In 1962 Paul Twine1 traveled to Albany, Georgia with forty-four other Chicagoans to support the antisegregation movement. Along with his comrades he was arrested and jailed in Albany for refusing to end a peaceful prayer protest on the sidewalk in front of the City Hall. Five years later on March 4, 1967, he was elected to serve as the first President of the Catholic Interracial Council, a Civil Rights organization that he cofounded with white Catholics of Irish, Italian, Polish, and German heritage who were committed to social justice. The Catholic Interracial Council emerged as one of the most influential Civil Rights organization in Chicago which brought together progressive Catholics committed to unifying Catholics across racial (and spatial) divides to fight for better “race relations.” One of the biggest challenges facing this organization was the impact of segregated communities on social relations between black and nonblack Catholics and the hostilities of Euro-American ethnics toward native blacks.
Although the Catholic Interracial Council of Chicago worked toward these goals and participated in historic events such as meeting with President John F. Kennedy when he visited Chicago, and some members marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1963 March on Washington, they were ultimately not successful in preventing the Archdiocese of Chicago from rewarding and subsidizing white flight to the suburbs. Paul Twine (the grandfather of one of the editors of this volume) died in 1972 after witnessing the Archdiocese of Chicago defund Catholic schools located in parishes that became “black” overnight as white flight quickly changed the ethnic landscape. White flight out of the urban areas reflected racism and resistance to Federal Civil Rights legislation. The year that Paul Twine died, Henri Lefebvre, a Marxist sociologist, published “Reflections on the Politics of Space” (1976) in which he argued that “Space has been shaped by and molded from historical and natural elements, but this has been a political process. Space is political and ideological. It is a product literally filled with ideologies” (31).
There was a very brief period of a few years in the 1970s, when black girls in Chicago attended the same elementary and high schools as white ethnic girls. There was a brief moment before working class whites were able to flee (to newly formed segregated working class suburban communities), when churches, classrooms, sidewalks, and dare I say bedrooms, were full of girls who established friendships across racial divides. But it ended quickly with a rapid resegregation. One of the unforeseen consequences of the Civil Rights Movement was the massive white flight of white Catholics from the urban areas in cities like Chicago. The Archdiocese of Chicago began to close inner city Catholic parishes (and elementary schools) and began to invest resources in building new parishes in the newly built suburban parishes for the white flight generation. This constituted, in effect, a form of subsidizing of white flight and rewarding white Catholics for leaving the city so that they could resegregate in newly formed suburban enclaves. The struggle over the building of new Catholic schools was essentially a battle for economic and educational justice.
Five decades after the Catholic Interracial Council was formed, Chicago is the third most segregated city in the United States. During the Civil Rights era Chicago was the second largest city in the United States, and home to millions of Catholic immigrants of European origins and their children who embraced white supremacy and racial segregation. Chicago was referred to by Malcolm X as “Up South” because of the degree of racism that blacks encountered in public spaces and public policies that manufactured the “ghetto” and promoted racial segregation under the leadership of the first Mayor William Daley. As in other cities such as Detroit, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, Euro-American Catholics (which included large Irish, Polish, Italian, and German ethnics) constituted a significant political bloc.2
In Culture and Imperialism Edward Said wrote: “Just as none of us is beyond geography, none of us is completely free of the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings” (Said 1994, 7). The contributors to this volume provide compelling analyses of the myriad ways that spatiality is a central dimension of global and local struggles for racial, economic, environmental, and gender justice, which are social problems of immense magnitude across the world that cannot be adequately understood without considering spatial politics and practices.
