1966, 1995, 1998) work on the culture-of-poverty thesis is based on an analysis of the Mexican poor in Mexico City and Latinos in the US, centralising the characteristics, behaviour and cultural deprivations that the inhabitants exhibited. Regardless of the conclusions and objectives of the work, it continued to fetishise the behaviour of the ‘Other’ as their traits would become the antithesis to White middle-class normalcy. The foreign, the exotic, the problem people must be studied, whereas Whiteness is left as the ordinary, native and organised, indicating exactly who can become a subject. Influenced by the framing of social problems by the CS, the ghetto and the underclass conceptions focused on the problem people and cemented the role of Whiteness as an organising agent of the city.

The ghetto and the Black belt

The slums are also crowded to overflowing with immigrant colonies – the Ghetto, Little Sicily, Greektown, Chinatown – fascinatingly combining old world heritages and American adaptations. Winding out from here is the Black belt, with its free and disorderly life…all obsessed with the vision of a new and better world. (Burgess, [1925]1967: 56)

The UC members understood this initial depiction of Chicago’s segregation. The genealogy of the ghetto outlines the foundational aspects of the CS and its legacies. The research agenda’s fixation with the ‘Other’ is still part of how communities of colour are understood (Deconteau, 2021; Montalva Barba, forthcoming). Focusing the discipline on a minimal sector of the population (Small, 2008; Wacquant, 2002; Young, 2008; Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva, 2008) exoticises and creates a false sense of the on-the-ground experience, leading to ‘Jungle Book tropes’ (Rios, 2013, 2015), hero ethnographers (Venkatesh, 2008; Wacquant, 2002), ethnography devoid of theory (Wacquant, 2002) and pathologising of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) while reaffirming an innocent White character.

The allure of metropolitan life, freedom, opportunity and violence drove Black, rural (im)migrants to urban centres but, because of a racist structural inequality, they had to settle in the slums, ghettos, Chinatowns and Black Belts of major cities instead. One of the Black community’s roles in major cities has been to supply labour power when necessary and serve as a cushion for immigrant groups, because Black people wear the badge of colour that stops them from ever fully assimilating (Drake and Cayton, [1945]1967: 175).

The constructed narrative framed the ghetto as a high vice and high crime area via concentric circle mapping, ignoring that power dynamics kept people in these spaces. The conflicting characterisation of the ghetto maintained a negative view of the physical space and of the residents, which happened to be recent Southern and Eastern European immigrants, Mexican, Chinese, Japanese and other populations. Drake and Cayton ([1945]1967: 175) explain that ‘the native-born, middle-class, white population is the group that sets the standards by which various people are designated as desirable or undesirable’. Such meaning-making shaped the experiences of the Black community and all those deemed ‘Other.’ Not only are (im)migrants needed in the city (Sassen, [1991]2001), exploited for their labour (Almaguer, [1994]2009; Feagin, 2000; Massey and Denton, 1993), pathologised to create distinction (Alexander, [2010]2012; Drake and Cayton, [1945]1967; Powell, 1997), and assigned to a place in the city, while instantaneously imposing meanings onto resident’s bodies, they are ultimately not incorporated into the city (Drake and Cayton, [1945]1967; Du Bois, [1899]1996; Massey and Denton, 1993).

Incorporating groups into American Life – moving from the slums into the suburbs – mimics Park’s race relation cycle. Today, the minority communities are less desirable for various reasons (Chavez, 2008; Dávila, 2004; Gilens, 2000). The Black community was not the only exception to the race relation cycle, but their undesirability was more pronounced based on phenotype. As assimilation theory would suggest, desirability and residential proximity to more affluent, White communities would facilitate a transition into better neighbourhoods. Drake and Cayton ([1945]1967) make it clear that White immigrant groups who were ‘by far the largest number of immigrants and their children…are no longer distinguishable from the older settlers’ (p. 10), highlighting the importance of skin colour (read White), the ability to become incorporated into the larger American culture, and the malleability of Whiteness. This had real consequences like assigning value to bodies (Alexander, 2005; Drake and Cayton, [1945]1967; Pulido, 2017), which directly translates into the social (Morris, 2015; Pattillo, 1999; Small, 2004; Wilson, 1987), economic (Jargowsky, 1997; Logan and Moloch, [1987]2007; Oliver and Shapiro, 2006; Shapiro, 2005; Wacquant, [1989]1995) and political capital (Alexander, [2010]2012; Hunter, 2013; Pattillo, 2007).

