From Racial to Reparative Planning: Confronting the White Side of Planning

Abstract

This paper advances a conceptual apparatus capable of accounting for planning’s entanglement with white supremacy and racial capitalism by developing a theory of racial planning. Racial planning, as the public production of racialized space, has been at the heart of the American planning tradition. It argues that racial planning occurs via three modes (public and private action and public inaction) and that it serves both the expropriative character of racial capitalism and the status hierarchy of white supremacy. The paper concludes with a normative call for the field to embrace reparations via a reparative planning.

Introduction

To define both the activity and normative object of planning, scholars and practitioners rely on well-defined typological traditions that conceptually organize the major historical themes of planning praxis. These include, for example, the rational comprehensive planning characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century, the advocacy, equity, and communicative planning associated with progressivism and mainstream critical theory, and the Rawlsian/neo-contractarian-inspired Just City planning of the twenty-first century. Each of these “paradigms” engages in descriptive and normative theorizing by challenging the predominance of an existing planning tradition and proposing its replacement by a new one. As Fainstein (2010) notes, this evolution within planning theory is attributable to the major epistemological and ontological shifts within social science and political theory—the move from positivism to post and antipositivism, orthodox Marxism to neo-Marxism and post-structuralism, and from liberal (atomistic) individualism toward a social ontology of causally efficacious social groups. The socio-ontological shift, in particular, has proven most influential, driving scholars of the mainstream critical and postmodern persuasions to consider the roles of class (Foglesong 2014; Harvey 1973), gender (Spain 2001), and race (Thomas and Ritzdorf 1997) in the project of equitable urban governance. But what has been consistently absent, some might say avoided, is a critical, metatheoretical reflection of the state as a site of racial subjection and white supremacy.

This is not surprising given the theorists from which planning scholars typically draw intellectual inspiration. These theorists, in the main, include the likes of Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, and John Rawls, all of whom had very little to say about race and how it fundamentally shaped the life-worlds within which they lived and the very objects of their study—the state, justice, democracy, and power (see Mills 2008; R. J. C. Young 1995). The outcome of this is that planning theory has developed in an insular theoretical universe, wholly detached from epistemic considerations of racial capitalism (Robinson 1983), the racial state (Fredrickson 1982; Goldberg 2002), the racial polity, and racial liberalism (Mills 1997, 2008). Consequently, racial planning, the most historically dominant planning tradition, has remained unacknowledged and untheorized, leaving its effects to be communicated as a series of nearly discrete and anomalous planning events.

Extending Yiftachel’s (1998) definition of planning simpliciter—“the public production of space” or “the formulation, content, and implementation of spatial public policies”—I argue that racial planning, a heretofore unacknowledged planning tradition, involves the public production of racialized space. I say “unacknowledged” because though several planning scholars, particularly those of color, have long critiqued the “racial politics” of urban planning, as Robert Catlin (1993) once put it, their contributions have most commonly appeared within the areas of planning history, geography, housing, and/or urban studies and have, to our misfortune, yet to effect a fundamental reordering of planning theory, especially its normative content (see Lowe and Shaw 2009; Thomas 2013; Woods 1998). ¹ That said, the theory of racial planning, importantly, does more than to shift our gaze, it does more than reveal that the “dark side of planning” so censured by planning theorists is actually quite white—it begets the construction of an alternative planning tradition rooted in reparation; a rectificatory justice procedure long suffering marginal consignment not only in urban planning, but in the public policy proper altogether. The elaboration of racial planning thus should be viewed as part of a dialectical process—the beginnings of a normative reorientation of the field toward a reparative planning.

The Critical Approach to Planning

Planning is variously understood across a spectrum of theoretical and political persuasions, but the dominant perspective holds that it is a progressive enterprise. The familiar tale of U.S. planning history features the emergence of a so-called radically egalitarian profession determined to check the unbridled expanses of capitalism and its consequent industrial city (Foglesong 2014; Hall 1988). It is told that the profession’s pioneers—the Fredrick Law Olmsteds, Ebenezer Howards, and Daniel Burhams of the world—utilized rationality and aesthetic sensibility to advance notions of the “good” city (Fainstein 2009). Other accounts of the profession’s origins, pre-histories they may be called, take a more elongated approach, detailing planning’s form and mission in the early decades of the United States. Here, the inchoate planning profession, profoundly shaped by an anti-aristocratic revolutionary zeitgeist, is argued to have taken shape as a decentralized and democratic process—a pluralistic “urban conversation” (Fishman 2000). On this account, the “American planning tradition” is understood as the democratic pursuit of the public interest, or, as Fishman would have it, “collective action for the common good.”

