LEGAL INVESTIGATIONS

Isabel Wilkerson distills the legislated means of maintaining hierarchical human divisions into “THE EIGHT PILLARS OF CASTE,” which continue to shape how we move through the spaces of our lives. All of our lives are predisposed to varying degrees of privilege, heritability, ancestry, dehumanization, favor, stigma, division, ranking, and control. Our behavior in reaction to, or in anticipation of, or in ignorance of this hidden system either puts us in positions of winning or losing space or place.

Whiteness asserts that race is a social construct, which means that racial categories are invented and updated through social relations. Racial, hierarchical categories also overlap with other social identities–including, but not limited to gender, class and sexual orientation. To understand how these hierarchies  – why particular groups are ‘raced’ in spatial terms, students investigate beyond discrimination towards understanding the historical and nuanced institutional structures of privilege and marginalization supporting the making of the built environment and its policies.

Voter suppression laws and political representation are investigated through the lens of Wilkerson’s Pillar Eight: Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority; The US Census is investigated through the lens of Pillar Three: Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating; and Public Pools are investigated through the lens of Pillar Four: Purity versus Pollution.