What is spatial justice? Edward W. Soja (2010) conceptualizes spatial justice as,
a theoretical concept, a focal point for empirical analysis, and a target for social and political action. Guiding the exploration from the start is the idea that justice, however it might be defined, has a consequential geography, a spatial expression that is more than just a background reflection or set of physical attributes to be descriptively mapped. As suggested in the above quotations, the geography of “spatiality” of justice … is an integral and formative component of justice itself, a vital part of how justice and injustice are socially constructed and evolve over time.… This forceful approach is more than just a claim that “space matters,” as geographers like me have been arguing for decades. It arises more ambitiously from a deeply held belief that whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective. (1)
Inspired by and following the insights of critical geographers such as Edward Soja, this interdisciplinary volume builds upon this concern and brings into dialogue scholars trained in anthropology, history, sociology, social psychology, urban geography, and ethnic studies. The contributors to this volume will guide the reader through diverse sites that include educational (elite schools), leisure (blues clubs, dance clubs), organizational (antiracist advocacy organizations), urban neighborhoods, brothels, European immigration detention centers, and rental housing as they provide nuanced analyses of the cultural, racial, national, and economic dimensions of privilege. Case studies of different forms of privilege will reveal how it is deployed and contested in several regions of the world including the Middle East, Western Europe, North America, and Southern Africa. Drawing upon European social theory, classical theory, Marxist theory, feminist theory, urban geography, political sociology, and justice studies, the chapters in this volume provide innovative analyses of diverse social, political, and institutional spaces.
The analyses presented in Geographies of Privilege illuminate the paradoxical and dynamic nature of privilege. How is privilege transferred across generations? How is it both sustained and transformed in post colonial Africa and Europe (see Heather Merrill, chapter 6, Pauline Leonard, chapter 4, and David Morton, chapter 10). How does privilege get recast and “upgraded” in multiracial music venues that are class integrated such as Chicago Blues’ clubs (see David Wilson, chapter 3)? How is it carried across national boundaries and reworked (see Pauline Leonard chapter 4, Max Andrucki, chapter 5, and Catrin Lundström, chapter 8)? How is privilege challenged and narrowly defined in organizations (see Erik Love, chapter 12)? Moving between Chicago blues’ clubs to South African dance clubs to brothels in Dubai to elite East Coast boarding schools, the contributors to this volume explain and examine how privilege operates as a daily practice, a set of discourses and public policies, and how it is intertwined with gender hierarchies, colonial legacies, leisure practices, bodily capital, emotions, and urban development projects.
In the United States, urban segregation by race is one form of white privilege. Racially exclusive residential communities are an injustice—a taken-for-granted dimension of privilege for its beneficiaries across the globe. Of course, this is not simply a dimension of racial privilege but also of class privilege. George Lipsitz (2011) has noted that: “Decades and centuries of segregation have taught well-off communities to hoard amenities and resources, to exclude allegedly undesirable populations, and to seek to maximize their own property values in competition with other cities … These nearly universal strategies for class advantage follow a distinct racial pattern in the United States. They subsidize segregation and produce rewards for whiteness” (28).
In How Racism Takes Place (2011), George Lipsitz provides us with the concept of the white spatial imaginary to explain how privilege operates and how white supremacy is transferred across generations and reproduced in the United States, a nation in which polling indicates that the vast majority of whites and nonblacks qualified for inclusion in the white category, believe that racism is no longer a serious obstacle and believe that claims of everyday racism are exaggerated by U.S. blacks (Essed 1991; Feagin and Sykes 1994; Lipsitz 2011).
The concept of white spatial imaginary is important not only because it names a form of privilege that has been foundational to the transfer of intergenerational wealth and power but also because it illuminates why these forms of privilege remain invisible to a majority of Americans, both white and nonblack (Dwyer and Jones 2000). Furthermore this concept helps us to understand how exclusively or predominantly white residential neighborhoods appear to be “natural” and how white supremacy became inscribed into residential neighborhoods where access to education, to safety, to decent grocery stores, to opportunities to form childhood friendships across racial/ethnic lines, upward mobility, and to wealth accumulation continue to exclude many people of color, but in particular brown skinned Latinos and people who are socially classified as black. Lipsitz carefully explains to the reader how in a contrast society such as the United States, the white spatial imaginary is used to empower racially dominant groups (Lipsitz 2011). During the period prior to the mid-1970s it was legal to openly discriminate in housing.
