racing economic geography: the place of race in economic geography

Geography Compass 7/6 (2013): 398–411, 10.1111/gec3.12049

Racing Economic Geography: The Place of Race inEconomic Geography

Anne Bonds*Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

AbstractIn this paper, I provide a critical overview of research in economic geography on race andracialization. I begin with a discussion about the connections between geography and processes ofracialization. I then move into an examination of the kinds of engagements economic geographersare undertaking in research examining racial difference and the racialized implications of economicpolicy and practice. Drawing from the insights of feminist economic geographers as well as critical racescholars, I argue that while economic geographers have long engaged in research that illustrates raciallyuneven economic outcomes, race remains under-examined in economic geography. I conclude with acall for increased scholarship on race in economic geography, suggesting that economic geographersdraw from research that interrogates the foundational nature of race and relational racialization tointerrogate the mutually constitutive nature of ‘race’ and ‘economy’.

Introduction

“. . .[T]he issue of race provides one of the most important ways of understanding how thissociety works and how it has arrived where it is” (Hall, 1981, 69 quoted in Jackson, 1987, 5).As I write this piece, new sets of data seem to emerge each week highlighting the incred-

ibly racialized nature of the current economic crisis. Recent research on the racial wealth gapin the United States – the gap in wealth and assets between Whites and people of color –indicates that the gulf between White and Black and Latino wealth has sharply widened:the median wealth of White households is 20 times than that of Black households and 18times than that of Latino households (Kochhar et al., 2011). These wealth ratios are not onlymuch greater than they were just 5 years ago; they are the most lopsided ratios to haveemerged since data on this topic was first collected 25 years ago (Kochhar et al., 2011).The release of 2010 Census poverty figures illustrates both an entrenchment of poverty –with poverty rates reaching an 18 year high – and a deepening of cleavages along the linesof race. The official poverty measure indicates that 15.2% of the nation’s population is livingin poverty (US Census Bureau, 2010). Disaggregating this overall percentage along Censusracial categories reveals striking differences: 10.0% percent of whites are currently experienc-ing poverty compared to 27.5% of African Americans, 26.7% of Latinos, and 12.1% of Asians(Kochhar et al., 2011). In the City of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the location from which Iwrite, a recent study finds that an astonishing 53% of African American men are either notemployed or categorically unemployed or not in the labor force because of factors likeincarceration (Levine, 2010, 2). Moreover, in the face of recent assaults on public workersat a variety of scales, empirical data illustrate that African Americans – who are one-thirdmore likely than whites to be employed in the public sector – are being disproportionatelyimpacted by public sector layoffs (Williams, 2011).

© 2013 The Author(s)Geography Compass © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Although these statistics merely skim the surface of the many economic indicators that quantifyracialized economic disparities, they importantly highlight the intense racial differences character-izing contemporary economic geographies. They also call attention to the important role thateconomic geographers can play in calling attention to the ways in which race, racisms, andracialized marginalization are spatially reproduced through economic markets, institutions,and processes.In this piece, I argue that the study of race is essential to economic geography. I consider

some of the ways that economic geographers have engaged with race and, following Price(2010), suggest that economic geography,1 has much to gain from the insights of critical racetheory (CRT) as well as feminist and critical geography. While economic geographers havelong engaged with race, analyses often emphasize the way that capitalism produces raciallyunequal outcomes rather than focusing on race as essential to organizing the economy. Iargue that economic geographers can more fully interrogate dimensions of racializedeconomic difference by emphasizing race, not just as an effect or product of capital accumu-lation but rather as a systemic presence that is thoroughly embedded in economic paradigms,institutions, practices, and actors.In what follows, I first discuss theorizations of race and geographic engagements with race,

racism, and racialization. I then provide a brief overview of some of the ways that economicgeographers have engaged with race and racialization and note some of the theoretical andmethodological issues that have challenged such engagements. I conclude with a call for increasedengagement with race in economic geography, suggesting that economic geographers draw fromresearch on race that “centralizes race and racialization” (Price, 2010, 3) and theorizes relationalityin order to interrogate the mutually constitutive nature of ‘race’ and ‘economy’.

