The Properties of Whiteness

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings Land use regulations have contributed to the construction of White supremacist racial categories and the persistent conjunction of race and property in the United States. Drawing on archival analysis of documents regarding early 20th-century municipal segregation ordinances and legal analysis of court decisions regarding property and land use law, this study makes three primary contributions to the literature. First, it homes in on the origins of a persistent thread of a racialized collective right to exclude at the neighborhood scale, exercised by White residents through some of the United States’ earliest land use regulations. Second, it draws on foundational works in critical race theory to illuminate how land use regulations helped construct race and property, examining how courts’ efforts to reconcile property rights in land with property rights in Whiteness changed judicial conceptions of the viability of property regulations, specifically zoning and land use laws. It builds on this analysis to connect the thread of racialized exclusion in the Supreme Court’s most recent takings decision in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid (2021). Third, it draws from Black geographies to suggest takeaways for planners in supporting Black spaces that can simultaneously support Black efforts to name the collective political reality and highlight the contingency of racial constructs in ways that can eradicate the substantive conditions of Black subordination.

Takeaway for practice Planning practice and land use regulations are both a reflection of institutionally determined logics, such as judicial determinations of property rights, and, sometimes, challenges to those logics. Planners have a role to play in addressing racial domination by studying local histories of race and space, analyzing histories of White supremacist exclusionary practices, supporting thriving Black spaces, revealing the contingency of race, and delegitimizing and deconstructing spatial orders that continue to sustain class and race hierarchies.