JUSTICEscape 2.0

In the pursuit of embracive public space design, equitable representation and consideration of all peoples in the built environment, JUSTICEscape 2.0 questions the impracticality of decentering whiteness as the default socio-spatial lens without understanding its construction. The recent sociopolitical events in protest of the caste-based inequities sparked by the murder of George Floyd (and many other non-white citizens) and the Covid-19 pandemic’s unmasking of disparities in income/labor, education, healthcare, public infrastructure, global supply chains, affordable housing, access to technology, environmental/ecological policy, land use, urban planning, and policing – exacerbating the pre-existing ideologies of racism, xenophobia and white nationalism - aroused shock (for some) and dismay, and prompted pledges from corporations and institutions to center people of color. Although the public statements and internal efforts to improve ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ (or JEDI) in policies and practices is a welcome step towards justice for ‘minorities’ and accountability for ‘majorities’, they may sometimes seem performative, hollow and uninformed without policy change and a greater understanding of why and how certain communities became marginalized – how caste was constructed and updated throughout history  -  and how society has arrived at definitive systems of socioeconomic and cultural inequities – systems that favor whiteness (and/or the closest proximity thereto) as the pinnacle of acceptance, freedom, immunity, and belonging. The American system was founded as a primarily two-tiered hierarchy with its contours defined by the uppermost group, those identified as white, and by the subordinated group, those defined as black [or non-white], with immigrants from outside Europe forming blurred middle castes that sought to adjust themselves within a bipolar structure (Wilkerson, 2020).

The purpose of investigating whiteness and white as property is to critically examine and discuss the history of racialized and unracialized bodies and spaces maintained by law – the crafting of unprivileged and privileged ranks - as related to property, right-to-place, space-propriety, spatial-benefits and the making of the built environment. JUSTICEscape 2.0 investigates how inequitable social systems influence the canon of design movements and processes through the legitimated lens of white identity, and its exclusive ideologies intimated (implicitly and explicitly) by policy and education - how white supremacy replicates itself in visual culture - how the construction public space can sustain methods and experiences of exclusivity. Students will develop a more honest understanding of society’s collective memory of itself, how worlds within worlds work and shape our spatial mobility (and cultural capital). We ask how history’s relationship to the land, aesthetic erasure and iconography reflects the stories we tell – how the implications of these stories shape social narratives – how these narratives become embedded in society and outline public policy -  and how policy structures the material conditions of our lives. Students will develop not a tertiary awareness of the spatial outcomes of caste, but its complicated, nuanced and evolving borders directly effecting how design can perpetuate inequality.

By unpacking whiteness and the white perspective, understanding its ubiquity and our collective numbness to it, students will reckon with how erased (or romanticized) histories become design ideology and shape contemporary landscapes built on the diminishment of raced identities. As students unearth how we unwittingly internalize, and comply with notions of whiteness, we explore its externalization in systems to which we adhere and assimilate through self-denial. We reveal wrongly constructed barriers to social capital, and their arbitrary meritocracies that relegate certain groups to the margins of resources for entry, being, moving and making. We challenge the circumstance and nature of birth - as central to one’s immutable identity, purpose and value, setting an automatic life trajectory - as a disinformation campaign ungrounded in empirical evidence and based on abstractions, stereotypes and invisibilities. Students explore how unconscious bias – couched in the promise of equality - suppresses authentic self-awareness and representation, teaching code-switching without the benefit of the original code. Students will counter false narratives with true legacies and social identities of dignity and honor to transform and recenter the lens towards personal agency and autonomy.

Through the power of discourse, narrative and making assignments, students will unpack and interrogate whiteness as an evolving construct that legislates caste - a paradigm by which granted entitlement of social and spatial mobility is measured. Research and assignments interrupt assumptions of ‘white normativity’ incorporating the notion of ‘the white gaze’, sustained by classicism and modernism design and art principles, manifested through public space (or ‘white space’) and the cultural production thereof. Students will arrive at their own conclusions while examining the implied power afforded to unraced bodies and spaces, investigating locations, patterns, configurations, devices and tactics that privilege whiteness, its right-to-privacy, and its gatekeeping. References from history, law, literature, geography, environment, agriculture, housing, color psychology, religion, biology and genetics, beauty, skin, colorism and passing, medicine, nature, and healthcare will be investigated to contextualize how the making of caste is inherently intertwined with the making of space through policy, capital and representation. The constructs of 'white noise', 'whitewashing', 'white flight' and 'white-opportunity-hoarding' will be questioned as students challenge disfunction, engage in uncomfortable, and nuanced conversation, and find comfort in truth, reclaiming their value as tellers, keepers and preservers of our their own histories and stories; learning to build communities of well-being and resilience in coexistence with the natural world; exercising their pleasure and responsibility as designers to ethically reshape the landscape, making public space truly open and welcoming to all.