George Lipsitz has provided a concept that is theoretically useful when trying to explain how white supremacy (and entitlement) is inscribed in physical spaces. Lipsitz refers to this as “white spatial imaginary,” a concept which he describes as:
[White spatial imaginary] structures feelings as well as social institutions. The white spatial imaginary idealizes “pure” and homogenous spaces, controlled environments, and predictable patterns of design and behavior. It seeks to hide social problems rather than solve them.… This imaginary does not emerge simply or directly from the embodied identities of people who are white. It is inscribed in the physical contours or the places where we live, work, and play and it is bolstered by financial rewards for whiteness. Not all whites endorse the white spatial imaginary, and some Blacks embrace it and profit from it. Yet every white person benefits from the association of white places with privilege, from the neighborhood race effects that create unequal and unjust geographies of opportunity. (2011, 29)
The issue of racial, economic, environmental, and gender justice are inextricably intertwined with spatial justice (Harvey 1996; Merrifield 1996). Which bodies can move freely across nation-state border controls, and across urban streets without detention or enhanced surveillance? Who can reside in the desirable neighborhoods? Which bodies are deemed nonthreatening and can move through public spaces without harassment by police or state surveillance officers? In order to address the problems of racism, urban poverty, class inequality, gender violence, and environmental degradation, a nuanced analysis of the geographies of privilege is needed. A spatial analysis of privilege can provide insights into the ways that privilege is reproduced, resisted, transformed, and inscribed onto the urban, rural, and transnational landscapes of the early twenty-first century.
Several contributors to this volume examine what can best be characterized as white ghettoes; that is, racially exclusive spaces where people who self-identify as white live. White ghettos, like black ghettos, are socially produced, and in turn, produce certain types of subjectivities. Catrin Lundström draws upon her field research on Swedish expatriates to examine how they navigate their move to southern Spain to live in transnational white enclaves (see chapter 8, this volume), while Pauline Leonard (chapter 4) provides an analysis of the choices that white British expatriates make who live in Johannesburg, South Africa. We learn from MacDonald and Twine about the strategies employed by impoverished white mothers to secure housing in racially and class segregated predominantly white residential communities (see chapter 9, this volume), and finally, Henk van Houtum provides a disturbing analysis of how the European Union or EuroZone is constructing itself as a gated community or a fortress against the invasion of those immigrants deemed undesirable (see chapter 7).
A spatial perspective deepens conversations about privilege in several ways. We will focus on three important aspects geography brings to an analysis of privilege. A spatial analysis offers conceptual tools that enable us to conceptualize the relationships between social inequality, social justice, and the materiality of space. Second, the question of scale is crucial to understanding privilege. Global inequalities are reproduced through local and regional politics, urban policies, and state practices. Finally, globalization studies and the movement of global capital, labor migrations, and multinational corporations, that operate across nation-state sites, call attention to the limitations of nation-states as an analytical frames. A nuanced analysis of the ways that privilege operates requires an international perspective. To this end we must consider the transnational flows of bodies and markets, which bodies are targeted for policing, and which are privileged—allowing for movement across borders.
The sociospatial dialectic is a Marxist concept grounded in readings of Henri Lefebvre's Production of Space (Lefebvre 1991). In the 1970s and 1980s, Marxist geographers such as Edward Soja and David Harvey popularized this way of looking at space in Postmodern Geographies (Soja 1989) and Limits to Capital (Harvey [1982] 2007). These geographers radically changed how social theorists perceived and analyzed space.
Once understood as a static container, the background on which time unfolded, geographers like Soja and Harvey presented space as a fluid concept, introducing it as an analytic tool for historical materialists (Soja 1989). Drawing from Marx, they theorized that space had a reciprocal relationship with social relations. The sociospatial dialectic sets up a necessary relationship between social relationships like race, gender, and class and material notions of space.
