Vital Dialogues On Race

Mabel Wilson and Irene Cheng jumped straight to the point in their introduction: as other academic fields such as history, sociology, art history, and psychology have adopted critical race theory, with more and more scholars advancing necessary conversations about race in these spheres, why is race so conspicuously absent from conversations about architecture? This workshop served as, if not a remedy to this, a much-needed step towards bringing race and architecture to the forefront of discourse. Framed as a participatory “teach-in,” the workshop had several prominent academics and architects including Quilian Riano, Charles L. Davis II, Justin Garrett Moore, and Jerome Haferd join Wilson and Cheng in giving short presentations about racialized spaces and identities, examples of both in history, and the role of the architect today. In Cheng’s words, racism “serves material purposes … it’s not just about attitudes and beliefs”—to pretend otherwise would be callous and dangerous.

Yet the most rewarding moments arguably did not come from the speakers, but from the 75 or…