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 so other participants who, in a series of breakout rooms, shared stories of their own experiences with reading race in the built environment, their own perceptions of the field, their own ambitions and hopes of making more equitable architecture. Led by the speakers and a series of volunteers from Dark Matter University, the breakout rooms were intimate and personal, with a sense of enthusiastic urgency from everyone. In these groups, radical conversations around reforming architecture bounced around, touching on everything from dismantling white architectural aesthetics to questions of whether the “architect” should even exist, and how exclusive the label is. As Wilson concluded, “To talk about race can be difficult, but it can be edifying and liberating.” As I felt the electric atmosphere of the conversations and saw how passionate the participants were, her words could not have rung more true.