The genealogy of the underclass

Du Bois did not use the term underclass, instead he outlined different Black Philadelphian classes in the 1890s. Had his work been taken seriously by White scholars and institutions, his contribution would have pushed the field of urban poverty in new directions moving past ideas of a monolithic Blackness. Du Bois outlined the wide range of classes present in the Black community. In Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward and Lombard Street, Du Bois recognised four grades of social classes. The first grade consisted of families of respectability with sufficient income where the wife did not need to work and served as a housewife, the children attended school and also did not have to work (Du Bois, [1899]1996: 310). The second grade consisted of respectable-working class families where only the younger children attended school (Du Bois, [1899]1996: 311). The third grade consisted of the under-employed population sector, considered the poor and the very poor, without relation to criminality (Du Bois, [1899]1996: 311). Grade four consisted of ‘the lowest class of criminals, prostitutes and loafers, the submerged tenth’ (Du Bois, [1899]1996: 311). Du Bois’s conceptual frame in the categorisation depends on economic factors and moral considerations. In another section of The Philadelphia Negro, he distinguishes solely on class (Du Bois, [1899]1996: chapter XI), dissecting the Black population into distinct social classes.

First mentioned in Myrdal’s ([1944]1962)An American Dilemma, the underclass’s conceptualisation outlines the violence deployed when concepts that are initially useful as explanatory definitions become incorporated into the social milieu. Myrdal’s conception was not explicitly defined, but it encompassed those individuals and families at the bottom of American society’s economic strata. ‘For Myrdal,’ as Aponte (1990: 118) states, ‘the formation of an American underclass had little to do with behavioral orientations but much to do with material deprivation and lack of reasonably accessible avenues to mobility for those at the very bottom’. Next, in Kahn’s 1964 report for the League for Industrial Democracy, he used the term to describe that portion of the population that had been long-termed unemployed (Aponte, 1990). A year later, Lewis’ (1966) culture of poverty thesis linked the underclass’s presence as the producers of a culture of poverty, resolidifying the relation of race to place. This linkage pathologised communities of colour and primarily affected African American and Latino communities. Within the larger discourse, the underclass’s utilisation was synonymous with those living under the poverty line, which most often was viewed as Black and Latino as represented by the culture industry (Gilens, 2000).

In The Declining Significance of Race (1978), Wilson aimed to counteract Lewis’s work by returning to structural explanations of the underclass. He utilised the term to refer to those at the ‘very bottom of the social class ladder’ (Wilson in Aponte, 1990: 122). The concept’s vagueness further solidified the popular conception of all those under the federal poverty line. In the 1980s version of Declining he later defined the term as a female-headed household, unstable housing and those outside the lower class. Aponte (1990) argues that this definition was unclear and vilified Black families when disconnected from its initial intent.

The Black Underclass (Glasgow, 1980) defined the underclass’s conception, which was now a term used wildly. Although Glasgow’s definition emphasised the underclass as the long-term unemployed, his definition named this class an entirely new population sector. This new definition created the belief that undeserving welfare recipients existed, based on the caricatures of the supposed ‘welfare queen’ and Reagan’s War on Drugs. This term continued to place Black and Latino people under the national and academic gaze. ‘Robert Park would have felt very much at home in Chicago’s Department of Sociology that housed William Julius Wilson’, states Steinberg as ‘yet another sign of intellectual stasis, of how little sociological thinking on race had changed from Park to Wilson!’ (Steinberg, 2007: 34). Steinberg suggests that perpetually indoctrinating young sociologists into the same old and problematic paradigm is a disservice. I argue that it is a particular form of adjustment and submission imposed on students. We continue to invest in White supremacy by perpetually teaching these problematic frameworks.

