The Dialectic of Race and the Discipline of Geography

Abstract

This article uses a biographical approach to trace the ways in which major thinkers in the discipline and, in particular, past presidents of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in their Presidential Addresses have conceptualized race. Race thinking emerged during the Enlightenment and, in geography, became more explicitly environmentalist through the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century. By the mid-twentieth century, environmentalism was surpassed, but most human geographers, including cultural geographers, urban geographers influenced by the Chicago School of urban sociology, or radical geographers, tended to avoid projects on race. I want to highlight the advances in antiracist scholarship by geographers of color since the 1970s. They have received too little attention, although they influenced a new generation of geographers.

本文运用传记方法，追溯本领域中的主要思想家、特别是美国地理学会（AAG）过往的大会主席在其主席致词中，概念化种族的方式。种族思考在啓蒙时代浮现，并且在地理学中， 自十九世纪至二十世纪初期数年之间，发展成为明确的环境决定论。二十世纪中期，环境决定论受到压抑， 但多数的人文地理学者，包括文化地理学者、受芝加哥学派城市社会学所影响的城市地理学者， 亦或是激进地理学者，皆倾向避免有关种族的研究案。我企图强调自1970年代起， 有色人种的地理学者推进反种族主义之进展。这些学者儘管影响了一整个新世代的地理学者，但却受到太少的关注。

En este artículo se sigue un enfoque biográfico para explorar la manera como conceptualizan raza los principales pensadores de la disciplina, y cómo lo han hecho, en particular, los ex presidentes de la Asociación de Geógrafos Americanos (AAG) en sus discursos presidenciales. Sobre raza se empezó a pensar durante la Ilustración y en geografía el tema racial se hizo explícitamente ambientalista durante el siglo XIX y a comienzos del XX. A mediados de ese siglo el ambientalismo quedó relegado, pero la mayoría de los geógrafos humanos, incluyendo geógrafos culturales y urbanos influenciados por la escuela de sociología urbana de Chicago, o los geógrafos radicales, se inclinaron por rehuir los proyectos relacionados con raza. Deseo destacar los progresos en erudición antirracista por geógrafos de color desde los años 1970. Ellos han recibido poca atención, aunque hayan influido seriamente sobre una nueva generación de geógrafos.

Key Words:

• AAG Presidential Address
• antiracism, history of geography
• racism

关键词：:

• AAG 主席致词
• 反种族主义
• 地理学的历史
• 种族主义。

Palabras clave:

• Discursos Presidenciales de la AAG
• antirracismo
• historia de la geografía
• racismo

The concept of race has a benighted biography among those who have created our discipline. I take the opportunity of this address to delve into the race concept and a situated series of enactments and interactions among geographers who have shaped its evolution. My aim is modest: I wish to take a biographical approach to uncover, unravel, and engage controversies over questions of race in contemporary geography, particularly but not exclusively through an examination of the Presidential Addresses given to the Association of American Geographers (AAG) within the context of the general development of our discipline over the past century.

A journey through the Annals of our discipline is certainly not the only path that I might take in attempting to understand how geographers have addressed questions of race, but as I have spent time reading the work of earlier presidents, placing their words in the context of the discipline as a whole, and of the society in which they situated themselves, I have discovered much food for thought. All of the addresses are intellectually stimulating, highly influential, and powerful messages. From an antiracist perspective, some of them are deeply disturbing if read through a twenty-first-century lens; but, without falling into the trap of relativism, I think it is important to reflect on the extent to which geographers have represented the contexts in which they live(d) and to understand the ways in which geography as a discipline is not only a way of engaging and describing the world but also a form of human relationship through which a discipline is constructed, contested, and transformed. It is the dialectic of disciplinary transformation that holds my attention here. It is not by any means a straight trajectory. It twists, turns, and is often lost along the way and then picked up as something rather different. Sometimes it reflects and sometimes it is at great odds with the social conditions of the day.

The Concept of Race and the Dialectics of Human Engagement

W. E. B. Du Bois ([1903] 1994) set out to construct an “autobiography of the concept of race” at the turn of the twentieth century, a few decades after the Civil War challenged the nation to call into question deeply seated views on the question of equality and difference among human beings. For Du Bois, the concept was the basis for a discursive remaking of African-American reality, overcoming what he termed the “double consciousness” of blackness, the experience of “twoness,” American and black, through which the racialized struggled to achieve and maintain a sense of identity. He viewed the color line as the single most important issue of the twentieth century (Du Bois [1903] 1994). What is so remarkable about Du Bois's vision is that it depicts the experience of racialization as a series of relational human acts of transformation, a dialectic in which individuals make themselves and others. Du Bois put his ideas into action. In February 1919, he organized the first Pan-African congress in Paris, hoping to influence the course of the peace talks going on at Versailles. Five Pan-African meetings took place over the next twenty-six years, aimed at destabilizing the colonial map of the world, especially in Africa. Du Bois and others of the American Pan-African contingent became among other things the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a major engine of the civil rights movement.

Nearly half a century later, anthropologist Ashley Montagu ([1945] 1977) famously labeled race as “man's most dangerous myth.” Montagu was a major author among the scientists commissioned to write the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO 1950) statement on race, commissioned by the United Nations shortly after World War II, which became the definitive statement on the social construction of the race concept. In the 1950s, however, Montagu's work was not widely read and seldom cited—never, to my knowledge, by geographers—at the time.

The dialectics of racial transformation were also well established in emerging poststructuralist theories of the mid-twentieth century. Jean-Paul Sartre's spin on the Hegelian dialectic as a recursive relationship among human beings and between human beings and environment, the constitutive gaze through which the self and the other are made, created what Gilles Deleuze has called the possibility of poststructuralism in the mid-twentieth century, a highly spatial interpretation (Colombel 2005; Boyle and Kobayashi 2011). One of Sartre's earliest statements of that dialectic was about antisemitism. The concept both inspired and provoked Frantz Fanon, arguably the most influential antiracist thinker of the twentieth century (Fanon [1952] 2008). The personal relationship between Sartre and Fanon was both intellectually productive and politically fraught; Fanon's response was to push the limits of both blackness and whiteness, challenging his own black body—by taking on the condition of double consciousness—to remake the future of the race and provoking Sartre to remake whiteness. Sartre then attempted to do so in his 1961 preface to Fanon's monumental work, Les Damné, or The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon 1963) calling on white people to remake themselves by casting off whiteness and colonialism.

