Tag: white supremacy

Subscriptions for CPJ Volume 46: The White Problem in Planning

May 13, 2021 / odrozd

Carolina Planning Journal (CPJ), the oldest student-run planning journal in the country, is excited to announce the imminent release of Volume 46: The White Problem in Planning. This issue features articles and book reviews from a wide range of planning students, practitioners, and scholars; see the editor’s note below for brief summaries of some of the topics covered.

We would love to be able to send you a print copy of this year’s journal. To order your own copy(ies), complete this brief subscription form and send us a payment via Venmo, Zelle, or cash or check; additional payment details are provided on the subscription form.

Subscription rates are as follow:

DCRP Student: $10
DCRP Alumnus, Staff, or Faculty: $15
General Subscriber: $20

Questions? Don’t hesitate to email us.

Editor’s Note

This past year has been in large part defined by three interrelated phenomena: a resurgence in Black Lives Matter protests and activism catalyzed by the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by the police; the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic; and the ouster of Donald Trump and the Republican Party from control of our federal executive and legislative branches of government. Each of these events has highlighted how the social, political, economic, legal, and physical institutions of our country have been designed and employed to benefit whites at the expense of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. In response, we asked authors to address issues raised by Goetz, Williams, and Damiano (2020) in their article titled Whiteness and Urban Planning, in particular how urban planning has worked to normalize and perpetuate whiteness–its invisibility, the exclusion by which it is defined, and the extractive nature of white affluence. The articles in this issue touch on many of the domains where planning intersects with whiteness, and they contribute valuable perspectives and analyses as we seek to build more racially just and reparative planning systems.

The roles of federal housing policy in building white advantage have been documented in an extensive body of literature. This literature also captures how federal housing policy has simultaneously excluded BIPOC groups from wealth-building opportunities and destroyed vibrant BIPOC communities. Frank Muraca (MCRP ‘20) builds on this work by examining the prevalence and impacts of “Urban” Renewal projects on rural communities in North Carolina, demonstrating the influence of federal Renewal dollars in creating and segregating white affluence. Rachel Eberhard (MCRP ‘16) examines contemporary efforts to mitigate housing discrimination, arguing that the Biden Administration has the opportunity to improve the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, expand housing opportunities, and eliminate racial barriers to housing access.

On the environmental justice front, Nora Schwaller (DCRP PhD candidate), Jordan Branham (DCRP PhD candidate), Atticus Jaramillo (DCRP PhD candidate), and Mai Nguyen (DCRP faculty) critique the use of race in natural hazards social vulnerability indices, arguing that such approaches neglect histories of racialized development, do not reliably predict disaster impacts nor support targeted recovery efforts, and may actually contribute to disinvestment in BIPOC communities. They propose reframing recovery with an anti-racist framework to better address structural, racialized disadvantage. Katie Koffman (MCRP ‘21) explores environmental injustice through a case study of the Lower Ninth Ward (LNW) in New Orleans, documenting how pre-storm racial inequities were compounded by the City’s and State’s approaches to recovery, leading to massive displacement for the majority-Black LNW. Amanda Ullman (DCRP PhD student) and Noah Kittner (DCRP faculty) write about the environmental and health impacts of container ports on nearby Black and Latinx communities. They propose that transit-oriented development and Green New Deal policies may offer more equitable and sustainable approaches to supporting the development of port-adjacent neighborhoods.

In an article centered on Los Angeles, Jackson Loop examines sites central to the 1992 Uprising following the acquittal of Los Angeles Police Department officers who were recorded beating Rodney King, an unarmed Black man. Loop notes that historic preservation systematically privileges monumental buildings and landmarks and “enshrines whiteness” while neglecting spaces that are central to marginalized peoples’ histories of oppression and resistance. Davi daSilva employs case studies and an analysis of landmarked places to explore how procedural and structural aspects of historic preservation have privileged white historical narratives while erasing those of Black Cambridge residents.

