WHITE MAGIC, BLACK MAGIC: DESIGN EDUCATION AS A SITE OF RACIAL JUSTICE CONTESTATION

WHITE MAGIC, BLACK 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.

ABSTRACT

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

INTRODUCTION This text engages the histories of academic design institutions as sites of student-led advocacy for racial justice, with particular attention given to urban planning and architecture. I will first draw on the role of planning institutions in white worldbuilding (‘white magic’) and constraining alternatives. This tradition would necessitate decades of Black resistance, knowledge production, and the development of alternative planning and education institutions (‘Black magic’). Magical thinking and bureaucratic institutions have tradition in other planning work in literal and symbolic ways (James 2012). Both white and Black magic have mediated internal university dynamics that have impacted the built environment outside of the university, particularly during moments of national conflict. As of 2021, this resistance has most recently manifested in student demand statements and the experimental building of alternative educational institutions outside of the design academy.

WHITE MAGIC To better understand the history of Black resistance within academic design departments, we must briefly reflect on the history of universities implementing white supremacist interventions in the built environment. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the founding of the first architecture and urban planning departments in the United States. The new departments shaped generations of designers who implemented many of the interventions that the same departments and their connected institutions now critique: racial zoning, apartheid townships, segregated neighborhoods, company and prison town-planning, and the massive decades-long forced movement of people and land dispossession known as urban renewal. I call the skills and credentials imparted by these institutions ‘white magic’ because they allowed students to conjure white imaginaries of urban space into the material, built environment. Numerous works have explored this history of dispossession at the hand of white planners (Massey & Denton 1993; Rothstein 2017; Taylor 2019; Goetz et al. 2020). The goal of this paper is not to detail the impacts of this violent white legacy, but to explicitly name the target of student organizers. This white magic was motivated by a set of communal priorities long-considered moral and of service to a greater good, and is the target of student resistance.

White magic has mediated internal departmental arrangements (the most glaring being explicit racial discrimination producing all-white departments until educational de-segregation) as well as external relationships with surrounding communities. White magic is not limited to white people, extending to anyone implementing work, even well-meaning work, sanctioned by white institutions. This includes institutions that were founded by slaveowners (such as MIT), segregated institutions built by slaves, and institutions operating off of wealth generated in racialized oppression (Krantz 2018). Despite integration of the university, the primacy of whiteness in the form of race-blind, racially-antagonistic, and race-deprioritized work manifests in planning departments. Samuel James Cullers, likely the first Black urban planning graduate degree-holder (awarded in 1952), serves as one example of this deprioritization. Cullers’s historic thesis, an interview analysis that cites race among other identities as variables that “time would not permit [a] detailed cross-classification of,” is in and of itself an early example of the nature of the scholarship that would secure an early urban planning degree (Cullers 1952). By referencing Cullers, I do not necessarily intend to implicate him in the white supremacist planning endeavor. Cullers’s work is important, but serves as a useful reference for how even a well-intentioned university program has historically constrained and deprioritized racial inquiry.

BLACK MAGIC The urban upsets of the 1960s sparked resistance to the work carried out by planning departments in their surrounding communities. Students critiqued town-gown dynamics of university expansion and gentrification of Black communities, like the famous 1968 resistance to development of Morningside Park by Columbia University (Carriere 2011). In the subsequent decades, cresting in the 1990s, universities witnessed student-led resistance to complicity in South Africa’s white nationalist apartheid regime (Soule 1997). More recently, particularly for planning schools in the South, departments saw student calls for action regarding confederate monuments on and near university campuses (DCRP 2018). These protests took the form of conventional demonstrations, committee disruptions, and even physicallybuilt displays of resistance in public space.