Part III. Du Boisian sociology, critical race theory, and global critical race and racism

Contemporaneously, Rios (2015) calls for a decolonising of White space in urban ethnography but to ‘decolonise’ urban ethnography; we must first name the undergirding White supremacy that marks bodies into racialised–minoritised places. The resurgence of Du Boisian sociology and the recent work by CRTs supports making urban studies more knowledgeable about the embedded Whiteness (Itzigsohn and Brown, 2021). The critical race perspective and Du Boisian sociological approaches push for a decentring of White logic and White methods (Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva, 2008). Slater’s (2021)Shaking Up the City urges urban scholars not to limit their research questions on what he calls heteronomy of urban research:

the condition of scholars being constrained in asking their own questions about urbanization, instead of asking questions and using categories invented, escalates, and imposed by various institutions that have vested interests in influencing what is off and on the urban agenda. (Slater, 2021: 4)

Instead of letting funding agencies – nonprofits, institutions and research centres – dictate the work and research scholars conduct, researchers should guide those questions. Academe supports this effort within the larger higher education structure, where grants are the key to grad school, job placements and promotion. What concretised the importance of the CS was working closely with the city of Chicago and nonprofit donors, like the Rockefeller Foundation (Yu, 2001). Various institutions also hired Du Bois to produce studies, but his work, grounded in rich methodological approaches, did not appease Black folks and their communities (Wright and Morris, 2021).

Du Boisian sociology, in particular a community and urban perspective, makes as its subject an analysis of ‘racial and colonial capitalism and the racial state’ (Itzigsohn and Brown, 2021: 127; Petersen, 2022). Itzigsohn and Brown (2021) state that the sociology of Du Bois does not isolate race to a subdiscipline or a variable but would centre racism and colonialism at the centre of sociological theorisation and research as they are the pillars of the modern world. Given the limitations of urban studies in embracing White supremacy as a structuring and structural agent, centralising Du Boisian thought could support a more critical understanding of the urban.

The work of Du Bois influences CRTs (Crenshaw, 2019). Of particular interest was the central notion that racism, colonialism and global capitalism were embedded in the structures of the modern world. It is those same pillars that CRT aims to highlight to address racist structural inequality. CRT challenges the dominant understanding of race and the law that has served as a standpoint from which other aspects of the law can be understood (Bracey, 2015). CRT recognises the role that the law has played in the social construction of race by pointing out its fluidity as it applies to the process of creating Whiteness (Embrick and Moore, 2020; Haney López, 1996; Lipsitz, 2019). The five general tenets of CRT are that racism is ordinary (Delgado and Stefancic, 2012) and endemic to American life (Matsuda et al., 1993) and globally (Christian, 2019; Christian et al., 2019). Second, interest convergence (Bell, 2005), or material determinism, is the notion that racism is in the interest of White elites (materially) and working-class Caucasians (psychologically) because a large sector of the population benefits and therefore has little interest in its eradication (Delgado and Stefancic, 2012), or what Du Bois (1935) calls the racial wage. Third, the social construction thesis, or racialisation, states that race(s) are social and relational social products, where the function and utility of ‘race’ are fluid and malleable with no biological foundation (Delgado and Stefancic, 2012). Fourth, CRT is action-oriented and works to eradicate racial and all forms of oppression by drawing on interdisciplinary and theoretically distinct approaches (see Delgado and Stefancic, 2012). Lastly, through the voice-of-colour thesis, storytelling, and their positionality and experiences, BIPOC can communicate a unique perspective that Whites cannot know (Delgado and Stefancic, 2012). CTR has found that the category of ‘White’ was constructed by the courts in a two-step process, (1) the construction of Whiteness on a case-by-case basis, that is, by naming who is not White and (2) by the construction of a White character (Clark and Garner, 2009; Crenshaw, 2019; Fields and Fields, 2014; Haney López, 1996; Lipsitz, 2019; Ross, 1992; Rothstein, 2017). The ambiguities associated with Whiteness have been historically advantageous because they can morph to maintain the centrality of Whiteness while simultaneously excluding certain groups for convenience (Embrick and Moore, 2020; Lipsitz, 2019, 2011; McKay, 2019).