Critical Geographies of Race

To embark on any discussion of ‘race,’ it is necessary to begin by highlighting the problematicnature of the term. As has been widely documented, the concept of ‘race’ is not scientificallymeaningful (Omi and Winant, 1994; Jackson, 1987; Smith, 1989). Race and racial classificationsare not rooted in biological or genetic difference but are instead mutable social constructions.Delgado and Stefancic (2001) explain that, as products of social relations, “races are categories thatsociety invents, manipulates, or retires when convenient (7).” Nonetheless, racial categories areoften viewed as fixed, scientifically determined objects, and naturalized assumptions about raceare commonly affixed to skin color, ethnicity, language, and national origin. Acknowledging raceas socially constructed rather than as a biologically derived human classification does not,however, diminish its materiality or the importance of race as a social construct (Saldahna,2006; Smith, 1989, 3). Bodies are specifically racialized through power structures that profoundlyshape embodied experience. Racially differentiated knowledges, experiences, and geographiesare discursively and materially reproduced in ways that sustain the seeming unalterability ofracial categories.Races and racisms are forged in place, and processes of racialization are fundamentally

spatialized. That is, the sets of practices and ideologies that animate assumptions about racesand that structure systemic inequalities between so defined racial groups are operationalizedthrough spatial relations. As Jackson (1987) explains, race and racisms often “have anexplicitly territorial dimension that require us to examine the complex interweaving of socialrelations and spatial structures” (14). Similarly, Pulido (2002) argues that if we are to take raceseriously as a socially produced construct, then we must recognize that it is a thoroughlyspatial relation (44). Geographic examinations of segregated residential and educationalspaces, redlining and mortgage lending practices, economic development and transportation

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agendas, tax policies, the siting of hazardous or toxic facilities, and location of environmentalamenities all highlight the ways in which race, privilege, and racialized inequalities areproduced in place.In spite of the centrality of space in the construction of race, until relatively recently, geography

has not been a visible field in exploring race as a social reality (Pulido, 2000; Gilmore, 2002). Forexample, Dwyer’s (1997) important analysis of the volume of research onAfrican Americans in sixgeography journals2 between 1911 and 1995 (including The Annals of the Association of AmericanGeographers, The Professional Geographer, Antipode, Economic Geography, Geographical Review, andUrban Geography) finds just 176 total articles focused on this theme during this period (442). Onlythe journal ofUrban Geography had more than 5% of its articles focus on African Americans, whileEconomic Geography had just 1.5% of its content (25 out of 1,774 articles) give attention to AfricanAmericans (Dwyer, 1997, 442). This dearth of research reflects a remarkably impoverisheddisciplinary history on this critically important topic. However, geographers are now examiningquestions of race, racism, and racialization to an unprecedented degree (Gilbert, 1998; Pulido,2000; Gilmore, 2002, 2007; Delaney, 2002; Peake and Koybayashi, 2002; Kobyashi and Peake2000; Anderson, 2002; Barraclough, 2009; Wilson, 2009; Lawson et al., 2010; Inwood, 2012).This growing body of scholarship has fostered new conceptualizations of the ways in which“space works to condition the operation of power and the constitution of relational identities”(Delaney, 2002, 6). Such research examines the spatial expressions of social processes, highlight-ing, for instance, how racialized constructions shape and give meanings to places and how placesconfigure race and processes of racialization. They additionally interrogate how relations of racestructure the experiences of embodied subjects.During the late 1980s and early 1990s, critical geographers raised significant concerns about

how race was being represented in geographic research (Jackson, 1987; Dwyer, 1997). Through-out this period, analyses “moved beyond a narrow consideration of numbers of articles” toemphasize instead “geographers’ understanding and utilization of the concept of “race” (Dwyer,1997, 441). Work in the area of critical geographies of race has emphasized the ways in whichdominant White discourses are implicitly or explicitly reproduced within geographic research.Examinations increasingly highlight the sociospatial production of whiteness as a racial categoryand the normative geographies associated with White identities. Such analyses problematizeresearch that attaches race solely to Black or Brown bodies, thereby leaving whiteness, Whiteprivilege, and the relational nature of racial categories unproblematized (Pulido, 2000; Hubbard,2005; Wright et al., 2005).