Following the Long, Hot Summers of the 1960s

Revolutionary global upsets of the 1960s impacted student organizing in planning departments across the United States. One recorded example is the 1969 National Urban Planning Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an annual event hosted by the American Planning Association’s predecessors: the American Institute of Planners and the American Society of Planning Officials. Among a group of “over 300 students and faculty from 50 city planning departments around the country,” a large group of over sixty Black student attendees staged a mass walkout (Jacobs 1969). Black students released a set of demands alongside this walkout, including dedicated funding to found Black city planning schools, scholarships, and budget contributions to a newly-founded Black Planning Network devoted to transforming planning into a discipline in the service of Black communities under Black leadership. Commentary from non-Black students who witnessed the action mirrored the sentiments expressed. “[One Cornell student] noted that city planners look on black urban communities as ‘workshops’” (Jacobs 1969). Another student, Lawrence Susskind, now Professor at MIT, remarked, “the demands were neither unreasonable nor revolutionary” (Jacobs 1969).

Some educators were so struck by such student demonstrations that they subsequently pushed their architecture and planning departments to transform beyond diversity of admission. One such call to action warned that the field currently “[fails] to prepare black people [with] needed skills for discerning and pursuing vital black metropolitan-wide interests,” and that planning education has “not equipped them to collectively absorb an equitable share of post-urban America’s resources” (Mitchell et al. 1970). Such publications preceded the student demonstrations of 2020 by a half century.

Student resistance was not limited to conferences. Members of architecture and urban planning departments were involved in local and global struggles that centered universities as complicit agents in oppressive interventions in the built environment. Student protest against Columbia University’s expansion into Harlem involved a Black-led, multiracial set of tactics within and beyond the walls of the university (Bradley 2010). Student strategies, including the occupation of campus buildings and discouraging investments in the school, were central to preventing what students viewed as an extension of urban renewal. They were ultimately successful. Protesting university investment in the apartheid regime of South Africa likewise required a level of creativity that deeply engaged members of planning and architecture departments. Students built shantytowns to disrupt public space on campus and called for boycotts and university divestment from apartheid South Africa (Naylor 2010).

Student-led struggles toward racial justice in architecture and planning schools have largely been bi-directional. The first direction of student efforts has been towards internal departmental processes, including admissions, funding, programming, and curricula. In a sense, these priorities mirror those of any other academic department. The second direction focuses externally on disrupting white supremacy in the form of urban planning practice. This student inclusion of external impact signals their acknowledgment of the uniqueness of design education (and planning education in particular) concerning impacts on the material conditions of Black communities globally. Such an intervention, to transform urban planning and design from a tool of the white imagination to a tool for the Black imagination, is engaging what I consider to be the discipline’s magical nature. This Black magic speaks

to a tradition of resisting the ways white imaginaries are conjured into material existence, which involves the use of land, the setting of economic relationships, movement of people, remembrance of history, the building of new structures, and the demolition of old.

FOLLOWING THE LONG, HOT SUMMER OF 2020 Following the police executions of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, global Black protest produced new examples of collective statements, demands, and moves towards transformative action. Black planning student groups and their accomplices engaged in similar work. Like their 1960s predecessors, these demands primarily called for: 1) internal departmental change in the service of a racially-just education, and 2) disrupting the external impact of urban planning and design as a vehicle for white supremacist worldbuilding.

Internal Transformation

Departments in all regions of the continental United States were met with comprehensive critiques of internal processes. The following section traces the thread of Black magic through each set of demands.

Students at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) stated, “given the sociocultural, environmental, and economic impacts of architecture, it is imperative that we seize this important historic moment to reexamine the culture, priorities, and pedagogy of UCLA” (UCLA 2020). Students at the University of Virginia (UVA) Architecture School went on to demand their departments “take radical steps to reflect our obligations to each other, to design, and in solidarity with Black lives” and argued their proposed changes are “what the next 100 years should look like” (UVA 2020). These proclamations urged planning and design educators and practitioners to recognize the present moment as a window of opportunity for transformation. Inherent in framing a particular moment as opportune is an implicit assessment that normal circumstances do not carry the same transformational potential. Organized students at UCLA and UVA sent an important message to future cohorts: if transformation does not occur under present circumstances, at the guidance of clear critique and widespread desire, then future change may require greater organized disruption.