This biographical provenance of the race concept is well established in American Africana studies and in much of the post- and decolonial literature. Although that geohistory is seldom if ever referred to in the geographical literature, for the past three decades, a majority of geographers writing on the topic of racialization have recognized race—among a range of identity attributes including gender, class, and disability—as a social construction. Although Fanon is often recognized by geographers for his influential role in exposing the conditions of creating blackness, geographers have been most strongly influenced by late-twentieth-century poststructuralist thinkers such as Foucault, to recognize the discursive practices through which race is created, powered, transformed, controlled, and governed.

Much debate on the social construction of race among geographers has focused on questions of ontological status. To discuss, however, whether something is socially constructed is, first of all, not a relevant task because social constructionism denies an ontological split between the essential and the constructed—much less the real and the ideational (Lewontin 1995; Hacking 1999). In addition, such discussion masks the important philosophical and normative question of how social construction and social change occurs and what we can and should do about the results. I take social construction as a starting principle, therefore, but the principle does not take me very far toward understanding the dialectical conditions through which the concept of race is organized and lived. In other words, the issue is less about whether race has been reified than with the social transformations that have come about through its reification.

The major contribution of the early race thinkers, including Du Bois, Sartre, and Fanon, was to recognize that racialization, including antiracism, is a transformational process. Fanon in particular had no time for debating the ontological status of race; he was concerned almost entirely with how human beings transform their circumstances. Sartre, controversial as his notions on being might have been, when it came to questions of race, was concerned with the dialectics of human relationship and with the possibility of overcoming oppression through social organization. Montagu (1997) spoke of overcoming racism as a project of collaboration: “It was not until many years later that I found support for my conviction that everything a human being comes to know and do as a human being has to be learned from other human beings, from the social environment” (35). Although my comments today are directed mainly at black geographies, Montagu reminds us that racialization is a complex, intersected, and diverse set of practices and that antiracism is often driven by coalitions and collaborations. Ultimately, my concern is that geographers are indeed very human and that there is another kind of double consciousness at work in our dual identities as humans and as scholars.

Phases in the Development of the Race Idea in Geography

My biography of race in geography starts with the assertion that our discipline is a social product, forged in classrooms and publications, in our interactions with the wider public, and of course in our academic meetings. I begin with a historical overview focusing particularly, but not exclusively, on presidential addresses at AAG meetings over the past century. The biography is organized around five major phases that run the course of the twentieth century and the complex controversies that emerged in each. Although in the interests of brevity I depict these phases in a simplified manner, I wish to avoid relativism, hagiography, presentism, inaccurate attributions, or overgeneralizations.

Enlightenment to Mid-Twentieth Century

Immanuel Kant is often depicted as the foremost intellect of the Enlightenment, but he was also among the first to obtain a formal appointment in geography, at the University of Konigsberg, where he taught about the relationship between race and climate. His views on race are completely outmoded today, but they need to be understood in context: in the classroom where he lectured young men who would become the intellectual, commercial, and political elite of German society. He claimed:

In the torrid zones, humans mature more quickly in all aspects than in the temperate zones, but they fail to reach the same degree of perfection. … Humanity has its highest degree of perfection in the white race. The yellow Indians have somewhat lesser talent. The Negroes are much lower, and lowest of all is that of the American races. (Kant 1802, 19)

Kant also conceived a bizarre theory of racialization in which children in Africa are born white but become black after exposure to the sun, which also causes a deterioration of mental capacity, although he could not explain why the same process did not seem to occur for Europeans. The erroneous science notwithstanding, Kant's beliefs presaged nearly two centuries of attempts by geographers and others to establish a science of race. Swedish scientist Carolus Linnaeus, at about the same time, proposed a classification of Homo sapiens into four “races,” as part of the science of taxonomic classification according to empirically observable features (see also Painter 2010). Linneaus's categories were debated (some claimed five human types, others as many as seven), but the notion of fundamental difference put forward by the likes of Kant and Linneaus became received wisdom. As many scholars have pointed out, such classification supported the historic project of colonialism and capitalist expansion and justified diverse actions including slavery, labor exploitation, and genocide. For many antiracist and postcolonial theorists (Hall 1992; Blaut 1993; Gilroy 1993) the mobilization of the race−colonialism dialectic was constituent of modernity itself.

As David Livingston (1991, 2002, 2010), among others, has shown, geographers’ claim to racial science included both mapping the world according to race and developing an understanding of the factors, climate in particular, that determined racial characteristics. Environmentalism became the dominant paradigm of the discipline until the twentieth century, in scholarship that ranged from simple acceptance of mappable characteristics to sophisticated analyses of human−environment interactions. I do not intend to provide a full story of environmentalism in geography here but rather to outline some of the key statements that defined controversies in U.S. geography.

In 1913, Albert Brigham (1855−1932) became president of the decade-old AAG. Brigham's 1915 presidential address urged the discipline to study race as a response to climate. He concluded that the question is the most important facing geographers: “No other phase of the subject is so insistent and so appealing as the earth's influence on our kind” (Brigham 1915, 3). Brigham praised Ripley, whose 1899 map of variations in cephalic indexes was one of the most often cited; cast doubt on Ratzel's ability to understand the relationship between climate and race; and eloquently affirmed the important work of Ellen Churchill Semple (1863−1932), who was to become one of the most prolific contributors to the Annals, which had been founded in 1911.

Semple became the first woman president of the AAG eight years later (Semple 1922). A student of Ratzel, she wrote detailed treatises on the development of human communities in Europe and the United States. Semple is often lumped uncritically with environmental determinists, but her approach was not so simplistic. She did talk about primitive and wild people and assumed a division of the world according to races and referred often to Ripley's map. The key to her thinking, however, was the claim that human−environment relations are infinitely complex: “Man has been so noisy about the way he has ‘conquered Nature,’ and Nature has been so silent in her persistent influence over man, that the geographic factor in the equation of human development has been overlooked” (Semple 1911, 11).