Darien Williams (MCRP ‘18) situates recent efforts to reform the curricula, structures, and praxis of planning departments in the U.S. as part of a longer historical narrative dating back to the 1960s. Williams argues that Black students recognize the “magical” power of planning education, which offers the tools to translate ideas, beliefs, and biases into the built environment, and that these students seek to transform or provide alternatives to white imaginaries through Black magic. L. Dara Baldwin, Tamika L. Butler, Anita Cozart, and Veronica O. Davis, interviewed by Wesley Lowery, reflect on their experiences as Black women in the planning field to characterize how the “White Problem” manifests in planning: historical context, white-centered planning education, exclusionary language, and a lack of empathy around racism. They call for creating and cultivating Brave Spaces; confronting power and privilege that perpetuate inequities; ending institutionalized racism in the planning industry; and revising the planning curriculum to reflect the experience of BIPOC communities.

This year’s cover photo by Joungwon Kwon (DCRP PhD student) highlights the physicality of what Williams (see above) terms “white magic”. The enduring legacy of the railroad tracks in Durham, as elsewhere, is not merely one of transportation, but of both literal and figurative separation and segregation. The familiar phrase “the other side of the tracks” both pathologizes and literally “others” Black communities, while simultaneously normalizing and idealizing whiteness. By shifting the focus to the other, this language also makes invisible the white affluence and exclusion that implicitly define the “right” side of the tracks–affluence and exclusion enabled by the tracks themselves.

I hope you take away as much from reading this year’s articles as I have from watching them develop.

Will Curran-Groome
Editor-in-Chief

What Charlottesville Tells Us About Silent Sam

August 16, 2017 / odrozd

On Saturday August 12^th, a white nationalist rally protesting the planned removal of a Confederate monument in Charlottesville dissolved into violence that left three dead and many injured. The circumstances that led to this tragedy bear an uncomfortable resemblance to events that took place less than two years ago at UNC, when Confederate heritage supporters rallied to defend Silent Sam. Then, as now, counter-protestors rallied and directly confronted those assembled to defend the monument.

No one was hurt at UNC in 2015, but what happened in Charlottesville shows how close we are to the edge. As much as I fear that our campus could become the next lightning rod of racist and fascist violence, I fear more for the future of our University if we do nothing. Charlottesville only makes the stakes clearer. Our community is actively imperiled by the revisionist history that Silent Sam represents. Silent Sam should be removed from the center of campus because it validates the worldview of the far right and perpetuates racist narratives within our own community.

Silent Sam was a gift to the University of North Carolina from the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Installed in 1913, nearly fifty years after the end of the Civil War, the statue is an example of a ‘lost cause’ monument. Built between 1895 and 1935, these memorials elevate the Confederate soldier as the model of citizenship and frame the conflict as one that ennobled those who participated.[1] Crafted in white society experiencing the upheaval of emancipation, the lost cause narrative reassured Southern whites by supplanting the dishonor of defeat with a romanticized image of a confederacy in which brave young men fought and died against a tyrannical Northern aggressor with superior resources. The narrative frames the tremendous casualties of the war as a sort of martyrdom: a noble sacrifice cleansed from complicity in slavery and upheld as an example of civic virtue.

The placement of a lost cause monument at the center of UNC’s campus is intentional. These monuments were erected in front of courthouses and by busy thoroughfares to purposefully enshrine a positive narrative about the Confederacy within the public life of the South. Formerly in front of the County Courthouse, the Confederate monument pulled down by Durham protestors on August 14^th is another example. On UNC’s campus, Silent Sam’s message continues to be heard. You need look no further than The Daily Tar Heel to see the lost cause narrative within our public discourse.

In the fall of 2015, when the Real Silent Sam Coalition and local Black Lives Matter activists called for the statue’s removal, DTH published several letters to the editor in the statue’s defense. One letter, titled ‘Silent Sam Represents Sacrifice, Not Hate,’ describes the monument as “a reminder of the willingness of [Confederate soldiers] to sacrifice their lives for their community, society and families and [sic] their courage, tenacity and fortitude.”[2] Another letter supposes that removing the memorial negates “all who had fought and died in vain and the civilian lives of Southern women that were raped by the Union soldiers that pillaged, stole and burned anything that they could not steal.”[3]

I do not deny the atrocities of the Civil War. The problem lies within the insidious nature of the lost cause narrative, which is a project of historical revisionism cloaked in the disguise of honoring the dead. The lost cause narrative succeeds when it obscures slavery from public memory of the Civil War. It succeeds when it ennobles the Confederate soldier and denies his defense of slavery. Every step we take towards this narrative is a step away from historic fact and further erodes the shared understanding of American history that we need in order to have a conversation about race.

