Peace and Planning

While I’ve been done with the first year of my PhD program for a over month now, it took a little time to get used to the new rhythms of summer life (stay tuned for updates in a future post!). However, the past few weeks have offered an opportunity to reflect on what I’ve learned thus far and what I hope to set my sights on moving forward.

Hands down the best class I took was Conflict and Race, where I was exposed to viewpoints – thanks to writings by scholars like Charles Mills and Cathy Cohen (among many others) and discussions with my brilliant professor and thoughtful classmates – that pushed me into new intellectual territory. It was in this class where (thanks to guest speaker Dr. Jared Clemons) I first encountered the principle-policy gap, wherein progressive white people actually vote for policies that undermine the racially just societies they claim to support.

Interestingly enough, I grappled with this phenomenon as it applied to my own research interests in a previous post without realizing there was a term for it. As a recap: DC is one of the most progressive cities in the country, and I imagine if you asked a random resident (who is – unfortunately – increasingly likely to be higher income and white) if they believed in climate change, they’d say yes. If you asked if they believe humans contribute to it, they’d say yes. If you asked if Black and brown communities are disproportionately at risk of climate change impacts, they’d say yes. If you asked if cars were a major source of the greenhouse gases that drive climate injustice (not to mention public health disparities [in the communities where refineries are located, in communities that have high vehicular traffic and in turn emissions, in communities that experience disproportionate traffic violence] in addition to environmental destruction, global political instability, degradation of social cohesion, etc.), they would say yes. If you said, okay great, how about you commit to using other forms of transportation (even some of the time, and I’m imaging someone that lives in at least a moderately transit-accessible location…which is not an insignificant chunk of the population), that would likely be a non-starter. That, my friends, is the principle-policy gap in action.

This introduces a promising framework that I might use in my future research, which is beginning to crystallize around local urban planning conflicts focused on transportation policy and at the juncture of individual behavior and structural change. Specifically, of late I’ve been wondering how individual behavior stands in the way of structural change. In other words, while I’m learning it’s not particularly useful to finger-wag at people for making the decision to drive despite having access to other alternatives, to what extent do folks who are ostensibly working to advance their self-interests of driving impede upgrades to our streets that would not only increase safety for all road users but would also improve their own driving experience? This reminds me of Heather McGhee’s work in The Sum of Us wherein white people actively vote for policies that make them worse off so long as it means people of color – and Black folks in particular – are even more worse off. Ultimately, taking this class further highlighted how so many of our society’s debates can be boiled down to issues of race. While I don’t yet know how much race/ethnicity (Laura Gómez has some intriguing insights on that distinction) will feature in my future research, this class underscored yet again how imperative it is to consider how white supremacy has shaped urban planning and presents fascinating areas of inquiry.

Another “best of” from the spring semester: a weekly “write-in” with grad students across the university hosted by the school’s Writing Center. This has morphed into a little community of us who are using Slack to check in with our goals, share updates on our progress, and give each other encouragement as we try to cultivate a writing practice. Here’s hoping this little community can help me keep up this blog over the coming months!