Despite temporal and methodological differences of emphasis in the field’s stories of origin—be they the rationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries or the alleged participatory bend of the preceding era—the “common good” narrative remains. As Yiftachel (1998) discovered in his pathbreaking article on the Dark Side of Planning, scholars have seen fit to explain the origins of the field through the sanitizing language of equity, efficiency, and rationality. A discourse of equity has focused on the tenacity of civic-minded, anarchistic, or radical social utopians; a discourse of efficiency has argued that planning emerged to counterbalance capitalism’s tendency toward self-liquidation; and a discourse of rationality has maintained that planning emerged as the socially recognized best way to manage “public decision-making about spatial, environmental and urban change” (Yiftachel 1998, 397).

That such rose-colored interpretations were subject to the attack of critical scholars in the 1970s should come as no surprise to anyone aware of the grimly disparate outcomes mining the field’s history. The problem was a narrow (and retroactively historicized) focus on the ideal as opposed to the actual. Hence, Sandercock’s (2004, 134) observation,

When researchers examine [planning] practices (rather than the espoused ideal of objectivity), what they have discovered, decade after decade since at least the 1950s, is that planning practices have always been deeply interested rather than disinterested, deeply implicated in politics and in communicative acts.

Correspondingly, the first wave of critically revisionist planning theory explored planning as an activity dominated by the class interests of the elite (Yiftachel 1998, 4). It is from this epistemic consideration that Marcuse (1978) challenged planning theory’s underlying “myth of the benevolent state,” that Castells (1978) critiqued the interplay of City, Class, and Power, and that Harvey (1973) sought Social Justice and the City. Following and often directly competing with these analyses were other critically revisionist interpretations—the progeny of the cultural and argumentative “turns” in the Left academe (see Connolly and Steil 2009).

Within the field of planning theory, theoretical treatments approximating what I here term racial planning are much more recent developments. Steil (2018) and Yiftachel (1998) offer two of the closest examinations. Steil persuasively argues that planners must shift from an anticlassification perspective—that is, one that condemns all decisions made with discriminatory intent—to an antisubordination perspective that acknowledges the need for conscious policies aimed at preventing the exacerbation of, if not eradicating, durable inequalities. In doing so, Steil provides a powerful response to what has been dubbed “colorblind racism”—a now mature strategy that is perhaps best characterized by Chief Justice Roberts ill-founded tautological judgment that “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” (551 U.S., at 748, 127 S. Ct. 2738). Hence, Steil’s use of a quote from the dissenting Justice Sotomayor toward the end of his article: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.” While the generality of Steil’s enterprise prevents him from articulating the distinctive contours of racial planning, he at least, in his pursuit of an antisubordination planning, tacitly acknowledges the historical and causal significance of what might naturally be termed a “subordination,” or, more particularly, a racial planning. Indeed, as he notes, “Metropolitan areas in the United States have been created with racial and economic segregation in mind” (Steil 2018, 1).

Yiftachel (1998) provides a more critical reflection of planning (“the public production of space”), finding at its core an ongoing dialectical tension between progressive reform and regressive social control. For him, planning, as an “arm of the modern nation state,” facilitates territorial control by elite groups, fetishizes questionable and at times regressive forms of spatial decision-making, distributes the benefits and negative externalities of spatial decisions along socioeconomic lines, and marginalizes the spatial imaginaries and practices of oppositional (non-conforming) cultural groups. Yiftachel’s model of planning’s territorial, procedural, socioeconomic, and cultural dimensions provides a useful framework to explore key aspects of racial planning, but additional work is required to link “the public production of space” to white supremacy. In what follows, I argue that racial planning is predicated on the social ontology of racial liberalism (Mills 2008), that it has three modes, and that the socioeconomic and territorial dimensions identified by Yiftachel are better understood in the context of racial capitalism.

