Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 9, No. 4, June 2008 Whitewash: white privilege and racialized landscapes at the University of Georgia Joshua F. J. Inwood1 & Deborah G. Martin2 1Department of Geology and Geography, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849, USA, jfi[email protected]; 2School of Geography, Clark University, 950 Main St., Worcester, MA 01610, USA, [email protected] This paper examines racialized landscapes at the University of Georgia to better understand the ways that whiteness—or more specifically white privilege—is positioned in and uses landscapes. Given a history of segregation, violently contested desegregation, and a contemporary student body that is disproportionately white (compared to the population of the entire state of Georgia), we investigate the meanings and contradictions of the University’s historic ‘North Campus’. Using a multi-method qualitative approach—including open-ended interviews and ‘roving focus groups’—we argue that privileged, white landscapes operate through a kind of whitewashing of history, which seeks to deploy race strategically to create a progressive landscape narrative pertaining to ‘race’. Key words: roving focus group, landscapes of memory, landscape studies, place identity, race, white privilege. Whitewash: 1. means employed to conceal mistakes the display was a photograph of Ms. Hunter- or faults.-v. 2. attempt to clear reputation by Gault pushing her way through a crowd of concealing facts. (Thompson 1998: 1049) angry white students with a large caption that read: ‘Make way for the nigger’. Before the In the winter of 2005 the University of Georgia exhibit was unveiled the campus newspaper, (UGA) unveiled an exhibit in Myers Residence The Red and Black, ran several newspaper Hall honoring Charlayne Hunter-Gault and articles highlighting the significance of the Hamilton Holmes, the first African Americans exhibit. The articles included several quota- to integrate the UGA. The exhibit consisted of tions from University officials, including the photographs and small quotations that director of University Housing, Rick Gibson, chronicled the Civil Rights movement on the who stated ‘[the exhibit will be] a glimpse of a campus and the struggle that led to the window of time into the desegregation of the desegregation of the university. Featured in [university]’ (Pauff 2005). ISSN 1464-9365 print/ISSN 1470-1197 online/08/040373-23 q 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14649360802033882 374 Joshua F. J. Inwood & Deborah.G. Martin The exhibit met with disapproval from the should have anticipated. It represents one in a UGA students and campus organizations, series of conflicts about race and identity on including the UGA chapter of the National campus. The UGA has been the site of several Association for the Advancement of Colored contentious debates concerning race, including People (NAACP), for the prominence given to affirmative action (ultimately deciding not to the photograph of Ms. Hunter-Gault and the take race into account when making admission accompanying quotation. In explaining their decisions), the meaning of diversity (how do position, the NAACP stated they were not poor rural whites fit in with the UGA’s desire to objecting to the exhibit as a whole, just the increase diversity on campus) (Markman 2004: offending phrase ‘Make way for the nigger’. An A1), and the school’s ties to several prominent NAACP press release stated: ‘There are ignorant Confederate political leaders1 (Jacobs 2004: people on campus who will see it and think it’s 1A). These tensions bring to the surface all right to say it’ (Simmons 2005: 1D). They important questions about how identity is noted that soon after the display opened the constructed and made visible on a university UGA launched an effort to recruit more African landscape. Schools, after all, are important American students to campus and the NAACP sites in the production of cultural meaning felt the display would hinder those efforts (Alderman 2002: 604) and have played a (Simmons 2005: 1D). crucial role in fights over desegregation and After a period of intense debate in the discrimination. Utilizing a series of historical campus newspaper and several university markers on the UGA’s North Campus we meetings, the offending quote was replaced examine how these landscape cues indicate a with a sign that read: racialized and privileged landscape. Specifi- cally, we argue the UGA North Campus As the result of students’ feedback concerning the landscape memorials simplify or ignore race presence of a racial epithet in the display, the section as a social mediator, thereby obfuscating will be covered until further notice. Decisions will deeply embedded racialized identities and be made in the near future