Race And Place

Geography matters. We long for diverse, thriving neighborhoods and churches, yet racial injustices persist. Why? Because geographic structures and systems create barriers to reconciliation and prevent the flourishing of our communities. Race and Place reveals the profound ways in which these geographic forces and structures sustain the divisions among us. Urban missiologist David Leong, who resides in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the country, unpacks the systemic challenges that are rarely addressed in the conversation about racial justice. The evening news may deliver story after story that causes us to despair. But Leong envisions a future of belonging and hope in our streets, towns, cities, and churches. A discussion about race needs to go hand in hand with a discussion about place. This book is a welcome addition to a conversation that needs to include both.

A revealing work of public history that shows how communities remember their pasts in different ways to fit specific narratives, Race, Place, and Memory charts the ebb and flow of racial violence in Wilmington, North Carolina, from the 1730s to the present day.  Margaret Mulrooney argues that white elites have employed public spaces, memorials, and celebrations to maintain the status quo. The port city has long celebrated its white colonial revolutionary origins, memorialized Decoration Day, and hosted Klan parades. Other events, such as the Azalea Festival, have attempted to present a false picture of racial harmony to attract tourists. And yet, the revolutionary acts of Wilmington’s African American citizens—who also demanded freedom, first from slavery and later from Jim Crow discrimination—have gone unrecognized. As a result, beneath the surface of daily life, collective memories of violence and alienation linger among the city’s black population.  Mulrooney describes her own experiences as a public historian involved in the centennial commemoration of the so-called Wilmington Race Riot of 1898, which perpetuated racial conflicts in the city throughout the twentieth century. She shows how, despite organizers’ best efforts, a white-authored narrative of the riot’s contested origins remains. Mulrooney makes a case for public history projects that recognize the history-making authority of all community members and prompts us to reconsider the memories we inherit.  A volume in the series Cultural Heritage Studies, edited by Paul A. Shackel  Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This book addresses the issues in an empirical fashion after examining different sociological and geographic perspectives. It provides a basic understanding of the multi-faceted nature of racial inequalities in urban America, both in a broad context and in separate analyses of housing.

"While Washington, D.C. is still often referred to as 'Chocolate City,' it has undergone significant demographic, political, and architectural change in the last decade. No place represents this shift better than H Street, one of the neighborhoods devastated by the April 1968 riots after Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Over the last decade and a half, the H Street corridor has changed from a historically low-income, African American neighborhood--featuring black-owned businesses that catered to the local residents--to one of the most sought after commercial and residential areas in the nation, replete with art house theaters, fusion restaurants, and rising property values that have pushed out much of the original population. Brandi T. Summers explores this shift from chocolate city to cosmopolitan metropolis, looking at the role of race in urban environments and how the neighborhood's aesthetics--from fashion and language to foodways and black bodies themselves--have been commodified and branded. Through ethnography, interviews, archival research, and media analysis, Summers sheds new light on the relationship between race, space, and capitalism"

In a world marked by the effects of colonial displacements, slavery's auction block, and the modern observatory stance, can Christian theology adequately imagine racial reconciliation? What factors have created our society's racialized optic--a view by which nonwhite bodies are objectified, marginalized, and destroyed--and how might such a gaze be resisted? Is there hope for a church and academy marked by difference rather than assimilation? This book pursues these questions by surveying the works of Willie James Jennings and J. Kameron Carter, who investigate the genesis of the racial imagination to suggest a new path forward for Christian theology. Jennings and Carter both mount critiques of popular contemporary ways of theologically imagining Christian identity as a return to an ethic of virtue. Through fresh reads of both the "tradition" and liberation theology, these scholars point to the particular Jewish flesh of Jesus Christ as the ground for a new body politic. By drawing on a vast array of biblical, theological, historical, and sociological resources, including communal experiments in radical joining, A Theology of Race and Place builds upon their theological race theory by offering an ecclesiology of joining that resists the aesthetic hegemony of whiteness.

Continuing Patrick Wolfe’s work on settler colonialism This edited collection celebrates Patrick Wolfe’s contribution to the study and critique of settler colonialism as a distinct mode of domination. The chapters collected here focus on the settler-colonial assimilation of land and people, and on what Wolfe insightfully defined as “preaccumulation”: the ability of settlers to mobilise technologies and resources unavailable to resisting Indigenous communities. Wolfe’s militant and interdisciplinary scholarship is thus emphasised, together with his determination to acknowledge Indigenous perspectives and the efficacy of Indigenous resistances. In case studies of Australia, French Algeria, and the United States, contributors illustrate how seminal his contribution was and is. There are three core reasons why it is especially important to develop the field of thinking inaugurated by Wolfe: first, because the demand for Indigenous sovereignty has been crucial to recent struggles against neoliberal attacks in the settler societies; second, because a critique of settler colonialism and its logic of elimination has supported important struggles against environmental devastation; and third, because the ability to think race in ways that are not disconnected from other struggles is now more needed than ever. Racial capitalism and settler colonialism are as imbricated now as they always have been, and keeping both in mind at the same time highlights the need to establish and nurture solidarities that reach across established divides.

In Place, Race, and Story, author Ned Kaufman has collected his own essays dedicated to the proposition of giving the next generation of preservationists not only a foundational knowledge of the field of study, but more ideas on where they can take it. Through both big-picture essays considering preservation across time, and descriptions of work on specific sites, the essays in this collection trace the themes of place, race, and story in ways that raise questions, stimulate discussion, and offer a different perspective on these common ideas. Including unpublished essays as well as established works by the author, Place, Race, and Story provides a new outline for a progressive preservation movement – the revitalized movement for social progress.