Social relationships are reflected in the material world we encounter. In turn these spaces help shape future kinds of social relationships. The spaces of segregation and apartheid reflect racist social relations (Goldberg 1993). The prison industrial complex in the United States is created by a myriad of ideologies and practices that are racialized and embedded in class inequality (Gilmore 2007). Domestic spaces that socially reproduce gender “differences” and gendered inequalities are spatialized in definitions of home (Rose 1993). Consider how the construction of detached housing in middle and upper-middle class suburban communities tends to isolate women in rooms like the kitchen and laundry room (Hayden 1980).
On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, an unarmed, seventeen-year-old black teenager was murdered, shot at close range while walking back to the home of his father's fiancée. He was unknown to George Zimmerman, the white Latino who admitted shooting him. Although there are still some disputes about this case, what is not disputed is that he was assumed to be a threat by Zimmerman—a danger because he was the “wrong” type of body in this residential space. A “neighborhood watch man” who was not authorized to use lethal force, nevertheless, felt justified in shooting Martin. Although this occurred in Florida, it could have also happened in any suburban residential community.
The death of Trayvon Martin is a tragic example of how racialized bodies that are perceived to be “out of place” can be surveyed, punished, and even murdered (Creswell 1996; N. Puar 2004). As a black male, Martin belonged to a racialized group that continues to be criminalized and perceived as dangerous and routinely subjected to hypersurveillance, routine police brutality, beatings, and in many cases, death. The hypersegregation of U.S. blacks and poorer and darker skinned Latinos from whites and other groups has not lessened in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. It is one example of “spatial injustice” as it operates in the United States and reflects the invisible privileges that are afforded to nonblacks.
The New York Civil Liberties Union released a report in May 2012 based on data from the New York Police Department that revealed dramatic racial disparities in which youth were routinely stopped and searched by the police. The New York Police Department stopped and frisked 685,724 black and Latino youth between the ages of 14 and 24 in 2011. This figure represents an increase from 2002 in which 97,000 individuals were stopped. The justification, or excuse used by the police for this program was that they wanted to reduce the number of guns on the street. However, only 780 guns were confiscated in 2011 (New York Times, May 12, 2012).
Today in post-apartheid South Africa, post-Civil Rights America, and the post-Berlin Wall world of Western Europe, new borders are being built and new forms of spatial injustice are being rationalized. Henk van Houtum (see chapter 7, this volume) calls attention to the ways that the European Union is engaged in transnational policing and detention of bodies deemed out of place, undesirable, and therefore not worthy of the civility accorded other types of bodies. Other types of barriers to spatial justice are class-linked as in the case of postcolonial Mozambique where the white flight of European colonists left desirable urban housing abandoned and provided opportunities for the spatial mobility of an emerging black African middle class. The issue of “belonging” and how people learn to “feel” is associated with spatial politics.
The use of space to establish zones of privilege (racial, ethnic, class, national, colonial) and to construct boundaries between the impoverished, conquered, enslaved, and migrant, and those who belong to the ruling and elite classes is not new. This has been central to nation building before the modern concept of white supremacy was erected by the British, Dutch, French, Spanish, and other European elites as they divided up the Americas, Asia, and parts of Africa. An analysis of space is central to illuminating how power operates, is negotiated, and transferred intergenerationally as well as how it is resisted, reconfigured, and recast as economic systems are transformed. The politics of privilege, or to use other terms, domination, resistance, and justice demands an analysis of space.
Privilege is a flexible and useful theoretical concept that can be used to analyze, illuminate, and challenge power relationships. In this volume, the contributors provide analyses that dissect particular spaces (domestic, institutional, legal, recreational, and transnational) as they structure relations of privilege and power in the 21st century. Although privilege is not fixed and assumes various forms, we agree that it has several core components.