Further, as an imagined student of the University, Silent Sam is a particularly potent symbol, both in the eyes of the white men and women who see the image of their ancestors, and in the eyes of the people of color who see him as their oppressor. Silent Sam embodies the myth of white innocence in the past, as boldly stated in the letters to the editor written in his defense. By the same token, he embodies the myth of white innocence today. The controversy around Silent Sam holds a mirror to the campus community, and we might not be flattered by what we see.

The University’s discomfort around acknowledging white supremacy tacitly legitimizes the support of Confederate monuments. More than the continuance of the lost cause narrative, this is why the University should remove the statue. Carolina’s trend of downplaying and denying the damage of white supremacy in the past and today must end. The stakes are too high—Charlottesville shows us exactly what arises from the spread of these messages.

For a place like the University of North Carolina, living up to the values of diversity and inclusion is going to include difficult and uncomfortable moments. Removing Silent Sam would send a clear message about the University’s commitment to these values. As long as monuments to the lost cause remain on our campus, the lost cause narrative remains in our community. Now, more than ever, we need to populate our sacred ground with monuments that truly speak to our principles.

Feature image photo: 2015 Silent Sam protest. Photo by Brittany Jordan, UNC’s Campus Y.

[1] Thomas J. Brown, interviewed by Frank Stasio, “Flags, Soldier Statues and Civil War Memory,” WUNC, an affiliate of National Public Radio, (12 November 2015), http://wunc.org/post/flags-soldier-statues-and-civil-war-memory#stream/0.

[2] Dr. Edith Bernosky, “Letter: Silent Sam represents sacrifice, not hate,” The Daily Tar Heel, (10 November 2015), http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2015/11/letter-silent-sam-represents-sacrifice-not-hate.

[3] Danny Knowles, “Letter: Remove all war memorials or none,” The Daily Tar Heel, (24 August 2015), http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2015/08/letter-remove-all-war-memorials-or-none.

Libbie Weimer completed a master’s in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UNC Chapel Hill with a specialization in Land Use and Environmental Planning in 2016. She is interested in the connections between energy production, water quality, and environmental justice. Weimer currently splits her time between academic research, GIS consulting, and documentary filmmaking.

A Place for Silent Sam

February 26, 2016 / odrozd

Forty feet tall, dulled from age, the statue of a uniformed young man strides forward from his stone plinth. His face is resolute. He carries a rifle held with two hands, at the ready, though he carries no ammunition box on his belt. In brass relief on his granite base, the same young man sits with a book open in his hands. A tall, robed woman bearing a sword lays a hand on his shoulder. A book lies discarded at his feet as he turns his face to meet her gaze.

Silent Sam. “Confederate Monument, 1913.” Photo credit: North Carolina Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill.

The Confederate soldier monument, known as Silent Sam, occupies a prominent location at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Facing north, it commands a view of the center of Chapel Hill, with the University’s McCorkle Place at its back. Both an entryway and a center, McCorkle Place is the soul of the University, rimmed by its oldest buildings and home to the ‘Old Well,’ the iconic visual symbol of Carolina. Unsurprisingly, McCorkle Place is also the epicenter of a decades-long conflict over the memorialization of the Confederacy within a modern University. The debate over Silent Sam unveils the precarious position of a University built by slaves for the sons of white slaveholders, which today strives to realize the values of diversity and inclusion.

For those who support keeping Silent Sam in place, he represents the sacrifice of 321 Carolina students who died in the Confederate armies. For those who support removing the memorial, he is a totem to white supremacy and physical proof of the University’s ongoing marginalization of students of color. As a planner, I firmly believe that as long as the discussion centers solely on symbolism and intent, it will remain unresolved. As anyone who has recently attended a heated public meeting can attest, arguments that arise from conflicting narratives do not have readily available solutions. One cannot easily bridge the gap between the belief that the statue is racist and the belief that the statue is noble. Our beliefs are ours alone.

As planners, we are tasked with the delicate business of divorcing the debate from individual views toward a communal vision, introducing the material aspects of the problem to the debate, and hopefully finding common ground among a diverse set of constituents in the process.