Planning, White Supremacy, and Racial Liberalism

White supremacy is not a term common to the lingua franca of planning theorists and historians, so it will be useful to spend some time defining the concept. The term does not make an appearance in Fishman’s (2000) sweeping volume on the history of the American Planning Tradition, Fainstein’s (2010) The Just City, or Marcuse et al.’s (2009) Searching for the Just City, and it is mentioned in only one sentence in Fainstein and DeFilippis’s (2016) 460-page edited collection of Readings in Planning Theory. In fact, a search for the term in the catalog of the Journal of Planning Education and Research, a bastion for work in planning theory, yields only two commentaries (including the one cited above by Steil). Likewise, an online search of the Journal of the American Planning Association produces one result; an article wherein white supremacy is framed in only attitudinal terms (see Wolch 1998), as does the Journal of Planning Theory. When the racial implications and consequences of planning practice are engaged, it is often through a critique of rational planning. Note, for example, Krumholz (1982, 166) lifelong disappointment with “the planner’s traditional posture as an apolitical technician serving a unitary public interest”—a theme that has come to characterize the rational model. As Alexander (2000, 252) argues, rationality has become, when unqualified, a “bad word” within the field of planning. But as he continues, it is generally Cartesian individualism and Weberian instrumental rationality that critics have in mind since an “irrational” planning would be definitionally oxymoronic. Hence, the attempt by some to replace (instrumentalist) rational planning with communicative planning; instrumental rationality with communicative rationality (Healey 1992, 1996; Innes 1996). Rationality itself is never truly abandoned. Also note Campbell’s (2006, 103) reflection on the transition from “the planner as instrumental rationalist” to the “planner as facilitator.” Fainstein (2005) argues that this shift began in response to the disparate outcomes of urban renewal, holding that

opposition was not to general goals of urban and transportation improvement. Rather, it was to the particular impacts of public programs on affected communities; these communities needed to be involved in the specifics of planning if they were to exercise any real control.

Of course, for Fainstein, the challenge is much larger than fostering democratic decision making. As she famously emphasizes in subsequent work, planning must center a “commitment to justice over technical efficiency in evaluating the content of public policy” (Fainstein 2010, 31). Thus, instrumental rationality (which is concerned with means) is, for her, only part of the problem. Planning must interrogate and define desired ends as well. As she argues, to do otherwise would be to displace justice as the principal normative object. Hence, her disappointment with “proponents of communicative rationality and deliberative democracy [who] expect that genuinely democratic processes will result in just outcomes” (Fainstein 2010, 3). It is the existence of injustice to which normative planning theories must principally respond, not the process elements of the rational model. While her overall framing of justice is class-based (see Steil and Delgado 2019), this argument holds for the demands of racial justice as well. It is the realrationalität (real rationality; rationality cum power) of racial planning—that is, white supremacy—that we must emphasize if we are to develop normative prescriptions of a reparative kind (Flyvbjerg 1996). When we recognize that the more glaring issue has been the racial model, not the “rational model” through which it has been articulated, we are better equipped to tackle the issue of racial injustice.

We can start by understanding white supremacy as an evolving sociopolitical system that, in its first instance, establishes a “Herrenvolk society” rationalized by the political ideology of (racial) liberalism, which, contra its purported egalitarianism, solidifies a new mode of ascriptive hierarchy in the form of race (Fredrickson 1982; Mills 1997, 2008). Far from the world of atomistic individuals propagated by sanitized liberalism (the all-inclusive “social contract”), the official social ontology of this society consists of “groups in relations of domination and subordination” (Mills 2017, 16), constituting a racialized social system (Bonilla-Silva 2001) wherein whiteness becomes the form of status property delineating who is entitled to equal moral worth and who is subjectable to enslavement, expropriation, and social disrespect (Harris 1993). The (racial) capitalist state conforms to this dynamic and, particularly during the period of de jure white supremacy, juridically and socially affirms the personhood of whites while denying moral equality to those deemed non-white (paradigmatically Blacks and Amerindians) (Goldberg 2002; Robinson 1983). In the second instance of white supremacy—the de facto form—racial subjectivation manifests as the rationalization of white social, political, and economic domination; the “law’s ratification of the settled expectations of relative white privilege as a legitimate and natural baseline” (Harris 1993, 1714).

In the United States, no institution was untouched by this system—public or private, sacred or secular. Planning is no exception. For our purposes, this requires that we recognize that from the beginning the American planning tradition developed within the context of settler colonialism, slavery, black code laws, and has operated under Jim Crow, separate and unequal, white hysteria, and now, as Steil (2018) notes, colorblind racism. From the outset, planning has not been characterized by an inclusivist, aggregative urban conversation, (Fishman 2000) but an exclusivist white conversation. We recognize that emerging contemporaneously with the industrial city was the racial city and that any planning therein, where it did not break from the imperatives of white supremacy, constituted racial planning. W.E.B. Du Bois (2007, 243) understood this full well when he, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, directed his ire specifically toward the city, asking “How long can a city say to a part of its citizens, ‘It is useless to work; it is fruitless to deserve well of men; education will gain you nothing but disappointment and humiliation?’ How long can a city teach its black children that the road to success is to have a white face?”