Harlan Barrows (1877−1960) succeeded Semple as AAG president in 1922. He, too, spoke the language of relationship rather than determinism (Barrows 1923). Like Semple, Barrows made simple assumptions about the non-European world, but his approach was even more Eurocentric. Barrows also needs to be understood, however, in relation to the work of Robert Park and the Chicago School of urban sociology that would come to play such an important role in the foundations of urban geography by midcentury (to which I turn later). If Barrows discounted the deterministic role of nature, he nonetheless advanced a biological metaphor of natural selection as a basis for understanding human occupation (see Scott 2006, 99). Urban ecology held that groups compete with one another for scarce resources, and the results work themselves out on the landscape in a process of invasion and succession, an image that was to linger in the geographical literature for many decades.

The apotheosis of environmentalism was reached in Ellsworth Huntington's (1876−1947) infamous presidential address the following year. He claimed, “The pinnacle of geography is reached when we are able to explain why certain types of human character, certain manifestations of genius, and hence certain lines of progress and stages of civilization are localized in various parts of the world” (Huntington 1924, 1)

Huntington was perhaps the most committed environmentalist in geographic history. He wrote disparagingly in Character of Races … that the equatorial zones created “idleness, dishonesty, immorality, stupidity, and weakness” (Huntington 2001, 294). This was a common view of its time, and Huntington believed that geographers’ expertise in climatology gave them a special role. He carried his views beyond the university to become for some time the President of the American Eugenics Society. But he also expressed the hope that the whole world might become “stronger and nobler” (Huntington 2001, 294).

Almon Parkins (1879−1940) became president of the AAG in 1930; he was also then editor of the Annals. He did not advance such grand environmental theories as Huntington and indeed eschewed “natural” environmental determinism but not natural human difference. His presidential address represented one of the most interesting discussions of race among geographers at the time. He postulated “regional behaviorism” as the actions of humans in adjusting to a given, static physical environment. Differences between North and South, he explained, resulted from a complex of factors “natural to both the environmental conditions and the social order” (Parkins 1931, 3), the attributes of different social groups varying by inheritance, institutional organization, and historical development. He explained economic differences between the North and the South according to the racial qualities of the workers as well as pragmatic responses to environment that made the South most suited to large-scale monocrops and slave labor. He stated in a matter-of-fact manner that “The tropical bred negro who was immune to the diseases of wet, hot climates was a godsend to Southern rice growers on the low, swampy, outer margins of the Coastal Plain” (Parkins 1931, 23). Yet he viewed slavery as an “unwieldy institution” (25), an unfortunate and ultimately uneconomical historical development, as well as an impediment to importing superior European workers, such as those who had been attracted to the factories of northern cities.

Time has demonstrated that the inherited and induced habits of the negro (sic) unfit him for the “exacting demands” of factory work. Prejudice keeps many out of factories today, but that is not the sole reason for their low representation in industry. (Parkins 1931, 22)

Notwithstanding the dry economistic tone in which Parkins explained the rationale of slavery as a practice that would disappear as it became less economically attractive, he explained at length the economic justification for treating slaves well to preserve their health so they can work productively. On the other hand, he also lapses into personal statements on the meaning of civilization, opining that:

At best the negro slave was a stupid, unwilling, indifferent worker, born with a superabundance of hereditary tropical inertia; and there was little incentive in the institution of slavery to develop diligence, enterprise, and a desire for work. There was no pleasure in work, for work was slavery and slavery meant work. (Parkins 1931, 28)

The capacity of the slave for adapting and developing the traits of “civilization,” however, Parkins believed to be substantial but limited.

Parkins was a well-regarded scholar, highly cited as an expert on the economic geography of the American South (Parkins 1938), and his interpretation of historical development was consistently one of showing how the white civilization took possession and advanced the region, pushing its frontiers (one chapter of his book is entitled “White Man Takes Possession” [91−122]). He published several textbooks on world and economic geography (McMurry and Parkins 1921, 1927) that became standard texts in schools throughout the United States and a major study of the rise of industrial Detroit (Parkins 1918), in which he first put forward his ideas on whiteness, civilization, and progress. All of his works were cited until the 1970s.

Try to imagine the group of almost entirely male—and certainly all white—American geographers assembled in Worcester, Massachusetts, on the occasion of that address. I want to be very careful about making any assumptions about how Parkins's address was received or of estimating what the attitudes and prejudices of individuals within that assemblage might have been, but it is reasonable to speculate that his audience was well read and aware of current events. It would be unrealistic to think that many in the room—or, for that matter, most reasonably informed people in the postbellum United States—were unaware that race was an issue in U.S. society. The Great Depression had begun and its effects on U.S. cities were beginning to be seen. Scholarship generated by the Chicago School under Robert Park had brought conditions in U.S. cities to the forefront of social science scholarship. The Great Migration had begun decades earlier and its impact on urban landscapes, demographically, economically, and culturally, was undeniable. Meanwhile, Jim Crow laws (which Parkins did not mention) were a powerful de jure determinant of living conditions for blacks in the South, and de facto racial segregation was well established in the North. The NAACP, based primarily in the North, with Du Bois at its head, was surely making some impression on white America. These contextual factors do not seem to have been incorporated into geographical scholarship on race during the 1930s.

If evidence is sparse as to the extent to which Parkins's views can be understood as common received wisdom, such is not the case for those of Isaiah Bowman (1878−1950), who succeeded Parkins as AAG president. Bowman's 1931 address defined a “pioneer spirit,” strictly European, as the hope for filling all the arable land in the world with agriculture. Bowman was one of the most complex of those who have created the discipline of geography. He was heavily involved in geography boosterism, especially promoting its value in public policy. But his discussion of pioneer settlement, which he saw as an important process in furthering economic development, talks about the “pioneer spirit.” His notion of advancing civilization bears a striking resemblance to that of Parkins:

Here would seem to be an opportunity for geography to take an important part … in focusing technical methods … upon territories and people of wide extent and of increasing significance in a world in which the remaining arable lands are being rapidly filled. (Bowman 1932, 107)

Bowman's published address included a map of areas of the world with potential to be developed—with no regard for the people who then occupied those places—including the U.S. “frontier” running north–south just west of Kansas.