Economic Geographies of Race

The ontological foundations of race and class present an enduring complication withinscholarship examining economic relations of race. Analyses of racialized inequality emphasizinglabor markets and production, for example, have faced critiques suggesting that anoveremphasis on the economic minimizes the significance of race. These charges warnagainst an economic determinism that grounds race in economic relations in a way thatobscures the connections between processes of racialization and economic practices (Omiand Winant, 1994). Within traditional neoclassical models, categories of social difference– such as race – are often considered to be exogenous factors in analyses or are identifiedas the outcome of irrationalities best addressed through adjustments in market mechanisms.Furthermore, human capital hypotheses – theories that support the notion that racializeddifferences in market allocations are the outcome of differential individual “investments”(in education, for example) – are underpinned by ahistorical assumptions about



individuality and rationality that elevate ideas about personal culpability while sustaining adisregard for the realities of systemic racism (Johnson, 2000). Classical Marxian approachestheorize social relations through the lens of class, and racialized inequality is situated withinthe dynamics of the accumulation of capital and class struggle. Accordingly, racisms areproduced through the logics of capitalism, which sustains social relations of productionand benefits from a racially segregated working class (e.g. Callinicos, 1993). Consequently,imperialism, the institution of slavery, and contemporary racism are fundamentallyconnected to the needs of capital and economic exploitation and the demands of capitalism(Callinicos, 1993). Critics, however, argue that this framework makes race vulnerable tobecoming subsumed by, or functionally determined through, class relationships (Roediger,2007 [1991]).Indeed, as Gibson-Graham (1996) has argued, political economy praxis remains haunted

by essentialized conceptions of the economy that posit the capitalist system as a unified,totalizing, system in opposition to social and cultural relations. Feminist and post-structuralresearch in economic geography has done much to redress the epistemological and ontolog-ical difficulties arising from race/class distinctions (Koybayashi, 2005). This work haschallenged the separation between all forms of (nonessentialized) social difference andthe economy to emphasize, instead, their discursive co-constitution (Massey, 1984;Gibson-Graham, 1996; McDowell, 1997; Wright, 1997). Moreover, feminist and post-structural theory and praxis destabilize the dichotomy between knowledge production andpolitics, to argue that act of subsuming race – or other forms of difference – ontologicallyis not merely an observation about the world but in fact a political act.Despite ongoing ontological tensions, there is, undoubtedly, a long trajectory of research

theorizing racial inequalities as produced and sustained through economic processes ineconomic geography. However, historically, research on race and racialized minorities ineconomic geography has occupied a marginal location in the subdiscipline. A notableexception to this tradition of relative neglect was a special 1972 issue in Economic Geography(Vol 48, no. 1), which emphasized the theme “Contributions to an Understanding of BlackAmerica”. However, the spatial analytic framework that was pervasive in urban andeconomic geography during this period of time – and indeed in this special journal issue– has endured significant scrutiny by critical and feminist geographers whose challengeshave destabilized the underlying ontological and epistemological assumptions of spatialscience (see Barnes et al., 2007 for a comprehensive discussion of these critiques). Themethodologically unchallenged frameworks that dominated regional science during thisperiod were criticized for being atheoretical and were intensely challenged for their failureto grapple with social difference. Accordingly, spatial science’s engagements with race havebeen problematized for a range of reasons – including its reliance on normative assumptionsabout race, its deployment of unquestioned racial categories as descriptive elements inpredictive models, its preoccupation with urban communities of color and ‘disorder’, andits neglect of systemic racism and white supremacy3. Referring to the ways in which BlackAmerica was historically portrayed in geographic literature, Carter (2009) stresses that “theblacks depicted in these articles were products of limited white imagination. . .[t]hey wereeither stereotypes. . .or explanatory variables in models” (468).A reliance on monolithic categories in geographic research on race and ethnicity has also

been the subject of significant debate4. These discussions have particular resonance foreconomic geography, given its traditional reliance on aggregate data sets like censuses,surveys, and business statistics. Rather than allowing the data to “speak for itself” (Barneset al., 2007, 4), research in this vein emphasizes the ways in which categories of race arefurther naturalized in studies, particularly those relying on quantification, that take the



complexity and the power relations embedded within secondary data on race for granted(Ellis, 2000; Carter, 2009; Kurtz, 2009). Census racial categorizations, for example, obscurethe socially constructed nature of race, reproduce the idea of race as an unchanging, concretecharacteristic, and reinforce racial and ethnic boundaries (Ellis, 2000; Bonilla-Silva andZuberi, 2008). While Census definitions have created sharp delineations along the lines ofrace and ethnicity, Census racial classifications have also fluctuated significantly over theyears, demonstrating both the fluidity of race and the shifting societal attitudes attached toracial delineations (Ellis, 2000). Bonilla-Silva and Zuberi (2008), in discussing social sciencein general, argue that the uncritical deployment of Census racial categories limits theresearcher’s ability to understand racial dynamics because studies often identify race and notracial relations as the casual factor in scholarship (6, author’s emphasis). Additionally, significantconcerns have been raised about the spatial separation that exists between the researchers andthe researched in quantitative analysis utilizing secondary data (Carter, 2009; Lawson 1995):

