ABSTRACT
As late as the mid-2010s, the fact that the inequality of wealth and income had increased within rich countries such as the United States and Great Britain since the 1980s spurred debates about how social inequality was “bad for growth”. However, only few voices pointed to how the increase of inequality worldwide was contributing to a reconfiguration of space and to the shifts this reconfiguration occasioned in charting elites and underclasses across cores and peripheries of the world-system. Recently, Wilma Dunaway and Don Clelland argued for decentering the analysis of global ethnic/racial inequality that sees white supremacy as the sole cause of racism and for bringing the non-Western semiperiphery to the foreground. This chapter engages at length with their arguments in order to illuminate both the benefits and the pitfalls inherent in the (over)emphasis of spatial reconfiguration more generally, and of the structural position of the semiperiphery in particular, to the detriment of racially mediated social as well as physical mobility across cores, semiperipheries, and peripheries.