First and foremost, privilege is synonymous with power. Any mention of privilege means that one group or individual is exerting power over another. The power that flows out of privilege is usually conceptualized in terms of unearned benefits. These benefits are divided into two categories. W. E. B. DuBois is credited as the grandfather of whiteness studies. In The Wages of Whiteness (2007), the labor historian David Roediger draws upon the insights of W.E.B. DuBois to describe a form of privilege that is emotional, or in his terms “the psychological” benefits that whites earned from knowing that they are not black (Roediger 2007). A second form of privilege or benefits is economic or material. The economic benefits of whiteness in the United States are numerous and have been extensively documented by historians, sociologists, and geographers (Anderson 1991; Hartigan 1999; Brodkin 2000; Dwyer and Jones 2000; Kobayashi and Peake 2000; Delaney 2002). Scholars have studied the effects of environmental racism (Pulido 2000; Collins et al. 2011; Moore 2012), inequality of schools (Hamnett and Butler 2011; Fox and Fine 2012), the value of whiteness in employment (Pager 2009), and the effects of race and class on the distribution of wealth (Massey and Denton 1993; Shapiro and Oliver 1997).
Second, privilege describes a very specific kind of power, one that is often rendered invisible, at least to those who benefit from it. This conception of invisibility became popular in the academy following the publication of a groundbreaking article by Peggy McIntosh, a white scholar (McIntosh 1995). In “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peggy McIntosh details the forms of white privilege and male privilege that are taken for granted (by whites) and constitute what she calls an, “invisible package of unearned privileges.” This article by McIntosh is routinely used in antiracist workshops, not unlike the one that Bradley Gardener (an editor of this volume) attended in the fall of 2011.
McIntosh's goal was to make visible unearned privileges to those who benefit from them. McIntosh argues that this is an important step toward breaking down myths of meritocracy in the United States. For example, unhyphenated whites need to know they are doing better economically because of unearned structural advantages and because racism, particularly against blacks, Native Americans, and recent immigrants, excludes these groups from competing with them in many occupational sectors. In The Ethnic Myth Stephen Steinberg provides a historical analysis of how white supremacy operates to benefit European immigrants at the expense of native blacks and other groups while erasing these benefits making them appear “natural” to white Americans (Steinberg 2001). The normalization of privilege (housing, education, jobs, citizenship rights such as voting) is supported by the myth of “meritocracy” and the belief that “if one works hard, one will be rewarded.” Hundreds of years of slavery, genocide, and Jim Crow segregation are erased from this narrative. Whites are taught to feel entitled to privilege. Further, to suggest a more equitable distribution of resources is understood as “reverse discrimination.”
Third, privilege is a multifaceted phenomenon. Privilege is also dependent upon social, local, national, and regional contexts. We cannot understand race privilege without considering generation (age), gender, sexuality, citizenship status, religious affiliation, national origins, and economic status. Specific cases cannot be subsumed into abstract categories of white/black or male/female (Housel 2009).
Fourth, privilege must be understood in relation to the groups it oppresses or harms as well as those it benefits. As scholars of privilege, our aim is not only to point out where privilege exists, but also who or what pays for privilege. The class privilege of the wealthy is made at the expense of low-wage laborers with few benefits (Higley 1995; Darby 2000). Racial or ethnic privilege is inextricably linked to the disinvestment of poor communities where stigmatized ethnic minorities live (and of course not all racial and ethnic groups are perceived as marginal or experience the same forms of economic discrimination) (Berman 1996; Surgue 1996; Wyley and Holloway 2002).
Finally, privilege is a flexible resource and is embedded in relationships that can mutate over time and space (Housel 2009). The categories under which privilege operates and is experienced are dynamic and always in motion. Who benefits and who loses is always a contested process in which the meaning given to categories and the categories themselves are in flux (Goldberg 1993; Kurtz 2006). Second, privilege is by no means a fixed relation, and both privileged subjects and those who are oppressed by privileging processes are struggling against power relationships (Robinson 1983; Woods 1998, 2007).
On Saturday, September 17, 2011 a group of anarchists and protesters in their twenties established a camp in Zuccotti Park (also known as Liberty Plaza), a privately owned public space near the New York Stock Exchange. By that evening 300 people went to sleep in that space and launched a six-week occupation to call attention to economic inequality and social injustice that has cost millions of Americans their homes and jobs, and caused a worldwide economic crisis. The mainstream media essentially ignored and failed to report on this economic justice movement for two weeks. It was not until the mass arrests of protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1, 2011, that the media began to cover it, although much of the reporting misrepresented Occupy and caricatured the Occupiers.