[We] are seeing a growing number of social scientists who claim to be poverty experts, but whoseprofessional authority is derived primarily from sophisticated secondary data analyses. Meanwhile,these researchers are reluctant to venture out to poor non-White neighborhoods to have conversa-tions with people representative of those in their impersonal secondary data sets (Stanfield 1999,419 quoted in Carter, 2009, 471).

Accordingly, the distance between the disembodied subjects of quantitative research andthe academic practitioners conducting such studies is sustained through research practices thatare insensitive to the relations of power embedded in data and research techniques. Wrightand Ellis (2006) raise similar concerns about the potential dangers of mapping immigrantpopulations. While new visualization techniques enable geographers to place foreign bornor minority populations, Wright and Ellis caution that the uncritical exercise of mappingrisks reproducing inaccurate assumptions about the spatial separation of racial and ethnicgroups (2006, 287).Yet, an important subset of economic geography has worked to challenge long-standing

assumptions about race. For example, the topic of segregation has occupied a prominent po-sition in economic geographic scholarship on race and racial inequality. Economic geogra-phers’ research on segregation and housing has helped to define the spatial dimensions andconsequences of racial apartheid in cities to demonstrate the ways in which economicprocesses fuse with racial logics to sustain inequalities (e.g. Rose, 1971, 1972; Morrill,1965; Harvey, 1985; Smith, 1987, 1989; Holloway, 2000; Kaplan, 2004; Wyly andHolloway, 2002; Wyly and Holloway, 2002; Wyly et al., 2007; Wyly et al., 2009). In the1980s and 1990s, the insights of feminists and critical geographers led to more reflexiveapproaches to theorizing racial segregation that contested essentialist (and implicitly racist)presumptions that emphasized urban segregation and ‘dysfunction’ and/or pathology toinstead call attention to racist practices and the social and spatial construction of urbancommunities of color (c.f. Smith, 1989). Connected to economic geographic research onsegregation is the prominently studied topic of spatial mismatch, which theorizes the conse-quences of the spatial separation between segregated urban residents of color and increasinglydecentralized job growth in peripheral locations (Kain, 1968). Geographic research on spatialmismatch accentuates the linkages between urban economic structures and labor marketoutcomes to theorize intrametropolitan occupational and industrial segregation (Holloway,1996; Kaplan, 2004; Houston, 2005; Preston and McLafferty, 1999). By explicitly linkingmobility with housing and labor markets, this research connects spatial barriers to employ-ment to racial segregation, metropolitan restructuring, and suburbanization.



Increasingly, spatial mismatch research emphasizes how overlapping identity categoriesconstrain mobility and access to employment in distinctly different ways. Feminist analyses,for example, have demonstrated the centrality of gendered assumptions in maintaininghomework separations between urban and suburban areas (England, 1993; Hanson and Pratt,1995; McLafferty and Preston, 1992). Furthermore, feminist geographic research has impor-tantly demonstrated the differential experiences of African American women and Latinascompared to White women with respect to geographical barriers to employment resultingfrom their disparate access to housing and labor markets (Gilbert, 1998; Preston andMcLafferty, 1999; Johston-Anumonwo, 1997; Parks, 2004; Joassart-Marcelli, 2009). Ellis,Wright, and Parks (2004) examination of residential and work tract segregation for native-born and immigrant groups in Los Angeles complicates the relatively fixed geographies ofresidential segregation research that tends to privilege home spaces to the neglect of otherspaces that structure daily activities. They find that racial and ethnic segregation patternsfluctuate significantly daily and that these differentiated labor and residential geographies varyconsiderably along the lines of race, ethnicity, and gender.Moreover, in spite of the methodological concerns raised about Census data and