concerning what course tensions on campus. Drawing on notions of of action or changes need to occur to address these whiteness and white privilege, we use the UGA concerns. Apologies are extended to anyone who North Campus landscape complex to confront may have been negatively impacted. and challenge everyday taken-for-granted memorials to show how they are both part of Ms. Hunter-Gault proposed a compromise and representative of the process of creating a position in which the phrase was contextualized white, privileged (and therefore always a and its prominence in the display was reduced. racialized) landscape. University officials and the NAACP agreed and Memorialization on the UGA North Cam- the original quotation was replaced with a sign, pus landscape is indicative of ongoing struggles taken from Ms. Hunter-Gault’s autobiography, in American society to recognize and fully which reads (as quoted by Grayson 2005): ‘As embrace contested racialized histories and students call out “Nigger go home” and a identities. Thus our examination of race in the variety of other unoriginal taunts, I find myself historic campus landscape highlights the more bemused than angry or upset’. contradictions in the history of the USA, The above incident is interesting, and in which a progressive narrative denies pre- perhaps less surprising than University officials sent-day racial injustice (Marable 2002). White privilege and racialized landscapes 375 This narrative situates ‘race’ in the past. Yet as Conceptual background the dispute over wording in the residence hall Landscape studies exhibit demonstrates, ‘race’ and racialization loom over contemporary social relations and The study of landscapes has been a corner- understandings. Scholars, too, have argued stone of American geography since the early that the concept of whiteness is central to part of the twentieth century (McDowell contemporary American racialized identity 1994). Throughout that period, landscapes formation (Dwyer and Jones 2000; Hoelscher have been viewed not simply as ‘scenes’ into 2003; Kobayashi and Peake 2000). Thus we which humans are inserted, but rather as the argue embedded within the cultural landscape products of human activity, shaped through of the UGA, and indicative of a larger cultural and shaping cultures (Sauer 1983 [1925]). An truth, is the ability of whites to frame the scene important development in the study of the and the shape of landscapes and place- cultural landscape is the incorporation of discourses, thus making visible only a limited social theory (Mitchell 2000). The use of African American experience. Schein argues social theory to examine the landscape fits that the materiality of landscapes ‘serves to within the broader context of contemporary naturalize or concretize—to make normal— cultural geography, which conceptualized social relations’ (1997: 676, italics in original). culture as a complex process relying on The UGA’s North Campus landscape, particu- unstable and shifting systems of meaning larly its historical markers, makes and nor- (Hubbard, Kitchin, Bartley and Fuller 2002: malizes a racialized past in ways that simplify a 59). This conception of culture recognizes that complex story, erasing some elements of racial social meaning and stories derive from conflict and their possible links to ongoing context, and are not immutable. For analysts, struggles of racialized identities on campus. then, ‘the thrust of the new landscape studies Exposing these seeming normalcies, and [was] to consider landscapes as part of a people’s reactions to them, helps us to articulate process of cultural politics, rather than as the key tension points in these ongoing struggles. outcome of that process’ (Hubbard, Kitchen, In what follows, we first describe the Bartley and Fuller 2002: 141). Thus the scholarly tradition of landscape studies as a cultural landscape is representative of both a framework for examining memorial spaces, process and a thing that can be analyzed and examine the meaning and significance of (Crang 1998; Schein 1997). Further, recog- ‘whiteness’ as a cultural norm. We then nized within landscapes are particular sites— examine the UGA North Campus, by focusing monuments or markers—which facilitate and on the discourse memorialized in historic direct the process of ‘collective memory’ and markers, and the reflections and experiences through which social groups situate their of a group of African American undergradu- identities in time and place (Till 1999: 254). ates. We explored the perceptions of these students through open-ended interviews and through two ‘roving focus groups’. We use these approaches to highlight the progressive Creating race narrative of integration, which conceals a more complex understanding of and contested American collective identify