Racialized Spaces: Difference Incorporated

1. Racialized Spaces: Difference Incorporated

2. Today’s Objectives • Contextualize public [racialized] space in a post-civil rights era. • Understand how power operates today with regards to difference • Make critical connections between racialization and capitalist appropriation across local, national, & global dimensions

3. Space: Anywhere & Everywhere • Institutional • Education • Healthcare • Housing • Familial • Gendered Divisions • Non-Paid Labour • Public Realm • Parks • Restaurants • Businesses

4. Space: urban dictionary • 1. public space • A place, in wide definition, for everybody to enjoy their coexistence and represent their collectivity and common interest without drowning or disaggregating their diversity. • The world, city, newspaper

5. Origins of Public Space • A Public Sphere is a social-cultural construct dependent on historico-political-economic agendas. • “A public sphere in the sense of a separate realm distinguished from the private sphere cannot be shown to have existed in the feudal society of the High Middle Ages.” • In sum, a new social order emerged during the 17th/18th European bourgeois society.

6. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere • “The bourgeois public sphere [is the] sphere of private people who came together as a public” (Habermas, 1991, 27). • Capitalism, harbored in a new way of interacting among entrepreneurs and business elite. • With the rise of a public sphere, came widespread usage of: • Coffee shops; book clubs; saloons; public squares; but most importantly a state-administered media

7. Race: The Power of an Illusion - The House We Live In (Part III) • 6. What is the relationship between race taxonomy and geography? Or race and public space? • 7-8. How does the US justice system determine inclusionary citizenship? • 18. What did the Civil Rights Era miss? • 19. Why does the racial wealth gap maintain existence today?

8. The Paradox of a Post-Civil Rights Society • If [we] are equal, then why does: • 1/6th of the US population lack health insurance? 44% of which are poor people? • Adults living in poor neighborhoods 2x’s more likely to be hospitalized for a preventable disease. • Poor men 6x’s more likely to have high blood pressure than Americana bourgeoisie. • African American females aged 15 in Harlem have a 65% chance to make it to age 65. [India] --Data from Reuss’ ”Cause of Death: Inequality”

9. “Hegemonic-Appropriation of Minority Difference” • “a [new] mode of power was forming that would ingest various revolutionary formations and, in fact, build its strategies around their dissection” (22). Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012)

11. Gentrification is…. • …the process of replacing low income distressed communities with new commercial and residential districts that cater to the middle and upper class. • Typically occurs in Black and Brown Hoods/Barrios • Destroys local economies/communities and in turn orchestrates a bourgeois public-private sphere • These [racialized] spaces are a in-demand commodity for contemporary capitalist who are making bank from ‘identity politics of difference’.

12. Making Sense: Difference and Capitalist Commodities • A “Colorblind” Society markets, distributes, and produces palpable differences. • Racial differences [& stereotypes] are commodified as less threatening and consumable by and for the white capitalist heterosexual gaze. • Racial differences [& histories, cultures] are perceived as “new”, “hip”, and “good energy” and soon are commodified as desirous and exotic by and for the white capitalist heterosexual gaze.

13. Post-Civil Rights Cultural Appropriation • At Washington State University • https://www.facebook.com/cougsagainstcougador • *At University of Alabama • http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/10/23/college-photoshops-black-mans-head-into-marketing-material-again/ * Though there has been an update about the