Importantly, within this naturalized universe, the polity and public interest, terms actually common to the lingua franca of planners, beg specification. In the actual racial polity (Mills 1997), the racialized moral economy is evinced in the spatial policies of Indian Removal and Chinese Exclusion, the Homestead Act is for whites, Urban Renewal is, as James Baldwin understood, Negro Removal, and the New Deal and G.I Bill effectuate white affirmative action (Katznelson 2005). The policies and practices of racial and exclusionary zoning, racial covenants and restrictive deeds, red-lining, and racially motivated referendums against public housing become theoretically legible under the auspice of white interest and the full gamut of planning activity, state-led and state-sponsored, is considered (see Rothstein 2017; Silver 1991; Taylor 2019). Racial planning, as the public production of racialized space, is found hiding in plain sight as planning theory comes to terms with the ubiquity of late nineteenth and twentieth century sundown towns that, as the name implies, forced Blacks (and sometimes Jews, Mexicans and Chinese) to vacate entire municipalities by the setting of the sun. What instead becomes perplexing is how the 456 sundown towns in Illinois alone, not to mention the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others concentrated in northern and western states, along with their corresponding infrastructure (freeway signs were common) and policies, could have evaded the radar of planning theorists (Loewen 2005). ²

But of course, racial planning, as with planning in other contexts, is not limited to the actions of state actors. It transcends the imagined fixities of the public and private domains. Here, a case from Greeley, Colorado is particularly illuminating. In 1936, a banner flew over the city with the words “All Mexican and other aliens to leave the State of Colorado at once by order of Colorado State vigilantes,” demonstrating that not even airspace was outside the bounds of racial planning (Delgado and Stefancic 1999, 790–91). Likewise, in the infamous Tulsa, OK race riot of 1921, six airplanes carrying dynamite were used to erase black homes and businesses from the urban landscape in what could be called a spectacular feat of racialized urban (re)design (Loewen 2005). And as the ubiquity of segregated cemeteries reveals, not even death impeded the hysterical spatial imaginaries of whiteness (Dwyer and Jones 2000).

Three Modes of Racial Planning

A recognition of white supremacy and its spatiality therefore radically alters the historiography of planning qua “public intervention to achieve national goals” of “fundamental social developments” (Graham 1976, xii–xiii) and planning qua “the formulation, content, and implementation of spatial public policies” (Yiftachel 1998, 395). It has consequences for whom we consider “planners” and, as implied above, the types of activity we consider “planning.” To the latter point, when we consider the policies of both government action and inaction, we acknowledge, with due respect to Heidenheimer, Heclo, and Adams (1990), a much more complete range of planning policies and possibilities. ³ Loewen (2005) similarly argues that when we fail to consider the significance of both written and unwritten law, we fail to recognize the ways in which racialized space is actually produced. At a deeper level, however, when we acknowledge the history of police, politicians, public administrators, and other civil servants colluding with white civil society to oust or exclude the racially stigmatized from neighborhoods, schools, cities, municipal services, and job markets, we begin to see the boundaries between state and civil society as porous “fictions of sociodiscursive formation” (Goldberg 2002, 106). Note the many examples of police, when not actively participating, standing by as self-deputized whites organize in mob fashion to rid communities of black residents (see C. Anderson 2016; Rothstein 2017; Wilkerson 2010). Racial planning thus follows three modes, none of them mutually exclusive: planning by state action, planning by state inaction, and planning by private action.

It is important to note, here, that the spatialization of race and the racialization of space are co-constitutive (Lipsitz 2007). As the philosopher Charles Wade Mills (1997, 53) suggests, we can illuminatingly think of the black body as a “moving bubble of wilderness in white political space, a node of discontinuity”. In the spirit of Enlightenment philosophers rationalizing black enslavement and death, Native dispossession and genocide, the wilderness is characterized as that which lives within the racial other, that which the racial other carries with her, and that which justifies the suspension of the rules of the formal (white) polity (i.e., Lockean property rights, Kantian personhood and respect). Not only are blacks ontologically devalued, then, but the places they live are as well: the “urban jungles,” the “black ghetto,” the urban “no-go zones,” the “pathological” communities, and so on. This devaluation is reflected by planning’s racialized moral cartography—its disregard for and violent erasure of that which exists beyond the ‘white’ polity. Swaths of black neighborhoods come to mind with inferior or non-existent public services, surrounded by a sea of white space, fully accommodated. Examples abound, past and present: In a 1913 race-relations progress report, the black sociologist George E. Haynes observed that playgrounds in Black neighborhoods were “so rare as to excite curiosity.” ⁴ Khalil Muhammad (2010, 129) notes how leaders of the settlement house movement advocated structural changes in the urban political-economy for whites while preaching self-help for blacks. Jason Corburn (2007) recalls how planning historically dealt with public health concerns by likening African Americans to hazards and displacing them. In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of how blacks were “tired of paying more for less” and “tired of living in rat-infested slums.” In 1969, the Young Lords of New York had to organize against their own city government for its refusal to provide adequate garbage pickup in Brown and Black neighborhoods (J. Fernández 2019). In 2005, a white congressman celebrated that Hurricane Katrina destroyed Black neighborhoods, saying “we couldn’t do it, but God did” (Goetz 2013). And as it stands today, Flint, MI remains without clean water as the white world looks on with barely a whisper of moral outrage.