“counting” in economic geographic research focused on race and ethnicity, secondary datasets and quantification remain essential in illustrating key issues pertaining to race andracial inequality. For example, those working in the realm of what Carter (2009) calls“critical quantitative geography” use quantitative techniques within a framework that is“nonessentialist and that problematizes the ontological basis of racial categories” to demon-strate the operation of processes of racial oppression (476). Wyly and Holloway (2002), forexample, document the disappearance of race from mortgage lending. Their analysishighlights the way that this disappearance undermines efforts to challenge unequal racialhistories in mortgage lending that has sustained practices like redlining and lending discrim-ination. The work of Ellis, Wright, and Parks (Parks, 2004; 2006; Ellis, 2007) brings criticalquantitative research together with a critical geographic perspective on race that does notassume or naturalize racial and ethnic categories in their research on immigrant and racialresidential segregation, labor markets, and spatial assimilation. Parks (2012) recent researchutilizes multilevel analysis of wage inequalities among African American, Latino, and Whitemen and an examination of “racial labor market institutions” (5) (the prison system, union-ization, and public employment) in her investigation of local labor structures and wagedifferentials. Parks’ innovative approach brings together theories of racial formation withan institutional framing of racial orders, and regulation theory to explore how highlylocalized systems of race sustain and/or mediate labor market outcomes,

Feminist Economic Geography and Critical Race Theory (CRT)

Feminist economic geographers have made profound theoretical and methodological interven-tions in economic geography. Research in feminist economic geography has complicatedgendered definitions of work and distinctions between production and social reproduction, hasemphasized the ways in which economic geographies are constituted through a range ofoverlapping social relations and expanded the scope of class to include other axes of difference,and has interrogated the masculinisim of traditional methods in economic geography(Oberhauser, 2003; Barnes et al., 2007). Nagar et al. (2002) emphasize the contributions thatfeminist conceptualizations can bring to economic analysis, underscoring, in particular, theimplications of privileging particular spheres, scales, actors, and networks in traditional economicframeworks. Feminist interventions have also challenged economic geographers to move beyondeconomistic renditions to interrogate how economic processes reconstitute and rework social and



cultural difference. Increased attention to the social and cultural construction of economicactivities emphasizes the way culturally embedded economic practices, institutions, and actorsare embodied and tied to constructions of femininity and masculinity (e.g. McDowell, 1997;Lawson, 1999; Wright, 1997). Analyses have sought to decenter the economy its discursivereproduction and illustrate how socially constructed economic identities are mobilized in supportof certain economic strategies (Gibson-Graham, 1996; Wright, 1997; Lawson, 2008; Lawsonet al., 2010). These critiques have questioned key assumptions underpinning economic geographyand facilitated an expanded research agenda that includes race and the constructions of racializedeconomic identities.This attention to power relations and the socially constructed nature of race resonates closely

with critical race theory (Price, 2010). CRT, emerging specifically from critical legal studies inthe United States, is an intellectual movement emphasizing the significance of the law inconstructing and sustaining racism, White supremacy, and social domination following the socialmovements of the 1960s5 (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgado and Stefancic, 2001; Price, 2010, 4).Rather than viewing the law as a facilitator of justice, scholars in CRT underscore the role theAmerican legal framework has played in upholding the racial status quo and obscuring the racialviolence committed against indigenous, Latino, and African Americans (e.g. Bell, 1995; Delgado,1995). Hence, a key focus of CRT is the idea that racism is not exceptional but rather that it ismundane and systematized, ingrained in institutions, and fundamentally sustained by seeminglyliberal structures purported to support justice and impartiality (Crenshaw et al., 1995; Delgadoand Stefancic, 2001; Price, 2010). CRT thus identifies race and racism as endemic componentsof society in theUnited States and rejects the notion that we live in a “colorblind” or “post-racial”moment. Indeed, as Price (2010) argues, this understanding is one of the important “commonal-ities” that links “CRT with critical geographies of race scholarship6” (7–9).

Through its emphasis on understanding how society is organized along the lines of race,CRT calls attention to White supremacy and the marginalization of people of color in orderto challenge the ways that race and racial domination are constructed. This focus not onlyentails examinations of the way in which racism advances the position of Whites but alsohighlights the centrality of racialization – the ways in which dominant groups constructracialized “others” differently over time and space. Emphasizing processes of racializationcalls attention to the differential paths of racialization experienced by racial groups; it alsoillustrates the ways in which groups are racialized in relation to one another and challengesassumptions about normative whiteness.I want to suggest that economic geography, with its concern for documenting and under-

standing material processes and the uneven distribution of resources, can more deeply drawfrom and contribute to theorizations of race and racialization. In the last portion of this paper,I had like to point to some insights that economic geographers might further draw fromfeminist economic geography and critical theories of race in order to more fully theorizehow race, racisms, and privilege are reproduced through economic relations.