Smith (2003) described Bowman as an evolutionary idealist, a perspective that allows a convenient association between Enlightenment ideas of civilization and European whiteness while positing others as lower on the evolutionary scale. Notwithstanding its implicit whiteness, Bowman's presidential address does not mention race, but elsewhere he wrote extensively of the attributes of various peoples of South America—intellectual, physical, and moral—as inferior but subject to improvement if not exposed to “a Chinese or negroid element or both [which] have led to local inferiority” (Bowman 1916, 55). As Smith detailed, Bowman's attitudes to matters of class and race are reputed to have gone beyond his scholarship to be used in his considerable power as a public intellectual (Smith 2003, 247−51).

Overcoming Environmentalism in the Mid-Twentieth Century

Carl Sauer (1889−1975) gave his 1940 presidential address at the onset of World War II, at a time when no one with any access to the media could be unaware of the implications of Naziism and racism. Sauer was already well known for his revulsion toward determinism and his turn toward understanding culture, and cultural systems, as a basis for understanding human life. Sauer followed Franz Boas, who had written forcefully against Huntington's beliefs. Part of the justification for his position came from the task of defining geography as a nondeterministic discipline separate from the geological sciences:

Perhaps in future years the period from Barrows’ Geography as Human Ecology to Hartshorne's late résumé will be remembered as that of the Great Retreat. … the pulling apart of geography from geology. … There followed the attempt to devise a natural science of the human environment, the relationship being gradually softened from the term “control” to “influence” or “adaptation” or “adjustment” and finally to the somewhat liturgical “response.” (Sauer 1941, 2)

Sauer went on to make a case for geography's strength as the analysis of landscapes produced by cultural systems. He used the example of the straw hat to suggest that we need to explain human choices and actions according to cultural context, rather than anything to do with racial characteristics. “Behavior does not depend upon physical stimuli, or on logical necessity, but on acquired habits, which are its culture” (Sauer 1941, 8).

It is noteworthy that Sauer became AAG president about the time that Montagu ([1945] 1997) was writing Man's Most Dangerous Myth and Du Bois had already written extensively on the topic. Sauer's intellectual mentor, Boas, was well known for pushing a claim for the equality of races (Littlefield et al. 1982), although he did not challenge the notion of racial difference per se. Montagu, however, acknowledged that Boas was among the first to read the manuscript of Man's Most Dangerous Myth, which goes beyond asserting the equality of ascribed races to challenge the very concept of race itself. It is very unlikely that Sauer was unaware of these developments in the discipline of anthropology. But there is still little or no evidence that geographers incorporated these authors into their own work. Whether intentionally or (likely) not, Sauer's perspective laid rest to issues of environmentalism while treading extremely lightly over the ground of racial difference. By 1940, although the debate over environmentalism had been intense over several decades, those who opposed environmentalism still did not challenge a received truth that people inherited both phenotypical and psychological characteristics according to something they called race. Sauer was no exception, but he did not address those characteristics that did not result from processes that he collectively labelled as culture. Culture had qualities, however, and could be judged according to “superior adaptability” (Sauer 1941, 24). In this respect he was closer to Boas than to Montagu.

The controversy continued, nonetheless, in the presidency of Griffith Taylor (1880−1963), who succeeded Sauer. Powell (1978) would refer to Taylor as “Australia's tormented prophet of environmental control” (123). Taylor corresponded with both Bowman and Huntington—who held a great dislike for one another, and Bowman was especially disdainful of Huntington's scholarship—but both were instrumental in Taylor's appointment at the University of Chicago, whence he shortly departed to become the first chair of geography at the University of Toronto. In that position, Taylor became the first non-U.S. resident to preside over the AAG. In 1941, Taylor took a genetic approach similar to that of Huntington. Under pressure to rethink environmentalism, however, he gradually adopted a concept of possibilism, or differential determinism, which he applied only to white settler societies. He wrote, “The writer (who is somewhat of a determinist in the broader fields of racial and national distribution) is prepared to admit that the human factor becomes of increasingly greater importance as we consider smaller and smaller human agglomerations” (Taylor 1942, 5).

The introduction of scale is an interesting aspect of Taylor's analysis. His lengthy presidential address (the longest ever published in the Annals) rambled over a large number of case studies in which he illustrated greater degrees of human agency in smaller and in more urban places, such as Toronto, which he depicted as developing in a series of stages as a result of migration, than in extensive and less settled places, such as Antarctica. Taylor's possibilism, like Bowman's, was incremental, historical, and decidedly biased toward places in developed European and settler societies. Bowman had expressed an interest in Taylor's work because he saw therein the possibility of getting beyond a disciplinary stage that he viewed as “vague or general or academic or merely systematic description [to become] real science” (Bowman to Taylor, 29 June 1920, cited in Powell 1978, 124−25). In this correspondence, and indeed in all of the controversy around questions of race until the middle of the twentieth century, questions of race as a basis for and legitimation of science superseded any questions of the neglected concept of racism.

Post–World War II: Spatial Science Rewriting Race

By midcentury, after three decades of debate, Du Bois's racial divide had not been breached—in geography or in society at large. Although they had different views on what determines human and environmental traits, the presidents (with the partial exception of Sauer) cited so far challenged neither racial difference nor a hierarchical, racialized view of human civilizations, with white Europeans at the top. The influence of Kantian idealism remained very strong. The rare geographical scholarship that addressed race in any way (e.g., Hart 1960) did so according to a strict definition of geography as mapping the location and movement of segments of the population. Blatant determinism disappears almost entirely from the Annals after World War II, however, even as spatial science emerges. Many geographers became fascinated by the elegant theories of spatial modeling. If both environmentalism and regionalism had failed by the 1960s to bring geography to its full potential, then perhaps spatialism could do so. But, as Sheppard has argued, such a caricature of quantitative geography is not helpful and leads to what Sheppard (2001) called a “stabilized representation” (540), which certainly needs to be destabilized. I cannot, of course, do so in this short address, but part of the stabilization process came as a result of beliefs that spatial theories, if they deserved to carry that description, can account dispassionately and without ideological encumbrance for all manner of terrestrial phenomena, including race (for a fuller account see Kobayashi 2014). In this respect, the so-called Quantitative Revolution was also fundamentally idealist, based on beliefs that spatial theory could help to achieve an egalitarian society.

