Confronting Inequality

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 2007 by Coleman A. Jordan

STRUCTURAL INEQUALITY: BLACK ARCHITECTS IN THE UNITED STATES

By Victoria Kaplan. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. 2006. $65 hardback, $24.95 paperback

This sociological activist study approaches architecture as a 'metaphor for the larger society', a profession whose practices reflect and reinforce continued racial discrimination in the United States. Kaplan employs the ethnographic methods of interview and storytelling to sample 20 African American architects' voices. They speak about systemic discrimination and injustice, and expose the racist myths of inferior qualifications they had to struggle with through architecture schools, internships, and in practice. This approach highlights the personal toll of the stress caused by the blacks' public exclusion from, or at best second-class citizenship in, what remains predominantly the 'white gentleman's profession'.

Kaplan emphasises that architecture's mission to 'create communities' and 'serve the public,' as R. K. Stewart remarks in the foreword, has not translated into sustained action. The refusal to engage in discussions on race or recruit more people of colour into the ranks of its most powerful brokers stems not only from the hegemony of Eurocentric notions of aesthetic, but also from the history of Western appropriation of and discrimination against black artistic expression and craftsmanship. Max Bond explains: 'Beyond pure aesthetics, architecture is about power, the power to transmit a culture's symbols, its politics ... its language, its religion'. Historic developments since the times of slavery job assignment quota systems, and the 'shield' of white privilege have allowed the majority of architects and institutions to remain unaware of or comfortable with their racism. Kaplan employs Foucault's notions of omnipresent social control and self-surveillance to explain why public policy decisions often result in the 'creation and reinforcement of institutional racism' for non-whites. Echoing projects by Sharon Sutton, Melvin Mitchell, and Jack Travis, she concludes with a call for wide-reaching educational, governmental, and business programmes that must be the responsibility of those who perpetuate the injustice rather than those who are its victims. The 'white gentlemen' should be the first to read this book.

While Structural Inequality does not offer new insights into causes and effects of racism, its validation of black architects' testimonies and professional experiences contributes significantly to the emerging and badly needed dialogue between architecture and African American Studies.