As a planner and as a member of the UNC community, I believe that if we examine the University’s history, its values, and the relationship between its built environment and its social environment, we should advocate for the relocation of the statue. Many say that removing the monument from McCorkle Place would be tantamount to forgetting our history. I disagree. We both forget our history and deny the realities of our present by keeping the statue as it is. Silent Sam may be without ammunition, but he is still armed. The time has long since arrived for Silent Sam to move from the heart of campus to a more appropriate location.

To move forward, we first must understand our history. Silent Sam was a gift to the University of North Carolina from the United Daughters of the Confederacy and installed in 1913. Unlike most Confederate memorials erected shortly after the Civil War, the statue does not mark a cemetery or a battle site. Instead, Silent Sam is an example of a “lost cause” monument. Built between 1895 and 1935, these memorials elevate the Confederate soldier as the model of citizenship and frame the conflict in terms of states’ rights, not slavery. The placement of Silent Sam at the center of campus is intentional. Lost cause monuments were erected in front of courthouses and by busy thoroughfares as a means to enshrine a positive narrative about the Confederacy within the public life of the South.¹ Amidst a society experiencing the upheaval of emancipation and reconstruction, the lost cause narrative reassured whites by supplanting the dishonor of defeat with a romanticized image of the Confederacy in which brave young men fought and died against a tyrannical Northern aggressor with superior resources. These monuments served to frame the tremendous casualties of the war as a sort of martyrdom: a noble sacrifice cleansed from complicity in slavery and upheld as an example of civic virtue.

Today, Silent Sam remains a physical monument in a public space. Both the product of our social world and the setting of public life, public spaces create narratives of our history and our aspirations. Monuments, in particular, imbue space with meaning, transmitting messages from generations past about how to live well and about what values to uphold. This is exactly what Silent Sam does: it tells a story about the past and evangelizes the values contained within that narrative. While it is easy to see public space as static, our perceptions belie the truth that we experience these spaces anew with each visitation. If the monument is a message from the past, it is one continually translated and reimagined by a community of passers-by. The question for members of the University, therefore, is not solely about what Silent Sam meant in the past. It requires that we connect the dots between the social environment and the built environment in the present day.

“Festivities Surrounding Confederate Monument’s Unveiling.” Photo credit: North Carolina Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill.

I see that connection between past and present very clearly in how the lost cause narrative is threaded throughout today’s debate over Silent Sam. Recent letters to the editor published in The Daily Tar Heel defend the statue in terms that echo this narrative, describing the monument as “a reminder of the willingness of [Confederate soldiers] to sacrifice their lives for their community, society and families and [sic] their courage, tenacity and fortitude.”² Another letter supposes that removing the memorial negates “all who had fought and died in vain and the civilian lives of Southern women that were raped by the Union soldiers that pillaged, stole and burned anything that they could not steal.”³ I do not deny the bravery of Confederate soldiers or the atrocities committed during the course of the Civil War. The problem lies within the insidious nature of the lost cause narrative, which cloaks a project of historical revisionism in the disguise of honoring the dead.

Whatever is done with Silent Sam will never right the wrongs of slavery and the systematic discrimination of the Jim Crow South. But to say that we must leave things as they are denies the agency we have as a community of the present. What planners bring to this debate is the knowledge of how we shape our environment, both its physical and social attributes. The Carolina community must ask itself what kind of environment we wish to inhabit, and how we want to remember our shared, fraught history.

Silent Sam watches as counter-protestors greet Confederate rally protestors in October, 2015. Photo credit: Libbie Weimer

We have a place to start to answer the first question. The University’s Statement on Diversity states that “the University promotes intellectual growth and derives the educational benefits of diversity by creating opportunities for intense dialogue and rigorous analysis and by fostering mutually beneficial interactions among members of the community.”⁴ The diversity statement encompasses our core values and presents a place of common ground from which to begin the work of shaping our environment and remembering our history.

As a planner, I believe that Sam should be moved not simply because he represented the “lost cause” to his builders, but because of the connections between public space, public memory and shared history. I believe that as long as monuments to the lost cause remain at the heart of our campus, the lost cause narrative remains in the heart of our community. This narrative is antithetical to our values because it denies the centrality of slavery to the Confederate cause. In doing this, it both subverts a rigorous analysis of the past and undermines mutually beneficial interactions among the diverse members of our community. As a community of the present, we must confront the past with clear eyes.

