Places that Feel Racist: How the Built Environment Re/Creates White Racial Spaces and Time

Abstract

In this 2022 Janet E. Helms Award for Mentoring and Scholarship keynote, I discuss the importance of understanding how our built-environment and our physical spaces and structures are intertwined with my conceptualization of systemic racism. I describe the problems with how we study racism, systemic racism, and context, and the limitations of how we have adapted traditional psychotherapy theories. In this paper, I propose an examination of structural racism and the ways in which white spaces, white property, and white time work to displace, dispossess, and dislocate Black and other non-Black people of Color. This constant racism within white spaces allows us to understand what may be creating the psychological and physiological stresses many people of Color experience. In better understanding systemic racism, I hope we can focus our critical scholarship on centralizing the humanity of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other people of Color.