By the 1960s, urban geography had become an exciting field, reflecting the rapid growth in the number and size of urban places as well as increased interest in urban planning, postwar suburbanization, and modernization of the urban landscape. No single scholar exerted a stronger influence on the discipline than Robert Park, a strong proponent of a rational society who believed that social groups move about the city as they advance vertically through socioeconomic levels, thus overcoming impediments to social and spatial inequality. Park and Harlan Barrows were contemporaries at the University of Chicago, and although there is no evidence of collaboration (Entrikin 1980), they shared an ecological approach to the city that would become important only after Park's death, when spatial science became the basis of urban geography in the 1960s. The invasion−succession idea was an important aspect of geographical thinking about the development of both cities and nation-states. Intellectual vistas opened along many roads from the Chicago school in sociology, anthropology, and geography. The main road to geography was a spatial science of city form based on Park, Burgess, and Hoyt, who until recently provided the foundational material of introductory urban geography courses. Another road followed Park's notion of a moral economy, in which he contended that all “races” except blacks were on a cycle of assimilation, but black culture made assimilation impossible (Lal 1987). The struggle to square Park's actual claims about the moral economy of race with later antiracist scholarship has been a geographical undertaking of very mixed success (but see Jackson and Smith 1981; for an anthropological account see Littlefield et al. 1982).

The emphasis, however, was on the spatial order of the city. “Reduce all social relations to relations of space,” Park (1926, 13) had observed, “and it would be possible to apply to human relations the fundamental logic of the physical sciences.” There can be some doubt as to whether Park believed that it was possible to reduce social relations to relations of space, but certainly many geographers did. Thus, central place theory rose to a position of unprecedented authority as an elegant theory of the urban spatial order. Central place theory is another form of idealism, which led spatial science to experiment with a world of perfect and even planes. The small problem of incorporating the process of racialization into that perfect world does not diminish the fact that whereas for some such a world invokes a totalitarian order, for others it represents a rational society based on perfect equality. As Barnes and Minca (2013; see also Kobayashi 2014) have recently shown, central place theory was the basis for planning a new, utopian Nazi Germany during the 1930s and Walter Christaller was hired to do just that. In retrospect, we might ask how rationality is therefore rationalized: Was central place theory bad science because it could be marshalled against the good of humankind? Or was the issue with the impossibility of spatial science in the first place? The range between these two views became the stuff of debate within the discipline by the 1970s and continues today (see Crampton 2012).

Geography and Race During the Civil Rights Era

Geographers have written little about the civil rights movement, then or now. Many of us who were born before the mid-1960s remember the period and the student movement that challenged aspects of modern life from warfare to consumerism. But it would be a huge exaggeration to claim that the discipline underwent a major shift at that time. Shift it did, of course, and a newer generation of geographers began to remake the discipline, but changes were gradual and the shield of spatial pattern provided intellectual shelter from the most pressing social issues. If for most geographers race was just one of a range of variables that could be mapped, for Richard Morrill (b. 1934) it was much more. His article in the Geographical Review (Morrill 1965) was the first in an established geographical journal to take a stand on racism in the United States as a subject for geographical enquiry. It was based on emerging ideas in mainstream urban geography, especially Häagerstrand's diffusion theories, which used analogies from plant behavior. He constructed a spatial diffusion model to depict the growth of the black ghetto in Seattle, and he developed alternative models of residential association, such as cluster models, to create new patterns of social interaction. We can think of reasons in retrospect why Morrill's cluster models might not have worked, but Morrill made a very deliberate choice to invoke established urban geographical theory based on empirical observations to encourage a form of grassroots socialism rather than revolution, and he saw no contradictions between the two. Morrill (1969) would argue against the “new left” because he sought a nonrevolutionary means to overcome discrimination, poverty, and injustice, which would require fundamental social changes, as well as overcoming the historically conservative tendencies of the discipline.

“Radical” geographers debated the issue of race for a time. Indeed, questions around race dominated the earliest issues of the journal Antipode. Perhaps the most ardent of the new radicals was Bill Bunge (b. 1928), who had made his own transition from a high-powered quantotheoretical treatise in his book Models in Geography (Bunge 1962) to take a position that was political, activist, and antiracist because, as he would later claim, “Never before, not even when the leaders of Europe thought the earth was flat, have politicians been as literally lost as they are today relative to geographic reality. Their spatial confusion threatens all of us” (Bunge 1979, 169).

During the mid-1960s, Bunge mounted geographical “expeditions” into the inner city and was an early advocate of what we now term participatory action research, encouraging residents to take part in grassroots organizing for change. Much has been said, on and off the record, about Bunge's expeditions. Opinions run from designating his work an unfortunate failure to marking it as the hubris of the white male academic (Merrifield 1995). But Bunge wrote brilliantly; in this line from the journal of the NAACP, to which I have found only a handful of references by geographers until very recently, he remarked sarcastically and wryly on the failure of urban geography to understand the fundamentals of life in U.S. cities: “How backward of them [African Americans] for us not to have found them” (Bunge 1965, 495). More than anything else, Bunge's expeditions show that who was a member of the expedition makes a difference.

