ABSTRACT
As late as the mid-2010s, the fact that the inequality of wealth and income had increased since the 1980s within rich countries—such as the United States and Great Britain—spurred debates about how social inequality was “bad for growth.” However, only a few voices pointed to how the increase in inequality worldwide was contributing to a reconfiguration of space and 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 bringing the non-Western semiperiphery to the foreground. The 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.
