A Research Agenda Pending Revolution

Abstract

This essay responds to David Imbroscio’s “Beyond Opportunity Hoarding: Interrogating Its Limits as an Account of Urban Inequities” by suggesting questions that researchers might ask about opportunity hoarding if they considered the concept through a Black epistemic lens. I propose that investigating cultural, cognitive, and psychological commitments to hoarding as a key feature of Whiteness and racial capitalism might lead to insights on how to divest from and ultimately dismantle these systems.

Keywords:

• Neighborhood
• demographics
• spatial

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 n.b.: When I say White/Whiteness, I mean not strictly ‘Caucasian race people,’ but white, White-coded, White-adjacent, and White-aspiring people who experience unearned privileges and maintain a system of a closed race–class network of those privileges, resources, and opportunities. Some people of color are afforded White-like status based on class status, but the limitations of Honorary Whiteness are apparent when considering Black Americans, even those with educational and income achievements.

2 I make the very deliberate choice not to cite this research in specific in this response. First, I believe that most readers of Housing Policy Debate are very familiar with the body of work to which I refer. I also anticipate that citing specific authors or studies will distract from the larger point—which is that there is an epistemic and ideological issue in an entire field of study. I have no desire to argue about the intentions of specific individuals—in fact, I think many of them are sincere in their beliefs that they are promoting equity and social justice. As a Black woman scholar who has been inundated with this research since entering the field of urban policy study in the mid-1990s, I share here the overwhelming sensation of reading, hearing, and absorbing how the White-dominated academy views this population/us/me.

3 To suspect that the goal of mobility policy is to acculturate poor Black mothers and their children to White middle-classness, even as the description of those mothers and children suggests that they have deep deficits of cognition, culture, and psychology, is another moment of kaleidoscopic sight-splitting. As Simone Browne quotes from James Baldwin in her book Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, “it is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom you know—which is the price of your performance and survival—you do not exist. It is hard to imitate a people whose existence appears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude that they are not, thank heaven, you” (quoted in Browne 2015, p. 10).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa K. Bates

Lisa K. Bates, Ph.D. is Professor at Portland State University in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning and in Black Studies. She is the Portland Professor in Innovative Housing Policy. Her scholarship focuses on housing and community development policy and planning, engaging in participatory action research with community-based organizations working towards racial justice and housing rights.