“Silent Sam blindfolded by Confederate battle flag.” Photo credit: Bradley Sacks, The Daily Tar Heel (September 2015).

The debate over Silent Sam does not happen in a vacuum. In Fall, 2015, students at the University of Texas at Austin successfully petitioned to move a statue of Jefferson Davis from a public space on campus into the Briscoe Center for American History. Closer to home, students at Carolina succeeded last year in renaming a building dedicated to William Saunders, a prominent statesman and leader of the Ku Klux Klan. In both instances, pressure from students quickly led to change. Unlike William Saunders or Jefferson Davis, however, Silent Sam remains firmly in place.

I believe that the reason why we should move Silent Sam goes a step beyond the seduction of the lost cause narrative. Silent Sam evokes a wholly different and much more powerful response than Jefferson Davis or William Saunders. It is entirely possible to reject the actions and values of historical figures without considering one’s own actions and values. But Silent Sam is not a historical figure. Silent Sam is a student of the University. For this reason, he is a particularly potent symbol, both in eyes of the white men and women who see the image of their ancestors and of themselves, and in the eyes of the people of color who see him as their oppressor. It is one thing to call into question the motives of named elites of the day, and another altogether to call into question the motives of the everyday people of the past. To defend Sam as not racist today is to defend oneself as not racist today. Sam embodies a myth of white innocence in the past and he also embodies a myth of white innocence today.

Silent Sam circa April 7th, 1968. Photo credit: Hugh Morton Photographic Collection, North Carolina Collection Photographic Archive, Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill.

For this reason, Silent Sam is not only a historical controversy, but also an uncomfortable examination of today’s academic environment and today’s student body. The discomfort around acknowledging white supremacy tacitly fuels the debate. More than the continuance of the lost cause narrative, this is why the University should remove the statue. Carolina’s trend of downplaying and denying the damage of white supremacy in the past and today must end. The University must move the conversation from a childish posture of denial to a real conversation about race, a conversation that organized students such as the Real Silent Sam Coalition are already having. This conversation is fundamental to transforming the University from an institution designed for white men to an institution for students of all races, ethnicities, religions, and genders.

The road toward realizing the goals of diversity and inclusion is a long and winding path. It is the difficult and uncomfortable path. Removing Silent Sam is a difficult decision that would signal the University’s commitment to this path. I believe that Carolina should take a page from the University of Texas’ book and relocate Silent Sam to a more appropriate location. For Jefferson Davis, a history center is an ideal location, where a historical figure can be put within the context of the events of the time. For Silent Sam, the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery is my preferred option. The cemetery includes remains of Confederate soldiers who were buried there during the Civil War. Removing the monument from a prominent public space and placing it in a cemetery among Confederate dead affirms the sacrifice of the 321. The lost cause narrative does not belong at the heart of our institution. Let’s populate our sacred ground with monuments that truly speak to our principles, such as the Old Well. The time has come for Sam to be laid to rest.

Notes:

1. Thomas J. Brown, interviewed by Frank Stasio, “Flags, Soldier Statues and Civil War Memory,” WUNC, an affiliate of National Public Radio, (12 November 2015), http://wunc.org/post/flags-soldier-statues-and-civil-war-memory#stream/0.

2. Dr. Edith Bernosky, “Letter: Silent Sam represents sacrifice, not hate,” The Daily Tar Heel, (10 November 2015), http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2015/11/letter-silent-sam-represents-sacrifice-not-hate.

3. Danny Knowles, “Letter: Remove all war memorials or none,” The Daily Tar Heel, (24 August 2015), http://www.dailytarheel.com/article/2015/08/letter-remove-all-war-memorials-or-none.

4. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Division of Workforce Strategy, Equity & Engagement. “Core Diversity Values of the University” http://diversity.unc.edu/our-commitment/carolinavalues/

Libbie Weimer is a current master’s student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UNC-CH. She is interested in the connections between environmental justice and energy policy, and is working on a master’s project about coal ash in North Carolina.

Tag: white supremacy

What Charlottesville Tells Us About Silent Sam

A Place for Silent Sam

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