Twentieth-century urban social science was saturated with racial imagery and whiteness boundaries

Evidence

Michael Keith provides a powerful reminder of both the breadth and the power of images of “the city” in different historical and geographical settings. Drawing on a diverse range of sources and situated examples, Keith provides a sharp reminder that many of the social scientific ways of conceiving the city that developed during the twentieth century were deeply inflected with racially composed or saturated imagery and with the boundaries of whiteness. He also provides a critical overview of the ways in which governmental intervention in urban contexts across Europe and North America have been rationalized by reference to the place of race and ethnicity within the iconography of “the city.” — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2241

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the theme from my immodesty/complaints work that putatively neutral frameworks often encode dominant-group signaling.