Dr. Aretina Rochelle Hamilton | MSU GEO | Triple G Colloquium Series | Fall 2021 | 10-23-2021

The White Unseen: Anti-Blackness in the Discipline of Geography

Fri, October 23, 2020 

The MSU Geography Graduate Group (Triple G) hosted Dr. Aretina Rochelle Hamilton, Associate Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the Interlochen Center for the Arts for the second session of the Fall 2020 Triple G Colloquium Series. Dr. Hamilton presented “The White Unseen: Anti-Blackness in the Discipline of Geography.” 

Description:

Despite our understanding of colonial thought and power, geographers–like many scholars–are less willing to look within. We speak in platitudes and identify oppression as placeless when the place is here and now. Even as some geographers unpack the systemic inequality and violence initiated by the state, how is violence perpetuated within our departments, institutions, and professional conferences? How does this refusal to look inward perpetuate anti-blackness and racism with our field? In the wake of the acquittal of the police officers in the murder of Breonna Taylor, what have we learned, and what are we doing? In the works of Dr. Clyde Wood (2002: 62), “the whipshaw of social, cultural, and physical destruction seems invisible to all but the amputees.”

In this talk, Dr. Hamilton will use the concept of the “white unseen” (Hamilton, forthcoming)–an intentional though pattern and epistemological process where the everyday action, terrors, ruptures, and tensions faced by black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) are rendered invisible–to illuminate how whiteness within our discipline is normalized.