Racing Economic Geography

Given that economic geographies are reflections of systemic inequalities in power and opportu-nity, economic geographers are well positioned to make sense of the ways in which race, racisms,and privileges as maintained through a range of economic processes, including (to name a smallfew) land use and real estate practices, rent, economic growth and development, labor practices,andworkplace politics and environments.Moreover, economic geography’s plurality and hetero-dox nature – in terms of its objects, subjects, and methods of analysis – and its emphasis on theeconomic as fundamentally social and political (Barnes et al., 2007, xi–xiv) suggest the potential



for a rich and much larger research agenda on racialized economic geographies. And yet, despiteits increasing presence, race continues to remain relatively peripheral in economic geography.Recently, for example,Wilson (2009) has advocated for more “racial economy perspectives” thatanalyze the interconnections between race and political economy in geography. Similarly,Roberts andMahtani (2010) have called for an expanded literature on neoliberalism and race thatexplores not only just the racially uneven impacts of neoliberalization but also the ways in whichneoliberalism is thoroughly raced. These insights point to the productive possibilities for increasedengagement with race in economic geography.First, economic geography can more fully interrogate race by underscoring the “all-

encompassing nature of race7” (Price, 2010, 7; Delaney, 2002). As Price (2010) powerfullycontends, “to take [Delaney’s (2002) notion of] the wholly racialized world seriously is at oncetheoretical, methodological, and political” (7). Within economic geography, such a framingnecessitates a “centralizing of race” (Price, 2010, 3), an appreciation that all economic actors areracialized economic actors and that all economic outcomes are racialized outcomes, as well asan acknowledgement of the fundamental role of race in structuring economic institutions,practices, and theories of analysis. That is, recognition of race as a fundamental dimension ofsociety thoroughly ingrained within all aspects of the economic: race is embedded in the socialconstruction of economic behavior and vice versa. Moreover, this entails an appreciation thatrace shapes the kinds of questions asked by economic geographers and that theorizations andinterpretations of outcomes flow through racialized lenses. Such a focus requires research thatexplores the experiences of differently racialized individuals and challenges a reinscription of thecentrality of markets and financial institutions within economic geography.A foregrounding of race in economic geography further underscores that race is not an

effect of the dynamics of capitalism but is rather a systematized presence, as the work of Parks(2012), Ellis et al (2004; 2006; 2007), Holloway (2000), Wyly and Holloway (2002), Wylyet al. (2007), Wyly et al. (2009), and Wright (1997) so clearly demonstrates. An expandedbody of research in this vein would enhance the subdiscipline’s engagement with race. Moregenerally, economic geographers have significantly underscored the racially differentiatedconsequences of specific economic policies. However, within such analyses, there is a dangerthat categories of race may remain relatively static and unproblematized. Furthermore,analyses primarily emphasizing the economic dimensions of race and racism may fail toaddress the co-production of ‘race’ and ‘economy’. Hence, emphasizing not only the raciallydifferentiated effects of particular economic agendas but also the ways in which all economicpractices are fundamentally raced and tied to the establishment and reproduction of norma-tive race structures is also essential for racing economic geography. Racialized differences arenot only sustained by economic practices; they are constitutive of the economic. In otherwords, economic relations of race powerfully shape and order racial identities even aseconomic processes themselves are transformed and reworked by processes of racialization.Second, economic geographers interested in race can draw from insights from feminist

geography, CRT, and other realms of critical geography that emphasize relationality.Relationality, the idea that identities and spaces do not exist as entities in and of themselvesbut are instead constituted through engagement and interconnection, has gained consider-able attention in geography over the past decade as a means of rethinking spatiality and theways in which power relations are materially and discursively established (e.g. Massey,2005; Hart, 2002; Yeung, 2005; Bathelt and Glückler, 2003). Feminist geographers DoreenMassey and Gillian Hart, in particular, have developed relational frameworks to explore themutable construction of places in ways that emphasize both the structural dimensions ofcapital accumulation as well as contingency, difference, and complexity. Places are theorizednot merely as passive receptacles of unequal power relations but as actively bound up in the