Within constitutional law, CRT has shown that colour-blindness, or the idea that all should be treated the same (regardless of race), was inscribed in several ways. Gotanda (1995: 257) states, ‘the US Supreme Court’s use of color-blind constitutionalism – a collection of legal themes functioning as a racial ideology – fosters white racial domination’. Gotanda (1995) states the four different ways the constitution uses race for domination: status-race, formal-race, historical-race and culture-race. Status-race is the traditional form of understanding race as a social status. Formal-race is the normative interpretation of race, lacking imposed meanings and characteristics. Contrastingly, historical-race does include the imposed meanings and characteristics assigned to race, for example, present and historical racial subordination. Lastly, cultural-race uses codes to signify characteristics, for example, Black equating to African American lifestyle, culture and consciousness (Gotanda, 1995: 258). A colour-blind constitution emphasised the formal definition of race divorced from historical and social meanings (Gotanda, 1995), thus consolidating race in the law and the constitution as ahistorical from their social, economic and political significance. The CS solidified culture-race by investing in social problems, for example, linking neighbourhoods to bodies. The centralisation of Whiteness and citizenship are tied up in who has rights to and in the city. As Park states, ‘the city is, finally, the natural habitat of civilized man’ (Park and Burgess, [1925]1967: 2). The city was inscribed and interrelated to Whiteness and (in)visible foundation, along with rights and property. Given the influence of Du Bois and CRT scholars, this work also includes a global perspective.

Christian (2019) proposes that the racial structure is global, and particular historicity shapes each nation based on racialised systems. Contemporary realities are the products of racial structures and practices, and ‘global white supremacy is the produced and rearticulated in new deeply rooted and malleable forms’ (Christian, 2019: 172). Extending Du Bois’ (1935) insight that colonial and racial capitalism has produced racial states, the global critical race and racism (GCRR) (Christian, 2019) framework focuses on racialised zones with imperial and colonial modes and their contemporary global practices that function via racialised neoliberal forms or through colour-blind forms. Colonial and racial capitalism is now enmeshed in the economic, social–juridical structures, state ideologies and global consumption of the western culture industry. Investing in developing work that traces each locality’s GCRR frame can be an initial process to understanding how racial and colonial structures operate. A contemporary example of anti-Blackness is taking place during the invasion of Ukraine. Ukrainian officials are not allowing Black students to board trains or busses to escape the ongoing invasion (Hagarty, 2022). Regions allegedly devoid of racialised structures still embed anti-Blackness and White supremacist frames.

Part IV. Shifting the lens

To move away from perpetuating embedded racism and White supremacy in urban studies, scholars must first come to terms with what is taking place. Then, our structure must change as one academic cannot change a system operating for more than a century (Montalva Barba, forthcoming). This section proposes several possible areas to help move this effort forward, focusing on urban identities and reframing our understanding of cities.