The worst form of devaluation, however, included the total objectification of black bodies. Khalil Muhammad (2010) speaks of how the spectacle lynching became a ritualized practice throughout the American South, with an African American being lynched once every other day during the Nadir of race relations (1880–1890), and once every four days at the start of the twentieth century. James Loewen (2005, 183) notes how integral lynchings were to the development of sundown towns in the American North, adding that some towns still have, as historical sites, memorial “‘hanging trees’ that remind residents [of] what happened to the last African American who wandered within the city limits.” Isabel Wilkerson (2010) recounts how in 1934 several thousands of whites, including their children, gathered to watch the lynching of Claude Neal as if it were a city festival. In the East St. Louis race riot of 1917, whites, after demanding that the city take “drastic action” to extirpate black presence, worked with state police to decorate the urban landscape with 39 black bodies hanging from telephone poles, chasing out, by terror, the remaining 5,000 (Wilkerson 2010, 274). And in New Orleans in 1811, black bodies were incorporated into the urban form as the heads of rebellious slaves were placed on pikes along the river and road into the city as to remind blacks of what was permissible in white space. If the urban form exhibits, as Parkinson (2012) argues, causal influence on political behavior—if it intentionally suggests, prevents, or triggers certain kinds of responses—and if the objectified black body has the potential to be incorporated into that form, we may need to consider exploring in more detail where the corporeal dimension of race and urban design converge.

Planning, Racial Exploitation, and Capitalism

To emphasize the historical significance of racial planning, its elements and underlying ontology, I have heretofore seen fit to forgo an analysis sensitive to the periodicities of white supremacy and capitalism. It should go without saying, though, that antebellum racial planning differs from its postbellum incarnation (see Foner 1988), just as pre-Civil Rights racial planning differs from the post-Civil Rights form (see Taylor 2019). However, an at least cursory periodization will be useful in articulating the particularly racial nature of the socioeconomic and territorial dimensions of planning identified by Yiftachel (1998). To reemphasize, Yiftachel’s (1998, 401–402) territorial dimension of “regressive” planning involves limitation of “the territorial expression of minorities by restricting minority land ownership” while the socioeconomic dimension “embodies planning’s long-term [negative] impacts on social and economic relations”. After briefly defining racial capitalism, another concept absent from planning literature, I will frame racial planning’s evolving dynamic by using two metatheoretical treatments of exploitation, one offered by Nancy Fraser (2016) and the other by Charles Wade Mills (2017).

Following Marx, both Fraser and Mills define capitalism not as a mere economic system, but an “institutionalized social order” (Fraser 2016, 163). However, both supplement Marx with insights from a long tradition of Black Marxists who found orthodox Marxism insufficient for the theorization of white supremacy—notably Cedric Robinson (1983), whom we have to thank for the term “racial capitalism.” As Robinson (1983, 6) explained,

In contradistinction to Marx’s and Engels’s expectations that bourgeois society would rationalize social relations and demystify social consciousness, the obverse occurred. The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology.

Yet, instead of accounting for racial subjection within his theory of capitalist society, Marx relegated it to a pre-capitalist mode of “primitive accumulation” that, while condemnable, had no bearing on the internal logic of capital. What is more, for Marx, the “silent compulsion of economic relations,” not direct coercion, captured the true essence of the political economic system. But as Nikhil Pal Singh (2016, 30) points out, not only did capitalism develop in the context of “human beings who were themselves commodities (as well as instruments of credit and capital investment),” but Marx’s expected abstraction of the relations of dependence—those antiquarian feudal ties dictating the relations of exchange—never occurred. Instead of abolishing ascriptive hierarchy, capitalism incorporated and indeed thrived because of it.

