Perhaps we do need a cultural politics of urban tastes. But perhaps what is more urgent right now is for geographers to engage in an anti-racist cultural politics against yellow perilism and all other forms of structural racism that the pandemic heightens.

This monograph focuses on how race has been utilized throughout the history of the American housing market to violently exploit and extract value from Black communities. To do this, Taylor furnishes readers with a meticulous account of the myriad ways private influence from the real estate sector along with the support of government entities helped to re-engineer key housing programs to extract profit from the very people they were designed to help.

In the evening of August 13th, 2016, the Sherman Park neighborhood of Milwaukee, Wisconsin erupted into protest. Earlier that day, a Milwaukee police officer had shot and killed 23-year old neighborhood resident Sylville Smith, prompting hundreds of people to flood the streets of Milwaukee’s north side. For three days, protestors faced down police in riot gear and snipers situated atop nearby buildings.

In "Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America", legal historian Martha Jones traveled back to antebellum Baltimore to uncover the citizenship debates that anticipated the birthright citizenship clause as codified in the Fourteenth Amendment. What resulted was a meticulously researched, richly textured, and entirely original piece of scholarship that rewrites the genealogy of birthright citizenship in the United States.

Readers will be well aware of the ways in which black women’s representation in popular discourses is deeply caricatured – as angry, as devoutly Christian, as “in the life” of prostitution and drug addiction. Williamson argues that the knee jerk criticism and refusal of stereotypes that sometimes follow from the deployment of these representations can also reproduce structured absences of black women’s sociality.

Jared Sexton's new book "Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing" moves beyond a traditional critique of respectability politics to interrogate how Hollywood films make invisible global structures of anti-blackness through narratives of black incorporation and authority.

When we listen to the accounts of those most impacted by racism rather than defensively dismiss them, we can see the pervasiveness of violence. We can see that for Professor Marrus’ ‘joke’ to provoke humor rather than pain and rage, our Black colleagues would first need to feel liberty, equity and basic safety where they work.

Jared Sexton is Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he also holds an affiliation with the Center for Law, Culture, and Society. He is the author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

How did a New York real estate magnate mired in scandals, including a lawsuit for fraudulent advertising by his university, the refusal to reveal his tax returns on the pretext that “Americans don’t care at all” (it turns out many do), a federal investigation into anti-black bias on his properties, and the confessed misuse of funds by his charitable foundation—not to mention personal sexual misconduct—manage to make anti-corruption a centerpiece of his campaign?

If indeed what we confront is an apartheid state, then what is our responsibility as scholars and educators? Put bluntly, what is the role of the university in the age of (American) white supremacy? What are the critiques, actions, and pedagogies we must produce to challenge the normalization of violence?

I am interested in what this rise says about the state of “British tolerance,” or rather, how it has contributed to the sense that Brexit has marked a “purge of inclusive values.” In this context, what does tolerance look like and is it really a lost ideal?

By this point, we have perhaps become accustomed to the inquiries from friends and family—“So, what do you study exactly?” The response—“Geography”—is often met by perplexed looks and polite smiles—“And, what do you plan to do with that?” For us, this dreaded question belies more than the familiar ritual of mid-twenty-something professional angst.

This essay attempts to articulate the historical significance of those defending racialized police violence. It asks: how has a phrase like “black lives matter,” so patently banal, become so politically explosive? How can the same factions revitalized by the mantra of “small government” defend the most extreme form of government intervention possible—killing its citizens?

We suggest that there is newness in the operation of anti-Black violence in our present, but this newness does not lie in the fact of exceptional or militarized police force. We highlight shifts in the social order that policing actively supports, that are assembled through the geo-political economies of urban space.

Drawing out both the causal and structural links that conjoin the underdevelopment of Black neighborhoods and the captivity of incarceration, Spatializing Blackness argues that even before Black men enter the prison system they are already inhabiting the prison-like environments and carceral politics of the prison industrial complex in their everyday lives.