Navigating Cultural Mindsets of Race and Place in the United States

The places where we live shape our lives. In the United States, a country built on colonialism and slavery, white supremacy shapes our places. Decades of disinvestment, discriminatory policies, and violence based on race have shaped the lives of millions of Americans. Structural racism has shaped and continues to shape where and how Americans live.

In this brief, we highlight key insights from research into the cultural mindsets that members of the American public use to think about the relationship between race and place. We discuss the ways in which existing mindsets thwart the pursuit of spatial justice, but also highlight how some existing ways of thinking can facilitate this pursuit. We discuss how communicators can most productively navigate this cultural terrain to advance spatial justice.

This brief is accompanied by a longer report that discusses our research findings at length. That report gets into much greater depth on findings and explores commonalities and differences in thinking across groups.