Black students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) organized under the banner of ‘Black DUSP Magic’. The students directly engaged recent planning literature published by planning educators, several of whom are members of the department. Black DUSP Magic’s (BDM) 2020 publication was formatted as a Master’s Thesis submission and titled Planning Ideas That Matter: Blackness, Indigeneity, Redistribution, and Reparative Practice (also referred to as The Black DUSP Thesis; BDM 2020). Across sections, the demands posed questions to wrestle with regarding “white supremacy and anti-blackness [that has] permeated [planning department] culture, in the past and present” (BDM 2020). The Black DUSP Thesis proposed specific interventions, including hiring goals, changes to the curriculum, increased funding (for Black faculty, staff, and programming), line-item support for Black and Indigenous students, and transformation of admissions, communication, and professional development processes. Black DUSP Magic used their discipline’s words against itself, with critical subtitles such as “We LOVE Ananya but Y’all Can Do More: Implement an Anti-Racist Curriculum and Strengthen Anti-Racist Educators,” “Align DUSP’s Mouth and Money,” and “Create a Department That Black Students Don’t Have to Fix” (BDM 2020).

Concurrently, planning students at Columbia University referenced departmental history, stating their school “has made it clear across its many disciplinary boundaries that it has little interest in the critical, creative, or scholarly work of black students unless it aligns with preconceived notions of blackness… ignoring and invisibilizing the full range of black creative production” (Black Student Alliance 2020). Students at Ohio State University reflected that their prior learning “[only] romanticized histories of our profession as practiced by white practitioners, taught by mostly white professors, in a community where BIPOC voices aren’t heard, on land violently dispossessed from Black and Indigenous peoples” (NOMA OSU 2020). These critiques served as alternative starting points

for expressed educational transformational goals. Rather than taking on institutional burden, students established boundaries and engaged administration and educators as distinct agents who perpetuated systemic issues in planning and design education. These are but a few examples of demands put forth, with additional statements made across the United States and Canada (AASU 2020; AVSSU et al. 2020; Black Student Alliance 2020; CAPLA 2020; CED 2020; Cornell AAP 2020; Design Justice Actions 2020; Design JusticeMaryland 2020; Inclusion in Design 2020; NOMA OSU 2020; NOMAS VT 2020; PSoA 2020; RISD 2020; RSA 2020; Ryerson DAS 2020; SAIC 2020; TSASG 2020; UCLA 2020; UVA, 2020; WhereIsDalArch 2020; YSoA 2020).

Beyond the Academy

This brings us to what student demands are ultimately in service of: the transformation of the material realities of Black communities in the United States and globally. In the struggle to interrupt planning and design education as an instrument of white supremacy, 2020 student-led resistance has mirrored the critiques of the half century prior. The current critiques call for a moment of reckoning with the discipline’s impact on the built environment of Black communities. Resistance at Rice University’s School of Architecture articulated that “too often White architects, politicians, and developers have had nearly exclusive control over architectural means of production, while Black and Brown Americans have historically been denied the agency to shape the very environments where they were forcibly compelled to work and live” (RSA 2020). Black student-led demands at the University of Pennsylvania brought the focus of departmental discourse down to the city scale, prioritizing the “understanding [of how] systemic racism and colonialism have operated throughout the history of the built environment -- globally, nationally, and within the city of Philadelphia” (Inclusion in Design 2020). Similarly, students at the University of Arizona also drew attention to local sites of anti-Black, anti-Indigenous dispossession, describing their school as “[inhabiting] a city where minority communities were removed for the Tucson Convention Center; [where the school’s] previous Dean advocated for the current urban renewal happening downtown and near the University” (CAPLA 2020).

Student critiques spanned scales, from local to national and international manifestations of white supremacy and nationalism. Students of University of California, Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design described their disciplines as “not exempt from the fight for justice [and] deeply complicit in the American tradition of white supremacy” (CED 2020). Students at the University of Toronto indicted their disciplines as those that “encode systemic anti-Black racism in both our built and digital spaces… [perpetuated through] academic, social, and cultural production” (AVSSU et al. 2020). This collective recognition of disciplinary impact and attempted disruption draws explicitly on prior efforts in and out of the design fields.