How will Occupy Wall Street be remembered one hundred years from now? Will it be remembered as simply another movement organized and directed by whites? Will it be seen as an unsuccessful, if well-intentioned movement that lacked a coherent set of goals as some of the Baby Boomer critics have argued? Was it doomed to failure because it was too reliant upon a particular urban space, Zuccotti Park, as a symbolic space of protest, rather than going to working class neighborhoods where people of less privileged backgrounds lived? Was it able to incorporate children, women of color, the working class, the disabled, and those who had social reproduction responsibilities?
This volume is timely because it synthesizes an amazing breadth and depth of different kinds of places that include border control (van Houtum, chapter 7), blues clubs (Wilson, chapter 3), dance clubs (Durrheim et al., chapter 2), brothels (Madhavi, chapter 1), antiracist advocacy organizations (Love, chapter 12 and Smith, chapter 11), domestic spaces (McFarlane and Hansen, chapter 14), elite all-male schools (Stoudt, chapter 13), rental housing (MacDonald and Twine, chapter 9), transnational motility (Andrucki, chapter 5), and public plazas (Merrill, chapter 6). Not only does its international focus meet challenges of scholars critical of privilege and whiteness study who argue that these studies are too North American focused, but the authors also consider how many different scales are connected (Bonnett 2000; Levine-Rasky 2002). As the authors in this volume deal with their particular slice of the world they attempt to understand the link between people and the way they make place, not unlike the way Manissa Maharawal (2011), a student organizer, experienced Occupy Wall Street, and link them up to the broader abstract processes that explain how the world works. Taking issue with the way organizers at Occupy Wall Street were conceptualizing race, she said, “we needed to tell him about privilege and racism and oppression and how these things still existed, both in the world and someplace like Occupy Wall Street” (Marharawal 2011).
A focus on space and materiality allows us to see how categories change and reform. Simply understanding that white or male bodies are always benefitting in the same kind of ways, and simply crying privilege without anything to substantiate it is a serious issue. A focus on space allows us to see how privileged processes unfold, and the best way to deal with them.
One of the foundations of privilege studies is that privilege is multifaceted, or as Peggy McIntosh says, “interlocking.” Jasbir Puar argues that intersectionality, the idea that different aspects of identity must be understood in relation to each other, intertwined, but existing as separate entities, is problematic (J. Puar 2007). Specifically, she argues that sorting out, naming, and making legible different aspects of identity such as race, gender, and sexuality leads to a reification of categories used by the state to produce and reproduce powered and privileged relationships. She says, “As a toll of diversity management, and a mantra of liberal multiculturalism, intersectionality colludes with the disciplinary apparatus of the state—census, demography, racial profiling, surveillance—in that difference is encased within a structural container that simply wishes the messiness of identity into a formulaic grid” (212). For Puar, breaking out of the grid that nurtures these categories is a necessary component of altering privileged social relationships.
Similarly, in a discussion of whiteness Peter Jackson argues against the reification of racial categories. He argues that:
Concepts of Whiteness should continue to be theorized within a radicalized context, whereby some identities are privileged over others, providing a powerful basis for racialized exclusion. This should not lead us to submit to a simplistic form of racialized thinking, where whiteness is automatically opposed to blackness. Instead the preceding argument has sought to repudiate such binarized ways of thinking and to focus on the complex cultural politics of all such racialized categorizations. (Jackson 1998, 104)
Jackson argues against privileging some racial identities over others, specifically black and white, the traditional categories of racial privilege and exclusion. He advocates a nuanced understanding of how privilege works. A focus on space, particularly in a myriad of different contexts, in our case at the international scale, can reveal the ways in which privilege works and can be transformed.