The central point of racial capitalism, then, at least before postulations are made about the in/separability of racism and capitalism, is that liberal capitalism ushered in the juridical freedom of the white worker, not the worker; the white individual, not the individual. So, what is needed is a theory of exploitation capable of accounting for phenomena unexplained by the labor theory of value—expropriation per Fraser, racial exploitation per Mills—and an understanding of how racial planning facilitates the overall process. As will be shown, Fraser’s formulation allows us to explore the ways in which racial planning functions as an extractive tool for the accumulation of wealth by the capitalist class, whereas Mills’ formulation demystifies the ways in which racial planning functions to preserve white social, political, and economic hegemony.

Racialized Dispossession

We can start with Fraser’s definition of expropriation as the seizure of productive capacities and resources—notably land, natural resources, and persons. The “political” in political economy is very important here since under liberal capitalism, that which rendered some as exploitable (via the wage contract) and others as expropriable (via chattel slavery, debt peonage, convict leasing, dislocation, etc.) was the status differential noted above—the politically prescribed ontological partitioning of humans by the socially constructed categories of race. Fraser stresses, however, that the core distinction between exploitable “citizens” and expropriable “subjects” has proven fluid, changing alongside capitalism’s continued growth and evolution. As she notes, financialized capitalism, like state-managed capitalism before it, has coincided with a “softening” of the two “exes” (expropriation and exploitation), creating a hybrid condition that still follows, though to a lesser degree, the proverbial Duboisian “color-line.” And it is this exploitation-expropriation “nexus” that has come to characterize the lived experiences of the most precarious among us—the politically repressed and the economically distressed.

Operating within the conception of racial capitalism proffered by Fraser, wherein racialized expropriation is endemic to the logic of capital (Roediger 2017) and a necessary precondition for (wage) exploitation, we could explain racial planning qua racialized territorial expropriation as one of several means by which the incessant crises of capital accumulation are solved. Here, the process of racial planning would resemble what David Harvey (2014) calls dispossession, the difference being the centrality of race to the very functioning of the process. If Fraser is right, we have a new conceptual grammar through which to examine racialized dispossession as it occurs within the planning context. Certainly, the conclusions of several planning and urban scholars would fit within this framework. Several scholars, after all, detail the racialized dispossession central to urban renewal in American cities including Newark (Rabig 2016), Detroit (Thomas 2013), Chicago (L. Fernandez 2012), and New York (see Avila and Rose 2009). Likewise, Goetz (2013) finds that HUD’s HOPE VI program systematically selected predominately black public housing developments for demolition only to confer the value of newly freed parcels to wealthy real-estate interests. Steinberg (2010) in a similar vein of critique underscores how planning scholarship, particularly around concentrated poverty and mixed-income communities, has become co-opted to serve the expansionist imperatives of the elite. And Imbroscio (2008), capturing the timbre of the resistance to displacement, has roundly criticized the “dispersal consensus” among housing scholars and practitioners who have for decades sought to disturb the spatial organization of blacks and much less the political economic relations that structure their daily lives (see Bennett and Reed 1999; Fullilove 2016; Goetz 2003).

The Wages of Whiteness

I would also argue that racial planning has a function outside capital accumulation that is, while perhaps still jarring to mainstream scholarship, more obvious, and less controversial. Here, I mean where racial planning, as a mode of racial exploitation, serves as a mechanism through which the “wages of whiteness” are conferred (Du Bois 2017; Roediger 1999). Per Mills’ (2017, p.123) formulation, which he notes does not rely on the contested labor theory of value, racial exploitation in its paradigm form involves the differential and inferior treatment of nonwhites, made possible by their lower “ontological/ moral/ civic” status. ⁵ That is, situations wherein the differential or inferior treatment (including exclusion) would have been prohibited had nonwhites been whites and thus protected by a schedule of liberal norms. This is the “paradigm” case, since racial exploitation mutates as the overall dynamic of white supremacy evolves (as noted above). Racial exploitation under the succeeding form of de facto white supremacy emerges not necessarily from nonwhites lower ascribed status, but from their inheritance of a “disadvantaged material position that handicaps them—by comparison with what, counterfactually, would have been the case if they had been” white (125). So, the legacy form of racial exploitation is manifest in the widespread black precarity resultant from the first system and the structural and pervasive illicit white advantage that continues to constitute the polity’s “baseline” for structuring the overall framework of what is “just” (Harris 1993).

