Residential segregation and inequality: Considering barriers to choice in Toronto

Segregation of visible minorities has persisted throughout time in Toronto. In examining these concentrations, the literature has been heavily focused on the notion that visible minorities are choosing to live in proximity to their respective ethno-racial groups and that these are spaces of aspiration rather than marginalization in Canada. This paper raises questions about the assertion of “self-segregation” by emphasizing affordability constraints on residential choices that are often rooted in discrimination in the labour market. Census data from 2016 and an adopted neighbourhood classification scheme were used to understand the spatial patterning of visible minorities in the Toronto census metropolitan area and highlight differences in the socio-economic characteristics of visible minority dominant and white dominant census tracts. The findings invite the inference that economic opportunities play a critical role in the residential choices of visible minorities and raise concerns about the quality of life in visible minority neighbourhoods. This research contributes to our understanding of how social inequalities have impacted the socio-spatial organization of the city of Toronto.     

Unravelling the “Thin Blue Line”: Policing as an Engine of Inequality

This paper argues that policing be understood as a creative social force that reproduces important dimensions of earlier iterations of the colour line. The paper advances this argument by integrating findings from two distinct research projects: the first on the household financial losses that follow arrest by immigration officials in Tucson, AZ; and the second focusing on the everyday costs of policing and carceral supervision absorbed by residents of Philadelphia, PA. Together, data from these sites illuminate how exposure to policing exhausts emotional and material resources from expansive family and community networks of care and support. To theorise the connection between financial dispossession and the dispossession of future opportunity, we draw on a heuristic reading of the “thin blue line” symbol. We conclude by suggesting a need for closer attention to how contemporary state interventions drive patterns of dispossession and vulnerability that accumulate across various scales, sites, rhythms, and collectivities.     

External validity of hedonic price estimates: Heterogeneity in the price discount associated with having Black and Hispanic neighbors

We examined the hedonic price of neighborhood racial composition across a sample of 180 US housing markets and compared heterogeneity in results. Statistically significant estimated price elasticities calculated at the mean ranged from ?0.61 to 0.2 and ?0.26 to 0.21, for increases in Black and Hispanic neighborhood proportion, respectively. Hedonic price discounts for Black neighborhoods were greater when land supply was more inelastic, when the land value share of the housing cost was greater, and in the southern portion of the United States. Hedonic price discounts associated with Hispanic neighborhoods exhibited no patterns relative to geography or housing supply factors.     

These Bars Can't Hold Us Back: Plowing Incarcerated Geographies with Restorative Food Justice

Mass incarceration entrenches racial and class inequality and segregation. Before, during, and after low‐income people of color enter prison, they experience a range of barriers and biases that make it difficult to break out of the prison pipeline. This article investigates food justice and restorative justice activists in Oakland, California who are intervening at the point of reentry. I argue for the significance of teasing out the connections between food and carceral politics as a way to expand the practice and understanding of food justice. Specifically, I show how the incarcerated geographies of former prisoners, that is, perspectives and experiences that result due to the prison pipeline, motivate the formation of a restorative food justice. The associated healing and mutual aid practices increase social equity by creating spaces to overcome the historical trauma of mass incarceration, produce living wage jobs, rearticulate relationships to food and land, and achieve policy reforms.     

The origins of university education in KwaZulu-Natal: The Natal University College 1909–19491

Public demand for university facilities in the then Colony of Natal began to gather momentum from the mid-nineteenth century. The Natal University College that was eventually launched in 1909/1910 in Pietermaritzburg and extended to Durban during the 1920s was characterised by three prominent features: First, it was initially affiliated to the University of the Cape of Good Hope and, in 1918, became a constituent college of the University of South Africa before maturing to become the independent University of Natal in March 1949. Second, the College remained an exclusively white institution until 1936 when the ‘Natal Experiment’ was launched in the form of separate classes for so-called ‘Non-Europeans’. Third, competition between Pietermaritzburg and Durban was seemingly resolved in 1928 by mutual acceptance of the principle of duality but a dual campus structure had serious implications with regard to the equitable distribution of limited financial and other resources. Since 1949 the multi-campus concept has been expanded. The present-day University of KwaZulu-Natal, established in January 2004, has a fivecampus structure, with four sites in greater Durban in addition to the original base in Pietermaritzburg. It is also multi-racial and of mixed gender with regard both to its student and staff complement.     

A beach of their own: The creation of the gender-segregated beach in Tel Aviv

This article examines the struggle for gender-segregated sea bathing in Tel Aviv from the first calls for gender segregation in the 1920s until 1966, when the city of Tel Aviv established a beach for men and women to swim separately. The most effective demands for gender segregation were framed in a civic and not religious discourse. Rather than claiming that gender-segregated swimming was against Jewish values, the ultra-Orthodox party Agudat Yisrael effectively argued that a lack of separate swimming violated their rights as taxpayers who had the right to bathe in the sea just as any other Israeli citizen.     

