ABSTRACT
This book begins with childhood, looking in detail at five white women’s descriptions of the places in which they grew up and analyzing them in terms of what I will refer to as the “social geography” of race. Geography refers here to the physical landscape-the home, the street, the neighborhood, the school, parts of town visited or driven through rarely or regularly, places
visited on vacation. My interest was in how physical space was divided and who inhabited it, and, for my purposes, “who” referred to racially and ethnically identified beings. The notion of a social geography suggests that the physical landscape is peopled and that it is constituted and perceived by means of social rather than natural processes. I thus asked how the women I interviewed conceptualized and related to the people around them. To what extent, for example, did they have relationships of closeness or distance, equality or inequality, with people of color? What were they encouraged or taught by example to make of the variously “raced” people in their environments? Racial social geography, in short, refers to the racial and ethnic mapping of environments in physical and social terms and enables also the beginning of an understanding of the conceptual mappings of self and other operating in white women’s lives.