There had been a lively debate in the pages of Antipode, which began publication in 1969, over the relationship between race and class, and over the role of empirical research—such as geographical expeditions—in bringing about social change. For Jim Blaut (1927−2000), racism needed to be addressed as a product of imperialism; although he wrote little about conditions in the United States or other developed countries, he became (along with Milton Santos in Brazil) one of a few geographers over the next decade to make the connection between racism and colonialism that was the foundation of the Pan-African movement. “Imperialism,” he wrote, “is white exploitation of the non-white world, a plague that began some 500 years ago on the West African coast and spread across the globe” (Blaut 1970, 65). For David Harvey (b. 1935), who at the time, like Bunge, had turned away from positivist explanations to address questions of social justice, theoretical explanation of spatial processes remained the goal, and he saw little value in geographers examining race either theoretically or empirically:

It does not entail yet another empirical investigation of the social conditions in the ghettos. In fact, mapping even more of man's patent inhumanity to man is counter-revolutionary in the sense that it allows the bleeding-heart liberal in us to pretend we are contributing to a solution when in fact we are not. (Harvey 1973, 144)

Harvey thus deeply influenced a generation of geographers to take more seriously the ways in which they explain geographical phenomena. Theory has never for Harvey been simply about seeking an external truth; it is a mark of our ability to comprehend and to change the world. At the same time, however, his view of the significance of racialization as a social process might have slowed the progress of understanding the lived experiences of racialized subjects. In any case, discussions of race had pretty much disappeared from the pages of Antipode a decade after its inception.

Although questions of the science—and the scientific possibilities—of our discipline were hotly debated at this time, very little was actually said about questions of racism. Across the discipline, outside of the debates over how to radicalize geography, mapping race became one of the major objectives of spatial approaches, particularly those derived from human ecology (e.g., Berry and Kasarda 1977), but none questioned the fundamental assumptions surrounding the ontology of race as a self-evident social category. In 1973, Edward Taafe (1931−2001) devoted his presidential address to an “unabashedly parochial, ethnocentric, and idiosyncratic” appraisal of the spatial view (Taafe 1974, 1). He called for geographical pluralism, and the coexistence of the three “traditions”: “man−land,” “area study,” and “spatial organization.” He made a veiled reference to the rise of “activism” in geography and its emphasis on spatial justice but cautioned against activism at the expense of the development of theory and generalization, leading to what he termed a “cautious and pragmatic pluralism” that might lead to societal good if based on such theoretical generalizations (16).

A year later, however, Wilbur Zelinsky (1921−2013) was more willing to take on the “church of science” (Zelinsky 1975). Zelinsky bemoaned the failure of contemporary science to establish the “ultimate worth of impending discoveries, whether practical or abstruse” or to “address some of the more compelling concerns of mankind in any serious, effective way” including inter alia “racial and ethnic maltreatment or other forms of social injustice” (Zelinsky 1975, 129). His vision for the discipline offered hope not only of transformed scholarship but a new of vision of human existence. His address inspired many at the time—including myself as an enthusiastic graduate student—but it did not provide a way forward.

Zelinsky's vision was passionate but entirely nonspecific. That of Julian Wolpert (b. 1933) in 1976 was deliberatively prescriptive. He made a plea for “Opening Closed Spaces” (Wolpert 1976) by building communities of inclusion based on voluntarism, contrasting two communities: one exclusive, the other more open. He did not mention issues of race and racism. Certainly attention to race might be read into his comments, but his prescription does not provide any basis for understanding how to increase voluntarism and inclusion in a society that is deeply divided along racial lines.

By the 1970s, the pages of geography journals had begun to reflect questions of modernity and social “relevance.” In the Annals there was no trace of the radical visions contained in Antipode, but Zelinsky, Wolpert, and others pushed their discipline to become far more interested in how they could contribute to social change. On questions of race, there were few exceptions, but the few are noteworthy. David Ley, for example, was part of a new generation of geographers who began to take notice of other aspects of Park's work on the “moral order of the city,” as a basis for what emerged as a new social geography and a shift away from biological toward social, cultural accounts of “race” (see also Jackson and Smith 1981). In what might broadly be described as a “humanistic” turn, these social geographers used pragmatism, symbolic interaction, and ethnographic methods (in keeping with developments in U.S. analytical philosophy) to capture the experiences of people living in racialized communities. Ley (1974) conducted iconoclastic research on the creation of graffiti in Philadelphia to describe urban cultural style, the creation of territory, and the emergence of “conflict zones” where violence and social change emerge. This work shows the strong influence of both the quantitative approach to ethnicity and the emerging behavioral, demographic tradition and it is an important precursor to the later development of critical race theory, although it does not show the influence of either Marxism's commitment to large-scale social change, or the poststructuralist influence of continental philosophy that would mark the emergence of critical race theory a decade or two later. (And it is one of the few that actually cites Du Bois, for the extensive work that he did on Philadelphia.)

As a whole, however, geographers—or perhaps editors because they controlled what was accepted and rejected—were reluctant to draw discipline-defining connections between geography and racism or other forms of oppression. Of telling interest, an electronic search of a major retrospective on the history of urban geography in the United States (Berry and Wheeler 2005)—much of which developed during the 1970s—yields twenty references to “race” and two to “racism,” although Leitner and Sheppard (2005, 356) noted that given the small number of African-American scholars in the discipline, especially in major research departments, the dearth of studies should not be surprising.

The Emergence of African-American Geography

A year after Wolpert, Harold Rose (b. 1926) became the first AAG president to confront the elephant in the room. Rose described himself as a behavioral geographer, with a psychosocial approach to understanding violence. He rejected both a structural and a culture of violence explanation, however, in favor of understanding the relationship between individuals and environments. Rose maintained an unwavering career quest to improve the lives of racialized minorities, and never lost sight in his writings of the need for spatial data to overcome the effects of racism. His past president's address (Rose 1978), entitled “The Geography of Despair,” explored murder risk among young black men. It was based on rigorous empirical scholarship, but what stood out, and what galvanized the attention of those in the room who heard the address, was Rose's passion to use both scholarship and choice of subject to make a difference. He made clear that geographers had not chosen to address one of the most significant social concerns of the time, which, he said, “has escaped the attention of that group of social scientists with a primary spatial orientation” (i.e., geographers; Rose 1978, 455). Notwithstanding his claim that he was not a theorist, Rose debunked most of the extant theories on violence, including the “culture of violence” theory, suggesting that violence occurs in a context of despair created by the formation of ghettoes through segregation and impoverishment, concluding, “It would have been more pleasant to have reported on a topic that reflects the geography of happiness, but such a report for me at least, would have represented hope, rather than reality” (Rose 1978, 464).