Eugenics ideals,racial hygiene,and the emigration process of German-American neurogeneticist Franz Josef Kallmann (1897–1965)

ABSTRACT

Biological psychiatry in the early twentieth century was based on interrelated disciplines, such as neurology and experimental biology. Neuropsychiatrist Franz Josef Kallmann (1897–1965) was a product of this interdisciplinary background who showed an ability to adapt to different scientific contexts, first in the field of neuromorphology in Berlin, and later in New York. Nonetheless, having innovative ideas, as Kallmann did, could be an ambiguous advantage, since they could lead to incommensurable scientific views and marginalization in existing research programs. Kallmann followed his Dr. Med. degree (1919) with training periods at the Charité Medical School in Berlin under psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer (1868–1948). Subsequently, he collaborated with Ernst Ruedin (1874–1952), investigating sibling inheritance of schizophrenia and becoming a protagonist of genetic research on psychiatric conditions. In 1936, Kallmann was forced to immigrate to the USA where he published The Genetics of Schizophrenia (1938), based on data he had gathered from the district pathological institutes of Berlin’s public health department. Kallmann resumed his role as an international player in biological psychiatry and genetics, becoming president (1952) of the American Society of Human Genetics and Director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute in 1955. While his work was well received by geneticists, the idea of genetic differences barely took hold in American psychiatry, largely because of émigré psychoanalysts who dominated American clinical psychiatry until the 1960s and established a philosophical direction in which genetics played no significant role, being regarded as dangerous in light of Nazi medical atrocities. After all, medical scientists in Nazi Germany had been among the social protagonists of racial hygiene which, under the aegis of Nazi philosophies, replaced medical genetics as the basis for the ideals and application of eugenics.     

ON THE ADVANTAGE AND DISADVANTAGE OF BLACK HISTORY MONTH FOR LIFE: THE CREATION OF THE POST‐RACIAL ERA

This article takes the Nietzschean dictum that history must “serve life” as a point of departure for an analysis of the American institution of Black History Month. Many continue to place great faith in the power of historical education to solve problems of race in America. Against this common‐sense view, this article argues that the excessive historicization of the problem of racism is at least as oppressive as forgetting. The black history propagated during this month has mostly been a celebration that it is history and thus a thing of the past. The article makes the claim that it is precisely a surfeit of black history that has encouraged the view that racism is vanishing in the river of time. The constant demand to view American racism through a historical frame has led to the perception that racism is a problem that must be historically transcended rather than solved. In other words, it is through the widespread dissemination of black history during Black History Month and elsewhere that the historical category of the post‐racial era has been constituted. The postracial era is not, as is so often claimed, a denial of historical context. On the contrary, it is an assertion that the horrors of racist discrimination were once real but are now over and done with.     

Unsettling “Inner City”: Liberal Protestantism and the Postwar Origins of a Keyword in Urban Studies

The term inner city first achieved consistent usage through the writings of liberal Protestants in the USA after World War II. Its genesis was the product of an era when a largely suburban mainline Protestantism was negotiating its relationship to American cities. Liberal Protestants’ missionary brand of urban renewal refocused attention away from the blight and structural obsolescence thought to be responsible for urban decay, and instead brought into focus the cultural pathologies they mapped onto black neighbourhoods. The term inner city arose in this context, providing a rhetorical and ideological tool for articulating the role of the church in the nationwide project of urban renewal. I argue that even as it arose in contexts aiming to entice mainline Protestantism back into the cities it had fled, the term accrued its meaning by generating symbolic and geographic distance between white liberal churches and the black communities they sought to help.     

Between political emancipation and creole hegemony: Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans (c. 1791)

Viscardo’s Letter to the Spanish Americans inaugurates a tradition of nonconformist political writing against Spanish colonial rule during the second half of the eighteenth century, a period characterized by the Crown’s attempt to reorganize several aspects of the colonial administration. As an ex-Jesuit living in exile after the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from all Spanish territories in 1767, Viscardo had a political as much as a personal motive in designing a project that would cut the colonial ties between Spain and the New World. His plans for emancipation included the instauration of a monarchical form of government, but his design was out of touch with reality and would have hardly been taken seriously by the inhabitants had a British-backed expeditionary force reached the coasts of Chile and Peru, as he had planned. While Viscardo’s Letter may have stirred a sense of creole patriotism some years after his death, the political scruples of the ancien regime based on social privileges and racial distinctions were too strong to be dismantled by mere ideals of freedom, justice and equality. Thus, effective political participation was restricted to the creole elite, whom Viscardo saw as the legitimate guarantor of social order and economic prosperity.