Urban studies can move into several areas that can aid in outlining the different technologies of managing race (Derickson, 2016; Sheth, 2009; Zapatka and Beck, 2021) by exploring how the city constructs and protects worthy victims (read White). Lawrence (2013) opens a conversation on the privatisation of care and concern related to racial segregation and the privatisation of education. By the privatisation of care and concern, Lawrence (2013) states that public policymakers and individual parents concerned with equal access to educational opportunities for all children systematically self-segregate into areas where ‘educational standards’ are the highest or move to racially diverse neighbourhoods for the benefits of multiculturalism but choose to educate their children in primarily White private schools (Montalva Barba, 2021; Serbulo, 2019). It leads to an opportunistic self-segregation and turns their claim for diversity and inclusion into a financial benefit for their White children (Montalva Barba, 2021). Urban scholars should recalibrate the academic emphasis from focusing on the ‘problem people’ to work on the ‘good people’ or those innocent in character (read White) (Ramos-Zayas, 2020; Ross, 2013) that function through colour-blind methods, multiculturalism, liberal and political correctness, but further perpetuate a racial system of inequality through benevolence. Work of this nature should draw out the interwoven racial ideology that demystifies the benevolent White character as the producers of trauma and violence that perpetually reproduce a system they might even criticise. For example, Montalva Barba (2021) interviewed White residents of a gentrifying progressive neighbourhood in Boston, Massachusetts, and found that their utterances continue settler colonial narratives, like the American Dream and pioneer fantasies. Despite the progressive narratives of community and diversity uttered by White residents, the respondents highlighted a central aspect of the settler colonial logic, the incongruence of ‘community’ with ‘diversity’ as they work in direct opposition (Montalva Barba, 2021).

Furthermore, studies that problematise the foundations of assimilation as colour-blindness are needed (Ford, 2002; Valle, 2017) as those structures maintain a race-neutral understanding of urban space and address colour-blind urbanism (Valle, 2017). ‘Assimilation’, as argued by Ford, ‘is thought to be the conjoined twin of color-blindness, the discourse that would bury the legacy of state-sponsored racism and its contemporary institutionalization in the deafening and disingenuous chorus of “People are people”’ (Ford, 2002: 50). Urban studies need to move beyond thinking and assembling under assimilation notions, as it is a colour-blind strategy used for population management visible in the city. CRT addresses this as

the non-assimilated minority is to blame for her disadvantage, while the assimilated minority is to be apprehended with suspicion: she is a mutant, warped and unnatural like a leopard that changed its spots, but also deceptive, like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. (Ford, 2002: 51)

A careful re-examination of what it represents to become assimilated or incorporated into a new space and place should not be measured by the accommodation level that a group may have undergone. The groups’ lack of incorporation might highlight the embedded racial system, pointing to ruptures or breaks in power relations.

Related to citizenship and status, or who can be the subject of true feelings recognised by the state apparatus, is another dimension where CRT and settler colonial thinking can push urban studies. Berlant (2002) complicates the notion of citizenship by challenging notions of national sentimentality, ‘a rhetoric of promise that a nation can be built across fields of social difference through channels of affective identification and empathy’ (Berlant, 2002: 107). Berlant’s (2002) definition of citizenship includes the legal sense, with all the juridical benefits, the protections of the identity in status and its discursive conception embedded in power and inclusion. A study of urban citizenship, as people make meaning of space and their identity as citizens, can help understand how citizens construct notions of belonging and exclusion by the invocations of patriotism (see Hunter and Robinson, 2018). Urban studies on citizenship should focus on the discursive practices of individuals excluded and not entitled to the category of ‘citizen’; thus, practices enact and reaffirm the discursive practices that always (re)centre set national discourses.

Cities as racial archives

By focusing on elite law schools, Moore (2008) showed that individuals are socialised into law practice via the frame of Whiteness. Within law schools, the foundation and historical legacy are racist because of the systematic exclusion of BIPOC from such institutions. According to Moore, White institutional spaces are apparent within the inculcation of the law, but also in the buildings themselves, as they tell a history of who can construct history and who belongs. Often shielded from public scrutiny, elite law schools function as socialising agents and have lasting repercussions for the nation, as individuals who graduate from such institutions become central government and public office figures. The reproduction of White institutional spaces is outlined by: (1) racial demographics and distribution of institutional power along racial lines; (2) racialised institutional and cultural practices and justifying racist ideology and discourse; (3) hidden signifiers of White power and privilege within the space; and (4) post-civil rights legal and political frames that protect White racial group interests (Moore, 2008: 32). Embrick and Moore (2020) extend that White space makes White supremacy possible, or as stated by Lipsitz (2019), the perpetual investment in Whiteness maintains a racist structure. Embrick et al. (2022: 2) write:

White institutional, organizational, geographical, and cultural spaces normalize the existing racial order, enable white fantasy(ies) of complete dominion over place and space, perpetuate (global) anti-Blackness, and facilitate white entitlement to maintain coercive control over BIPOC individuals and communities, and provide credibility to the rhetoric of the current whitelash.