Importantly, racial exploitation, by its very nature of opening markets and opportunities to whites only, benefits whites generally—not just one particular class of whites—and it occurs both at and beyond the point of production (Mills 2017, 125). In its paradigm form, it is evinced in the aforementioned examples of racial planning—the spatial policies of Native expropriation, the Homestead Act, Chinese exclusion, sundown towns, cities, and states, ghettoization, racial zoning, redlining, racialized homeownership policies and the like. In its legacy form, racial planning is abstracted. Where planning action is concerned, racial exploitation can be found in the so-called “rational” planning decisions that protect white neighborhoods in favor of taking the politically “least resistant” path, putatively class-based exclusionary zoning that, with a very thin veil, specifically targets African Americans (Rothstein 2017), and environmental policies that treat nonwhite communities as “waste bins” (Pulido 2017; also see Bullard 2018; Collin and Collin 1997). Where planning inaction is concerned, it is found in communicative planning approaches that trade in an explicit focus on racial justice as a desired end for a communicatively determined, relativistic end instead (Fainstein 2010; Flyvbjerg and Richardson 2002), urban economies wherein politically unprotected nonwhites are particularly subject to expropriation by predatory lenders and private equity firms (D. Fields 2017; Newman 2009), fetishized white areas of concentrated affluence that hoard advantages and opportunities resultant from the history and ongoing logics of white domination (Goetz, Damiano, and Williams 2019), and integrationist strategies that either take for granted the cultural backwardness of blacks or place undue burdens upon them while doing nothing to fundamentally address the racial wealth gap (Goetz 2018; Shelby 2016).

From the frameworks provided by Fraser and Mills and this short list of examples, we have at least two interlocking conceptions of the racialization of the socioeconomic and territorial dimensions of planning offered by Yiftachel. From the historical materialist perspective, we can interpret the production of racial difference (differential moral value) and the expropriation that ensues as necessary preconditions to continued capital accumulation within a crisis-prone system. Within this explanatory framework, racial planning, through “the formulation and content of spatial public policies” (Yiftachel 1998), facilitates the transfer of resources from those ripe for expropriation (the racially stigmatized, in the main) to the capitalist class. Simultaneously, however, white supremacy—perhaps a relatively autonomous system in its own right (Mills 2017)—facilitates a racial planning justified by the overarching moral economy; one that produces poorly funded schools, inferior services, exclusion, and disinvestment for blacks, and illicit advantage for whites.

Toward a Reparative Planning

If the field of planning has any hopes of heralding the dawn of the just city, it must seriously consider planning’s entanglement with white supremacy. As Steil (2018, 6–7) argues, planning has yet to take “a clear stand to address” racial disparities or “to systematically recognize the role of planning in the white supremacist construction of US urban and suburban space”. Part of the reason for this silence has been the conceptual whiteness of the descriptive and normative theories proffered by planning theorists. For too long, the ire of planning theorists has been the rational model and the industrial/capitalist city, not the corresponding racial model and racial city. By linking the public production of space to white supremacy, racial liberalism, and racial capitalism, racial planning provides a much-needed theoretical synthesis of both planning and black political theory. More importantly, however, it paves the way for the development of a new normative theory that responds directly to illicit white advantage and its enveloping moral economy. After all, “Normative questions . . . hinge not merely on clashes of values but also on rival factual claims, both with respect to specific incidents and events and with respect to determining and constraining social structures” (Mills 2017, 116).

While the full-fledged development of such a theory is beyond the scope of this paper, I suggest that where African Americans are concerned, it should be explicitly linked to the material and symbolic demands of the reparations movement. This is to say that a central organizing principle of the planning profession should be corrective/reparative/transitional justice—the rejection and dismantling of white supremacy such that life chances become independent of one’s ascribed social location. ⁶ A reparative planning, like reparative justice, would thus concern itself with “the annulment of both wrongful gains and losses,” including in “a distribution of holdings (or entitlements)” (Coleman 1983, 6), and with “what ought to be done in reparation for injustice and the obligation of wrongdoers, or their descendants or successors, for making this repair” (Thompson 2002, xi).

This normative orientation notably stands in stark contrast to “Just City” planning as articulated by Fainstein (2010, 35–37), who shies away from corrective racial justice in arguing that universal “demands for civil and human rights, access to education and health, and protection from loss of one’s home have greater currency than calls for reparations or job quotas.” For me, this strategy is unsatisfactory as it conceptually marginalizes the history of centuries of racial exploitation and the consequent duty of public and private entities to, at a bare minimum, apologize for it. It therefore sidesteps one of the most central goals of the reparations movement, moral reconciliation, and fails to see the movement’s potential beyond economic redress (see Brooks 2004). The conflation of distributive justice and corrective justice also stands out as potentially problematic.