This volume breaks new ground by engaging in public debates about privilege taking place on the streets, in university classrooms, and organizing spaces like the Occupy Wall Street movement. Second, it brings notions of spatial hierarchy into discussions of privilege. In our view, this is essential to rethinking how to reduce inequality, racism, and poverty by implementing a more democratic distribution of resources. This volume moves between the local and the transnational, thereby revealing some dimensions of privilege which are relatively invisible to those who possess them.
An analysis of privilege is approached using different theoretical traditions. In chapter 11, Andrea Smith pushes the reader to rethink privilege by examining some of the ways that white privilege is replicated in the discourses employed in the context of antiracist organizations. For Smith the individual confessional white subject is unable to see his or her privilege while it is actually being performed and deployed in an effort to promote social change. Furthermore, Smith argues that a concentration of privilege on the individual scale produces the reification and concretization of problematic categories of identity. A second approach in this volume involves analyzing the obstacles to geographical mobility across neighborhoods (MacDonald and Twine, chapter 9) and across nation-state borders (Merrill, chapter 6, Leonard, chapter 4, and van Houtum, chapter 7). Several contributors analyze the ideologies and practices that “privilege” some bodies over others. This enables privileged bodies to convert their racial/colonial ancestries and national origins into forms of currency (access to visas, resident permits, jobs, and housing) that enable them to travel and reside in Europe with ease. The absence of fear and the ability not to be detained is a form of privilege in intra-European travel.
Third, contributors focus on how privilege operates in the marketing or selling of pleasurable experiences and access to specific leisure spaces and in neighborhoods located in middle class as well as racialized and impoverished urban communities in the United States and South Africa. David Wilson provides an analysis of the ongoing transformation of Chicago South Side blues clubs during a period of economic development. He analyses the discourses and practices employed by a club owner as she negotiates the larger structural changes occurring in the city and balances the club's economic survival with marketing the club to a more privileged and racially diverse clientele. Pauline Leonard offers an analysis of the rebranding of Johannesburg to appeal to more progressive, post-apartheid whites (chapter 4).
Forth, the issue of what types of spaces are prioritized in civil rights advocacy is addressed by Erik Love in his comparative analysis of two different Muslim American Civil Rights advocacy organizations (chapter 12). He highlights the important role that gender plays in structuring which types of spaces are visible in the discourses and legal projects of one Muslim American organization that is dominated by men and another that focuses on semipublic or private spaces. This complements the analyses offered by Andrea Smith (chapter 11) which focus on antiracist organizations that are run by and primarily for whites. Finally, the issue of masculinity and gendered practices that are privileged in an elite school is examined by Brett G. Stoudt (chapter 13). We learn how elite schools are spaces where young boys are socialized into aggressive forms of masculine behavior and into patterns of upper-middle-class entitlement. This occurs in specific spaces that are outside of the classroom and constitutes what would be called “the hidden curriculum.”
Geographies of Privilege is not intended to be an exhaustive analysis of all dimensions of privilege; rather, it is intended to provide compelling, contemporary, and innovative analyses of different forms of privilege as they operate across the globe. This book is a tour through an exciting global landscape in which people struggle to acquire, utilize, and transfer different resources (social, educational, economic, material, erotic) that in turn, are used to reproduce, resist, challenge, and reinscribe different types of spatial privileges, some of which are visible to them and some that are taken for granted.
1. After serving for two consecutive terms as the President of the Catholic Interracial Council and thus becoming a lay spokesperson for progressive Catholics in Chicago, Twine stepped down. In 1972, Paul Twine died in Chicago at the age of 52. In his obituaries, which were published on April 13, 1972 in the Chicago Tribune (the white press) and in The Chicago Defender (the black press), he was described as “former President of the Catholic Inter-Racial Council” and an employee of the Chicago Transit Authority.
2. John T. McGreery provides an insightful analysis of the political struggles around race and racism for urban Catholics in several major cities including Chicago. For an analysis of this and to understand the significance of lay Catholic activists such as Paul Twine (who is quoted in this book), see (McGreery 1998).
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