In the US and many other parts of the world, the city is a White institutional space, noticeable in the racial demographics and institutional power distribution along racial lines in affordable housing, barrio, ethnoburbs, gentrified communities and culture of poverty tropes. Secondly, racialised institutional and cultural practices used to justify racist ideology and discourses are many. For example, mass incarceration and the deportation industrial complex (Alexander, [2010]2012; Almaguer, [1994]2009; Bell, 2005; Davis, 1981; Feagin, 2000), the failure of educational institutions to educate children of colour, health and environmental disparities within communities of colour, among other racialised institutions and processes used to justify systematic oppression. Thirdly, the hidden signifiers of White power and privilege are found in how people conceptualise progress narratives within the city (frontier narrative, fortress, political economy) and those who can become central players. Besides, Whiteness is found in the privileged racialisation narratives embedded in liberal ideals, meritocracy, that is, pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps. Finally, Whiteness’s legal post-civil rights protection is embedded in the city by colour-blindness, enlightenment thinking, criminalising individuals or inherent criminal intent and imposing characteristics onto individuals based on place (Derickson, 2016; Vathi and Burrell, 2021). It is not difficult to conceive the city as a White institutional space because it is rooted in a history embedded in Whiteness, male property-owning and the exploitation and domination of non-Whites.

More studies are needed that utilise all four of Gotanda’s (1995) definitions of race – status-race, formal-race, historical-race and culture-race – as the CS solidified only the cultural definition of race through their investment in codifying the characteristics of Black people. Shaw’s (2007, 2014) Cities of Whiteness can serve as an example of the kind of work that can be done to bring into question the centralisation of Whiteness with indigeneity in the city’s organisation, as her study explores how Whiteness functions to animate the process of gentrification in Sidney, Australia. Shaw makes Whiteness visible as it functions through its privileged status to set the process of gentrification in motion by the mere presence of White bodies. Besides highlighting Whiteness, Shaw outlines how institutions serve Whiteness by facilitating and accommodating White interests. Relatedly, Hayes and Zaban (2020) write about transnational gentrification (Sigler and Wachsmuth, 2016, 2020) as a contemporary form of urbanisation where high-income transnational migrants are sought after to close rent gaps. These processes are closely related to a Du Boisian perspective, where racial and colonial structures are at the heart of such processes.

Conclusion

To disrupt urban studies from its problematic roots, we must come to terms with the damage done and the continuing dominance of its ideology. The CS solidified the study of social and racial problems by controlling AJS, training White and non-White scholars, using accommodation politics in their theories, and investing in the ‘Other’ while ignoring Whiteness. By ignoring Whiteness, scholars built a colour-blind urbanism frame to study ‘problem’ people while leaving Whiteness as ‘normal and natural’. A clear example of the legacies of the CS is assuming that White neighbourhoods, schools and people are better, cleaner and more innocent.² The most current wave of urban theorising is the cultural turn (Clark and Wu, 2021), which directly connects to the foundation of the CS – focusing on the ‘Other’ while avoiding taking Whiteness seriously. Urban studies’ theorisation of the ‘Other’ has had lasting and damaging consequences, like the deployment of culture of poverty tropes, the underclass, negative views of the ghetto and its inhabitants, broken windows theory, informality, assimilationist theories and the de-emphasising of race as an organising principle, among many others. These legacies are embedded in how people and scholars think, see, and experience the world. The arguments presented here urge urban scholars to take Du Boisian theorising, CRT, race, White supremacy and imperialism seriously to be better researchers, academics, professors and most importantly, not to replicate the same mistakes.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all who helped make this paper possible – much love to you all.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Miguel Angel Montalva Barba

Notes

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