Rose was one of a small handful of geographers willing to address the reality of life for racialized Americans. Although his followers were few in number, he took a position of leadership by advocating for geographical solutions to address the problems of a landscape of injustice. In 1972, he had guest edited a special issue of Economic Geography (Rose 1972), a seldom-cited collection that represents to the best of my knowledge the first significant compilation of geographical views on the question of race, with an emphasis on segregation (see Morrill and Donaldson 1972).

It is no accident that a practical coming-to-terms with the lived reality of racism in the United States was initiated by African-American scholars, although they were remarkably few in number. At that time, the majority of black students attended historically black institutions, where geography was not a strong feature. A small number made a difference. Thelma Glass (1916−2012), for example, who taught geography at the University of Alabama, wrote little and was almost completely unknown in the discipline. But she was the last member of the Women's Political Council, which organized the Montgomery bus boycott and supported Rosa Parks in 1955, leading to the 1956 Supreme Court decision that marked the abolition of segregation laws. This group was also a solid force behind the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr. (George and Monk, with Gaston 2004).

By the end of the 1960s, there were only two black geographers with PhDs in departments offering a graduate degree. One was Harold Rose; the other was Donald Deskins, Jr. (1924−2013). Like Rose, Deskins's scholarly approach was conventional (e.g., Deskins 1971, 1972); he mapped differences in black and white patterns of everyday life and the impact of such differences on spatial segregation. But Deskins made an important impact on the discipline. In 1964−1965, then Executive Officer of the AAG, Saul Cohen, initiated a program to address the dearth of black students in the discipline, a training program to provide geographical training for students from small southern (i.e., black) institutions. Deskins became the initial director of the program, called the Commission on Geography and Afro-America (COMGA). It was the first of several projects undertaken by the AAG over the years, expanding from black students to address a range of racialized groups. Such initiatives have resulted in extremely modest, incremental gains (AAG Diversity Task Force 2006).

One of Deskins's first publications was a bibliography of geographical writings about African Americans (Deskins 1969), which shows a meager fifty-eight items, including twenty-one in the Annals and thirteen in the Geographical Review, overwhelmingly written by white scholars. The majority are geodemographic, describing migrations or spatial distributions. Morrill's (1965) path-breaking discussion of process in ghetto formation is exceptional. Displaying the scholarly activism that was to continue throughout his career, Deskins's question was this:

Before geographers can address themselves to the question: What research contributions can the geographical profession make that will contribute to a solution of the racial dilemma presently facing America, they have to answer the question: What have geographers done in the past to contribute to the resolution of American racial problems? (Deskins 1969, 145)

His question is unfortunately as salient today as it was at the time.

Deskins never let up in his quest to improve the lives of black Americans. In 2009, he co-edited Letters to President Obama: Americans Share Their Hopes and Dreams of the First African-American President (Walton et al. 2009). His death in March 2013 was a deep loss to the discipline, just weeks before he was scheduled to receive the inaugural Harold Rose Award for Antiracism in Geography in Scholarship and Practice.

If the children of the civil rights movement are passing from the stage, their task, and the task of geography, is far from complete. So who has noticed? Bobby Wilson noticed, partly because he had been at a symposium organized by Don Deskins when Wilson was a graduate student at Clark in 1972. The inconsistency between the black imagination and the geographical imagination, between the racialized imagination, the colonized imagination in general, and the white imagination, has now become pretty clear in the writings of a predominantly white discipline:

Geography, a relative new profession for the black academic, and dominated by a white epistemological framework, is faced with the problem of dealing with a black community which is becoming aware of its own lived world experience and values. This inconsistency between the Black Imagination and the Geographical Imagination was perhaps the major impetus of a symposium which took place between March 9th and 11th, 1972. (Wilson and Jenkins 1972).

The 1990s and Beyond

It is quite beyond the scope of this article to address the very substantial shift of geographical interest by the 1990s toward not only questions of racism but postcolonial and poststructural accounts of processes of racialization. Some very brief comments are in order, though. Three basic developments occurred during the 1990s. First, the advent of poststructuralism as the dominant paradigm allowed geographical theorists to question assumptions about the ontological status of race. The shift begins with Peter Jackson (b. 1955) bringing together a group of scholars who were beginning to articulate a social constructionist approach to race (Jackson 1987). This work was heavily influenced by sociologist Robert Miles, who had translated the ideas of Collette Guillaumin, a black French theorist who was a member of Montagu's UNESCO panel and a contemporary of Fanon and Sartre, as well as by the burgeoning field of cultural studies, especially under the intellectual leadership of Stuart Hall of the Birmingham School. This “British School” of antiracism in geography influenced thinking about the race concept profoundly, but it was not strongly connected to events in the United States for some time thereafter.

Second, the intersection of antiracist scholarship and other forms of antioppression began to produce fruitful work during the 1990s. Marxist geographers began to treat the development of capitalism and racism within a larger context of colonialism and, moreover, to recognize anticolonial efforts such as that of the Pan African movement as culturally destabilizing forces (e.g., Blaut 1993). Feminist antiracism was particularly compatible (although mainstream feminism had paid scant attention to issues of race prior to the 1990s) as intersecting aspects of forging identities, oppressions, and subjectivities (Kobayashi and Peake 1994). Intersections of race, class, and gender were addressed in terms of environmental justice (Pulido 2006), and urban geographers began, more recently, to explore the possibilities of place-based activism (Pulido, Barraclough, and Cheng 2012) as well as the most fundamental connections between racialization and the condition of modernity (Gilmore 2007).

Third, and perhaps most important, although geographers of color are still far from demographically representative in the discipline, their presence makes geography a very different place than it was until recent decades (Kobayashi 1994). The majority of scholars of color currently in geography departments in the United States have received their PhDs since 1990.