reworking of economic processes and identities. Indeed, many economic geographers havetaken up relationality to theorize how “socio-spatial relations of actors are intertwined withbroader structures and processes of economic change at various geographical scales” (Yeung,2005 37; c.f. Bathelt and Glückler, 2003). However, as Yueng (Yeung, 2005, 38) asserts,much of the emphasis relationality in the emergent field of relational economic geographyis thematic, in that, it emphasizes the significance of interconnections between actors andstructures; yet, he contends that theorizations of power relations that are a critical componentin relational analysis remain under-explored and underdeveloped. Werner (2012) moreforcefully critiques the ways in which economic geographers have engaged with relationality,arguing that “while feminist epistemology is everywhere in the literature, feminist politics isnowhere” (1). More specifically, she is critical of economic geographers for adopting arelational approach while minimizing social and cultural difference, uneven economic geog-raphies, and power geometries in examinations (Werner, 2012, 2). Ultimately, she arguesthat the ‘relational turn’ in economic geography “nominally adopts post-structuralist,feminist approaches and neutralizes them in the process” (Werner, 2012, 2).Building from Werner (2012) and Yeung (2005), I suggest a renewed engagement with

relationality in economic geography that emphasizes not just relationships and intercon-nectedness but one that centers unequal power relations and social difference, elementsthat are critical underpinnings of a relational framework. A relational approach that leadswith a focus on power relations enhances analyses of race in economic geography byforegrounding the interplay between material social relationships and race to explorehow racial perceptions and attitudes legitimate and sustain material injustices and inequal-ities. For example, increasingly, geographers have drawn from theories of relationalracialization to explore the ways in which race is constituted in place through economicpractices, public discourses, and long-standing stereotypes and representations of racialgroups and their relative status (Bonds, 2012; Barraclough, 2009; Lawson et al., 2010;Lawson, 2008). Such a framing emphasizes the ways in which economy and racializationare articulated together while underscoring the ways in which economic practices reinforceracial categories, racisms, and White supremacy, even as racialization is a fundamentalcomponent in shaping economic processes themselves. That is, a relational framework thatengages racialized power and uneven economic geographies together accentuates theways in which processes of racialization coincide with, rework, and transform changingeconomic conditions.

Conclusion: An Agenda for Racing Economic Geography

The fractures of the current economic crisis make evident the fragility and fickle nature ofeconomic dominance; they also highlight the necessity of ideological and structuralreworking and adaptation to sustain economic power relations. But the crisis has also height-ened awareness about just what is at stake, who is most vulnerable, and the significance ofparticular racial tropes in animating and marshaling support for economic agendas. Even asurficial glance at economic indicators reveals the profoundly socially differentiated dynamicsthat characterize the current economic landscape. To neglect the centrality of race ineconomic geography at this juncture of intensifying racism and racial violence acrossscales would be not only unjust but would also lead to diminished analyses (Inwood andBonds, 2012).In this piece, I have argued that economic geography has much to gain from – and add to

– theorizations of race. While a portion of economic geography has engaged with questions



of race for some time, race remains vastly under-explored as a substantive focus of thesubfield. However, economic geography is well positioned to make important contribu-tions to conversations about the critical interplay between racial logics, economic practices,and the reproduction of material (dis)advantage. In sharp contrast to orthodox economics,in particular, or to economic approaches in other fields of social science, economicgeography’s theoretical and methodological variegation grants the subdiscipline muchmore openness for interrogating questions about race, power, and justice. This openness–forged by feminist and radical geographers demanding a more socially just economicgeography – has facilitated a disciplinary atmosphere that promotes innovative challengesto long-standing traditions and norms (Barnes et al., 2007; Inwood and Bonds, 2012).Economic geography has an ethical responsibility to utilize this openness to cultivate asystemic commitment to an antiracist research agenda that confronts racisms, racial hierar-chies, and racially unequal economic geographies.So, how might this actually take shape? Researchers in CRT and in feminist and