Closer to the mark is the project advanced by Steil and Delgado (2019). While their “antisubordination planning” stops short of calling for race-specific redistributive policies, the criteria they put forth would certainly comprise at least part of what I would call reparative planning. They advocate the recognition of white supremacy, the proscription of disparate impact where it would further the disadvantage of historically marginalized groups, the provision of affordable housing, and access to public space, among other things. Their strongest moral implication, however, which I concur with, is that the extent to which we fail to engage in antisubordination planning, we continue the practice of subordination planning. Put another way, when we do not challenge the established “baseline” of white advantage (Harris 1993), we festishize and perpetuate it and thus continue to engage in racial planning.

Still, there is room for improvement. A planning appurtenant to the reparations movement must seek to do more than work to repair the economic consequences of white supremacy—it must repair the affective, epistemic, and moral schema that allow illicit white advantage to remain unchecked in the first place. While this might seem a strange target at first glance, especially for a field traditionally associated with the built environment, a shift in focus toward this direction may already be underway. During the 2019 convening of the Association for the Collegiate Schools of Planning, a contingent of “radical planners” pressed to make “emotions in planning” a topic of central concern. Their call echoes that of Leonie Sandercock (2004), who more than a decade ago paved the way for such an endeavor with her notion of “therapeutic planning.” As Sandercock (2004, 139) observed, “many planning disputes are about relationships, and therefore emotions, rather than conflicts over resources”. For reparative planning, however, a more encompassing realm of concern might be social epistemology. We can expect that the “emotional” responses confronting the future of reparations and reparative planning will be heavily racialized—rooted in competing group-informed conceptions of social reality (i.e., epistemic communities).

As such, a key challenge for reparative planning will obviously have to be confronting white ignorance. What reparative planning must do, then, is more deeply politicize “therapeutic planning” such that it orients toward the particular goal of reparative justice. It goes without saying that a reparative planning cannot succeed without explicitly challenging the epistemic factors that continue to lead far too many whites to resist corrective racial justice at every turn. Future research, toward this end, will have to venture into the uncharted territory of critical whiteness studies and the less explored territories of moral and social psychology. Notably, the discourse will shift even further from problematizing black communities (which is, thankfully, falling out of vogue) to explicitly focusing on the more causally significant challenges of opportunity hoarding, racial animus, and discrimination endemic to exclusionary white communities (see E. Anderson 2010; Bonilla-Silva, Goar, and Embrick 2006; Dwyer and Jones 2000; Goetz, Damiano, and Williams 2019; Lipsitz 2011; Lo 1990; Tilly 1998).

Finally, and above all else, a truly reparative planning must reject the paternalistic impulses of entrenched planning traditions which would deny African Americans the right to assert, to the extent possible within planning processes, principles of self-determination and self-development (see I. M. Young 2000). Reparations in the planning context not only requires fundamental changes in the distribution of public goods and services and a confrontation with white ignorance, but a fundamental rethinking of the role of African American communities in setting planning goals and enacting planning policies. The question of how this should be done is a matter for future research. For now, I submit that planners must embrace and encourage the utopian “freedom dreams” (Kelley 2002) of African Americans, not dismiss or restrict them with notions of technical efficiency or incrementalism. We would do best to remember Clyde Woods’ pioneering work. In his pathbreaking book, Development Arrested, Woods (1998) not only detailed the reality of a highly racialized form of planning in the Mississippi Delta region, he also captured the essence of an insurgent and resistant planning tradition rooted in the “blues epistemology” of specifically working-class African Americans. It was through this epistemology that African Americans shared radically different, egalitarian, and sustainable spatial imaginaries of a world beyond racial capitalism and white supremacy. And it is through the blues epistemology of our day—through Black Lives Matter and the revitalized reparations movement—that we might truly achieve a just city.

Conclusion

To date, acknowledgments of white supremacy, racial capitalism, and racial liberalism – as well as calls for reparations – have been scant or non-existent within planning theory. Racial planning, as the public production of racialized space, has evaded scrutiny despite its ubiquity and its importance to the creation of not only the United States, but the modern world. Not unrelatedly, reparative justice and its implications for planning practice have been equally marginal to the development of planning theory. But if the just city is truly our goal, we can no longer ignore these issues. Racial planning must be met with reparative planning, and reparative planning must challenge white supremacy in both its socio-economic and socio-ideational dimensions (Mills and Mills 2003). Reparative planning must be a planning that challenges not only racial inequality, but the whiteness on which it is predicated.