In the spirit of the Black Radical Tradition, Black planning and design students have articulated their struggle as part of a centuries-long series of resistance to white supremacy. Groups at Princeton University’s School of Architecture connected their demands to “weeks of civil unrest demanding justice and reflecting on 401 years of anti-Black racism and violence across the nation” (PSoA 2020). Those at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago included a reference to Harriet Tubman in their statement, claiming “the future is coming--Harriet Tubman taught us that it is already here” (SAIC 2020). Perhaps most explicitly, Black DUSP Magic students at MIT recalled and referenced the work of Black Cambridge community members from the prior century. The front page of their Black DUSP Thesis features a 1968 photograph titled Questions to MIT, 1968, which features a public display on campus bearing the questions “Should MIT continue to hold conferences

FIGURE 1 – Questions to MIT, 1968. Photo credit: MIT Museum

on urban problems without substantial attendance of grass roots Black people- not just so-called leaders of the community? Should MIT continue research in the ghetto without having approval & active participation from the Black people living there?” (Figure 1; MIT Black History, 2020).

Towards an Alternative

Student and community resistance has been generative, conjuring new, non-hierarchical forms of education and practice. One such example includes Dark Matter University (DMU). Dark Matter University is an alternative digital space, organized by members of the Design As Protest group and their contemporaries to build “a democratic network” guided by a set of principles (DMU 2020). These principles include “new forms of knowledge and knowledge production, institutions, collectivity and practice, community and culture” and ultimately “new forms of design” toward anti-racism (DMU 2020). Other examples include Emergent Grounds for Design Education, a collective led by Chris Daemmrich, My Anh Nguyen, and Michelle Barrett that documents and engages these recent and unfolding histories in real-time, offering alternative ways to develop values and skillsets for design practice. Both DMU and Emergent Grounds for Design Education include urban planners, architects, landscape architects, and other designers in meetings, workshops, meet-andgreets, and, in the case of DMU, full-fledged courses associated with university communities. The spaces serve as models of a non-hierarchical alternative to the university, inviting anyone with internet access to engage in both learning and knowledge production without barriers, guided by a democratically agreedupon normative approach. These alternatives point to decentering the university as the only place where legitimate planning and design skills and credentials are bestowed. DMU and Emergent Grounds let planners start from scratch, at least as much as they can in a well-established discipline. This enables learners to avoid wrestling with institutional lag in universities with tangled histories and incentive structures that hinder the speed of the overhauls in student demand statements.

I invite the reader—the planner or designer, the practitioner or scholar—to engage with the Black Radical Tradition. Calls for justice, equity, and transformation do not exist in a vacuum. These calls represent concurrent horizontal organizing, across field, school, race, and nation. They also represent generations of struggle, firmly rooted in the impact of planning, architecture, and design in our shared communities. Engaging the Black Radical Tradition and the magic of planning education begins with following the thread of decolonial movements cited in student demands, such as landback to Native peoples, reckoning with apartheid history, Black freedom struggles, and Palestinian liberation. Engagement involves attending to disinvestment, exploitation, and facing urban renewal’s continued legacy head on. I invite you to push for planning justice for the people of Flint, Michigan, Hurricane Mariaimpacted Puerto Rico, and marginalized communities in Texas. Finally, decades-long calls for transformation implore us to try out new ways to congregate, to produce and share knowledge, disrupt our universities, and build community, as Dark Matter University and Emergent Grounds for Design Education have done.

CONCLUSION In content, character, and form, these internal and external demands are more than department or school-specific moves to reform the university. The demands recognize the school as a bottleneck where massive changes can be implemented. They contend with how planning and design education reproduces the skillsets and priorities of white supremacy. They demonstrate that Black students, many of whom come from communities impacted by generations of white planners and designers from the departments they now find themselves in, have rich and magical legacies of resisting white supremacy in every segment of their education. This resistance has always required a deep inward interrogation alongside far-reaching transformation beyond the academy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work was inspired by the undergraduates, graduates, and alumni of Black DUSP Magic, as well as the intellectual support and assistance of Dasjon Jordan at MIT CoLab and Enjoli Dominique Hall.

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CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The authors attest that they have no financial interest in the materials and subjects discussed in this article.