Spaces and How We Occupy Them

This is such an insightful summation of many of the themes we've been discussing  in the 360 as well as within the BiCo. I love how you use the boxes to set off analogies to the spatial conditions of difference and inequality in racialized American society.

You put it better than I could:

The cruel irony of this paradox of space arises when we acknowledge that the places where marginalized people are forced to fight for space, are that very places that have been constructed specifically for those marginalized identities. Bryn Mawr’s admissions policies create an opening for individuals that would probably not otherwise have access to an institution like Bryn Mawr. But as soon as that access is granted, they are thrown into a place, theoretically made, in part, for them, that works immediately against them. Prisons are constructed as a place to give ‘deviants’ a space. But this space, originally constructed for the purposes of rehabilitation and reintegration has become a place made only to silence people on the inside. Inmates face a space that is always their own and never their own. They must be in the space they are forced into and yet they hold none of it. And so we find ourselves constructing space where black voices and voices of color can hold and be held, within a space that denies that everyday, even though the purpose of the larger space was originally meant to alleviate that very structure.