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This descriptive qualitative study used racialized organizations (Ray, 2019) as a lens to examine how 27 faculty, administrators, and postdoctoral fellows in STEM departments at two institutions understood the problems that underlie negative racial climate, the strategies they used to improve racial climate, and the alignment between problems and solutions. Participants did not discuss racism and White supremacy as factors that contribute to negative racial climate. Instead, they indicated a weak STEM pipeline, and lack of faculty engagement created negative climate. Because participants did not attend to how racism and White supremacy fostered negative climate, their strategies (e.g., increased recruitment, committees, workshops) left systemic racism intact and (un)intentionally amplified labor for racially minoritized graduate students and faculty champions who often led change efforts with little support. These findings can help move departments away from intervention-centered models of change and toward more systemic approaches that contest how racialized organizations operate.
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“I am Sapelo”: Racialized uneven development and land politics within the Gullah Geechee Corridor
The history of land struggles in the United States demonstrates how ongoing patterns of uneven development depend upon and codify the legacies of white supremacy. In this article, we show how the histories of white supremacy continue to be embedded and institutionalized into contemporary land and property politics through the processes of racialized uneven development using the case of Sapelo Island, Georgia. We trace the history of property relations on Sapelo over four periods (covering 1802–2020) to reveal how Black, Saltwater Geechee descendants’ presence on the island has persisted despite manifold attempts to manipulate, control, and dispossess families of their land. We re-interpret Sapelo’s history through the lens of abolition ecology to articulate how the struggle for life through land consistently runs up against state-sanctioned racial violence, which perpetuates and institutionalizes systemic racialized uneven development. We argue that the “racial state” is facilitating the dispossession of Geechee cultural heritage, which lies in having access to and ownership of the land and requires new political imaginaries to combat the persistence of these tactics.
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- PAR ID:
- 10312697
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space
- ISSN:
- 2514-8486
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620987366