critical geography have developed robust critiques that have significant implications forthe ways in which economic geographers can and should engage with race and processesof racialization. A serious engagement with race in economic geography should includetwo connected agendas. First, there needs to be an expansion of race-focused research ineconomic geography. That is, more geographers should ask questions pertaining torace and should explore the racialized dimensions of economic geographies. Whilesome might identify this suggestion as an “add race and stir”8 approach that advocatesa narrow emphasis on the volume of research on race, few would argue that, to date,race has been adequately addressed in economic geography. Thus, as a starting point,an agenda for racing economic geography requires that race and the racializeddimensions of economic geographies be investigated more vigorously and frequentlyin the subfield.Second, an agenda for racing economic geography ultimately requires a fundamental

rethinking of race as it relates to the economic. This rethinking draws from the insights offeminist research and critical race theory in their challenges to essentialism in theory andmethodology and their emphasis on inseparability of social and cultural dimensions fromthe economic. To foreground race in economic geographic research requires not only anappreciation of its connection to the distribution of material assets in society, but also anacknowledgement of its fundamental role in organizing all aspects of the economic. Thisimperative recognizes that there is “no ‘outside’ of race” (Price, 2010, 7), no moment inwhich an economic process is not racialized. Racial difference is constituted through andwithin economic relationships even as race and racialization organizes and reworks these veryprocesses. Thus, I advocate a foregrounding of race in economic geography that accentuatesboth that racialized processes are always thoroughly spatialized and that all economicpractices are thoroughly racialized.

Short Biography

Anne Bonds is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University ofWisconsin – Milwaukee with research interests in gendered and racialized poverty and priv-ilege, incarceration, and the politics of economic development. Her work is especiallyconcerned with the material and discursive construction of the ‘undeserving poor’, particu-larly through the dynamics of mass incarceration, community development agendas, andaffordable housing issues. Her current research projects focus on prison-led economicdevelopment strategies and carceral geographies in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.



Notes* Correspondence address: Dr. Anne Bonds, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee,Northwest Quadrant 6515, P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, WI 53201, Phone: 414-229-4872. E-mail: [email protected]

1 As with all disciplinary boundaries, the distinctions between economic geography and other subfields in geography areporous and subject to debate. The literature I connect with the “dynamic and heterodox field” of economic geographyhere is no exception (Tickell et al., 2007, xi). For example, one of the problematic binaries that I sustain in this discussionis the distinction between economic geography and critical development studies in geography. In so doing, my analysisboth excludes the work of development scholars who have importantly explored topics of race, ethnicity, andindigeneity and sustains a troublesome and limiting dichotomy between the Global North and the Global South. Thus,I begin with an acknowledgement that my examination of the realm of scholarship in economic geography and race isnot – and could not be – exhaustive. Rather, my goal here is to make note of some themes and signal the potential forincreased engagement.2 In referring to this study, I do not mean to reify notions that race is something possessed by only by people of color.Rather, I draw from this example to call attention to the dearth of geographic research on African Americans between1911 and 1995, noting that prevailing assumptions about whiteness and invisibility have historically cloaked White racialidentities in social science research.3 The works of Dick Morrill and Harold Rose stand out as notable exceptions and as particularly significant in thehistoriography of economic geography’s engagements with race and racial inequality. Rose’s and Morrill’s sustainedengagements with urban African American communities and their efforts to highlight racial injustice contrast withtraditional spatial science research in economic and urban geography. For example, Morrill’s, 1965 study illuminatedthe significance of real estate practices and financial and governmental institutions in sustaining the de facto segregationof African Americans in a post-Jim Crow urban context in the United States. Rose’s, 1971 research on African Americanghettos drew attention to the political consequences of urban segregation.4 In many ways, these conversations parallel exchanges in feminist geography about “counting” and quantification(e.g. Lawson 1995; McLafferty 1995; Kwan 2002).5 Please see Price (2010, 4–6) for a much more detailed discussion of the geneology of CRT and its theoreticalapplications.6 Price (2009) notes that geographers interested in race utilize the term critical race theory as a way to refer to aninterdisciplinary body of research that problematizes the socially constructed nature of race. However, often the useof this term does not include a direct engagement with CRT literature (2).7 Please see Delaney (2002) and Price (2010, pages 7–9) for detailed analysis of the “all pervasiveness of race”(Price, 2010, 1).8 Within feminist theory, conversations about “add women and stir” approaches have a long history. These debatesemphasize the distinctions between more liberal perspectives advocating an incorporation of women and women’sexperiences into existing approaches compared to post-structural and more radical approaches calling for a fundamentalrethinking of gender, power, and identity categories (J. Scott, 1986).

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racing economic geography: the place of race in economic geography

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