Floyd, racism, and architecture
Our country is on fire yet again, engulfed in horror and grief over the unabated racism of our power structure seen in the death of George Floyd, the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, and the insidious racism of Amy Cooper. Architecture, design, and planning have many connections to the web of injustice that flows from American racism, and we must urgently do our part to reset race relations and steer towards a better future.
In the big picture, our professions drew up the redlines and made the plans and structures that segregated neighborhoods, denying equal access to education, healthcare, and economic opportunity (www.segregatedbydesign.com) . Our professions have never stood up for real enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, and we have done precious little to research or advance the benefits of integrated neighborhoods – a deep and essential solution to racism that requires the active participation of our professions.
Then there’s access to our professions themselves. From their inception, architecture, design, and planning have been elitist associations dominated by white men. While the current movement for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion is finally starting to change that biased and segregated status quo, we have a long way to go. When one factors Justice into the equation, one must ask whether simply bringing women and people of color into the leadership of today’s firms will make up for a power structure fundamentally hostile to us (or to them, depending on your perspective). Whitney Young Jr., speaking in 1968, alerted the American Institute of Architects to their monumental failure to address American racism… who pays for the profession’s failure to heed his call for the intervening three generations?
And then there is our participation in the criminal justice system – the spark of today’s fire, and that in Ferguson, and of so many other conflagrations. There is no element of the American power structure more directly responsible for racial oppression than the criminal justice system: policing, prosecution, and incarceration. ADPSR has been calling on design professionals to boycott the design of prisons since 2004, and we have been petitioning the American Institute of Architects AIA to end the design of execution chambers and spaces for solitary confinement since 2013. In this deeply racist system, the death penalty is perhaps the most starkly racist policy we have: blacks and whites are equally likely to be victims of a capital crime, yet while the U.S. population is about 13% black, 75% of death penalty cases are when the victim is white. There is no policy in the United States that more clearly demonstrates that Black Lives Don’t Matter than the death penalty. There is no difference between cops killing black men on the streets and prison guards killing black men in execution chambers, except that architects, designers, and planners are more complicit in the latter.
ADPSR finds it completely unacceptable that the AIA’s National Ethics Council said earlier this year that designing an execution chamber is not unethical. Even more unacceptable is NEC’s stated rationale: that it is OK to design execution chambers because they are legal and that "the norms of our society are reflected in its laws." On the one hand, the most important norms of our society are reflected in our human rights treaties, which stand above our laws, and our aspirations to equal treatment of all under the law. On the other hand, as the past week’s examples from around the country show, racism is an American social norm. And to add a dose of hypocrisy, AIA already rejects some legal norms – its Ethics Code prevents members from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, even though that is legal in many states. AIA claims to have a strong and enduring commitment to Equity, Diversity and Inclusion – but if that were true, they would not have their Ethics Council stating that our most obviously racist laws embody the norms of our society.
ADPSR is not done fighting for AIA to recognize human rights and oppose racism. We know that architects are good people at heart and we demand that AIA stop hiding behind bogus legalistic arguments to appease a small group of members who see progress towards human rights as a threat to their undeserved privileges. AIA – stop being a backwards and cowardly Institute and stand against the killing of black people and all people!
The AIA Board of Directors can overrule the National Ethics Council, AIA Members can vote for a new policy, and the National Ethics Council can even change its mind and issue a new opinion. If you want to get involved in organizing to make those changes happen, please join the discussion at our Facebook group, leave a comment here, or email us at info@adpsr.org.
ADPSR is in solidarity with all who believe that #blacklivesmatter.