Conclusion

Harold Rose was the last—and only—AAG president to make race the topic of a past president's address. Since that time, especially in the past decade or so, issues of race and racialization have become a major part of the geographical canon. Questions of “diversity” have become a normal—if still unfulfilled—part of running departments and academic associations. Our journals regularly feature articles on race and racism, and few undergraduate programs ignore the topic. Since 2002 the AAG has participated in “Race, Ethnicity, and Place,” a biennial conference devoted to the topic (http://rep-conference.binghamton.edu/). All such initiatives have not overcome the fact that the discipline is still predominantly white, but the demography is changing. My brief biography shows that the presence of geographers of color in the academy has been an instrumental part of transforming the discipline.

It goes without saying that the phases of race thinking in geography vary drastically from those in the field of antiracism and postcolonial studies. I have found almost no evidence, for example, that Du Bois fraternized with the Geography Department while at Harvard. Within our discipline, discussions of race took place at another window, animated by the relationship between humans and another dangerous myth, the natural environment. The emergence of understanding of the process of racial construction over the past century has been dominated by two larger discourses, one about the relationship between humans and environment and the other about the status of geography as a science. Both deflected geographical scholarship from questions of race.

By the middle of the twentieth century, the discipline had moved past environmentalism as a dominant explanatory framework but, in doing so, particularly in the Sauer-dominated thinking of cultural geography, placed emphasis on cultural systems in which race itself had no explanatory power. Whereas anthropologists such as Montagu were questioning the ontological status of race, geographers sidelined it. In contrast, urban geographers, heavily influenced by the more individualistic urban ecology of Park, took race as an ontological given but placed explanatory faith in spatial systems. Radical geographers, whose work was strongly influenced by the civil rights movement beginning in the 1960s, initially addressed racial inequality and residential segregation, but they too bypassed serious studies of the phenomenon of racialization to focus on class as an overarching explanatory. Humanistic geographers in their turn, by the 1970s, appealed for justice and social change but again largely failed to develop an explanatory framework.

Major gains have been made by geographers of color, and in particular African-American leaders such as Harold Rose and Don Deskins, who ironically have not advanced the field theoretically but have led by example. They added substantially to empirical understanding of the experiences of racialized communities and labored to cultivate and advance both minority scholars and minority scholarship. Their work has had a direct influence on the small but growing numbers of geographers of color who have become a presence in geography departments since the 1990s.

In highlighting the importance of the work of geographers of color in recent years, I certainly make no claim to exceptionalism, nor do I budge from a constructivist position. But the point is that the concept of race as part of the dominant discourse has been well understood by those most affected by its results. It seems very unlikely that those gathered at AAG meetings a century ago even noticed, much less passed judgment on, the whiteness of their discipline. Even by the late twentieth century, geography's whiteness went without comment, much less was the history of the discipline examined from the point of view of how racialized assumptions have been deployed to steer who writes what about whom and who has the opportunity to read, engage, critique, and steer further directions. It took Harold Rose to make the pragmatic and prosaic statement that, “The process of ghetto formation is essentially related to the refusal of Whites to live with Blacks” (Rose 1970, 1). We might replace a few of the words in Rose's pronouncement to say exactly the same about disciplinary formation.

I began this address with the claim that understanding the formation of a discipline is about understanding human relations dialectically, as discursive, power laden, transformative, and sometimes unsettling but mostly conforming to established ideological norms and received wisdom. If that characterization reflects the thinking of many “critical” geographers today, it also reflects the process through which the discipline has slowly taken up questions of race and racism, a process that remains incomplete, contested, and extremely uneven from place to place. Race is still a taken-for-granted concept in much of the literature. Discussions of race still make a lot of folks uncomfortable and therefore susceptible to retreating into euphemisms such as “diversity.” Now, more than perhaps any other time in disciplinary history, however, the dialectical transformation of relations among geographers is resulting in serious scholarship based on ongoing human relations, on who talks of what to whom, and where scholarly opportunities are opened up or closed down. It is of utmost importance, therefore, that we engage not only in race scholarship but also in examining the ways in which the discipline itself reflects the human relations of which it is forged. It is for that reason that I have embarked on this incomplete biography of geography and race.

Reflecting on recent work by postcolonial theorists, I also wish to assert that I do not consider race a master narrative—notwithstanding that it has been used as such for social, political, and academic purposes. Like the concept of capitalism, it accounts for the organization of particular places and human relations, but it is always a partial, usually fractured concept. In the United States, and in U.S. geography, it has been understood primarily—or often only—in terms of black and white. Not only is such a dichotomous view of the racialization process problematic for understanding the many shades of brown and the range of ways in which U.S. society has developed but also much of the strength of critical race scholarship has been in recognizing the hybrid, contingent, and often contradictory ways that race has been inscribed on human bodies. Some of the most helpful intellectual and political gains have resulted from coalitions among differently raced bodies. Furthermore, as Chakrabarty (2007) argued, we need to get past dichotomous thinking to guard against any kind of proprietorial theoretical narrative, including that of critical race theory itself.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank all of the geographers who have made antiracism an important part of our discipline but in particular those coauthors and fellow activists without whom I would not have been able to say anything: Mark Boyle, Joe Darden, Linda Peake, and Bobby Wilson.

Notes

1 Elementary Geography and Advanced Geography were revisions of school texts originally published by R. S. Tarr (1864−1912) and later taken up by McMurry. The books came out in successive editions and were used until at least the 1940s. Several states republished the books as part of official state curricula.

2 See, for example, the 2011 Classics in Human Geography Revisited discussion of Bunge's (1971) Fitzgerald: Geography of a Revolution with Trevor Barnes, Nik Heynan, Andy Merrifield, and Alison Mountz.

3 Bobby Wilson was given the AAG Presidential Achievement Award following this past presidential address.

4 The term diversity is widely used to define the equity and representation goals of the AAG and most contemporary institutions. I use it with great hesitancy because it has become a euphemistic term employed among those made queasy by the concept of antiracism. Neoliberal ideologies tend to “celebrate diversity,” thus avoiding the issue of overcoming racism.

5 Although Du Bois does tell the story of taking a class in geomorphology from Shaler, who invited a student who refused to sit beside him to leave the classroom (Du Bois 1940, Chapter 1).