Feature Article: White Magic, Black Magic
WH I TE M AGI C, BLAC K MAGIC : Design Education as a Site of Racial Justice Contestation
DARIEN ALEXANDER WILLIAMS Darien Alexander Williams is a doctoral student in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies &
Planning, where he focuses on disaster recovery, climate change, and Black religious organizing. He has previously worked across eastern North Carolina on local planning in the aftermath of hurricane events and is an alumnus of UNC-Chapel Hill’s DCRP.
ABSTR ACT Problem, Approach, and Findings This paper explores urban planning and other design departments as sites of studentled contestation for racial justice. I first draw on urban design education history, citing statements and examples from planning departments across the United States. In exploring this history, I reference recent forms of student critique and protest following the national outrage over the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Particular attention is given to urban planning. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, founded in 1933, offers illustrative examples as the longest standing and largest planning department in the United States. I argue that planning education is uniquely ‘magical’ in that it provides students with the tools and credentials to materialize their desires in the built environment. There are two characteristics that we shall explore: 1) Planning students learn ‘magic,’ a term I use to describe a privileged ability to transform an imagined world (informed by ideology, identity, and biases) into something ‘real’ and material in the built environment, and 2) planning students, particularly Black and other students of color, recognize this magic’s impact on our shared built environment and repeatedly target curricula as a means of intervening in the reproduction of white supremacy. Implications Planning and design education has historically been an institution for the implementation of white imaginaries. The lengthy historical record of Black students critiquing this institution demonstrate that ways our discipline can disrupt white power’s ability to manifest and organize the built environment. Disrupting white power begins with decolonial struggle (e.g., landback), dismantling infrastructures of death and exploitation, and learning from alternative education formats modeled by recent experiments with curricular transformation. “There is a dialectic – a back and forth – between alternative Black spaces and the forces they resist.” – Karla Slocum, Black Towns, Black Futures, 2019
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