10/9/24 CU Boulder Today:
After the Civil War, laws mandated racial segregation in public
facilities across many U.S. cities, requiring separate bathrooms,
schools and waiting rooms for people of color and white people. While
the last of this legislation, known as the Jim Crow laws,
was overturned in the 1960s, the built environment continues to impose
boundaries that make certain races feel unwelcome, said Shawhin Roudbari, an associate professor in CU Boulder’s Program in Environmental Design.
Roudbari
has been studying how design elements can perpetuate racial inequality
in the U.S., hoping to shed light on systemic issues.
Currently, he is piloting a study exploring how the space and buildings at U.S. college campuses reinforce racial inequality.
“I
first became interested in this area because college campuses are a
place where young people come during an identity-forming time in their
lives,” Roudbari said. “It’s important to learn how they perceive the
space around them in a place they have to live for multiple years.”
CU
Boulder Today sat down with Roudbari to discuss his research on campus
design, racial inequity in architecture and what inclusive design looks
like.
Many don’t think about that when considering architecture. They might
think of accessibility issues, like the presence of ramps for people
with disabilities, but not about race.
But architectural design
often reflects social hierarchies, and those hierarchies are frequently
tied to the history of Western colonization and racism.
For
example, certain classroom setups, like the auditorium-style lecture
hall where students surround a professor, portray the teacher as the
center of power standing in the middle of the room. This way of learning
was made mainstream by Western colonization, which
eliminated enslaved or otherwise colonized Indigenous communities as
part of attempts to extract wealth or advance supremacist projects like
Manifest Destiny (a belief that American settlers were destined to
expand across North America). In other non-Western traditions, learning
tends to be more communal and decentralized, where people sit around in a
circle and share their expertise.
Do the following phrases mean anything to this idiot: "Indian chief", "Chinese emperor", "caliph"?
In your recent study,
you interviewed 20 CU Boulder community members, including white people
and people of color, about how they perceived the campus. What did you
find?
One issue that came up a lot is visibility. The campus has
a lot of big, open spaces, which is great for some. But others pointed
out that on a campus with a predominantly white demographic, people of
color stand out more in open spaces.
Many people of color
expressed that they felt a sense of being noticed and watched on this
campus, because the environment provided little refuge for them to be
less visible or even hide in this predominantly white space.
The
big lawn in front of the Norlin Library is one example. Students there
enjoy playing games or sun tanning. When most people there are white,
and my skin color is a bit different, the contrast becomes enough to
make people uncomfortable.
This would be a problem in classrooms, too, maybe even more so. Solution is simple: do not attend colleges with white people! Clearly, we left that behind with Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
Green spaces like this are common
across college campuses in the US. Can you elaborate more on how this
landscape can be problematic?
Manicured lawns on U.S. college
campuses have roots in our imagination of what elite schools in Europe
look like. We want to build a campus that looks like Oxford University
or Cambridge University to convey a superior status. So, even though
they seem like neutral design elements, they can make non-white students
feel alienated because these spaces weren’t designed for them. The
architecture of a campus can send subtle messages about who belongs
there and who doesn’t.
Excuse me while I laugh. I thought it was about creating a peaceful environment. Does any non-white student walk onto campus and say, "This place looks like Oxford. They do not want me here."
When I first went to university, I was a lower socioeconomic status white person. (The people that ran universities then could not imagine that concept.) Was it different? Yes. I was grateful for the opportunity to get an education on my way to becoming a research chemist. Do black freshmen show up on campus and say, "This place does not want me here." They may not feel like they fit in. My first year at USC, I felt the same way. But I did not let that stop me. They wanted me there or they would not have admitted me and provided a modest scholarship to make up the difference between the scholarship provided by California and USC's hefty tuition. (I could have attended UCLA. But the gap between what California would pay and UCLA's much more modest tuition meant that USC was the cheap alternative.)
If you want to see how deep the rot is in our institutions of higher education, look at what "architecture racism" finds in news.google.com.
