variable that needed to be explained, to the
extent that it was correlated to some geographi-
cal criterion such as spatial pattern.
Within the new positive scientific framework,
the earliest attempts to document ‘race’ as a
geographic phenomenon (for example, Morrill,
1965), viewed it as a problem that could be
‘fixed’ given a better spatial model. ‘Race’ was
taken as an invariant category, and spatial
inequality as the problem. Space, not ‘race’, was
the object of geographical knowledge. The most
significant pioneer in understanding spatial
inequality was Harold Rose, one of the first
African Americans to practise geography and the
first to address explicitly the effects of spatial
inequality from within the black community
(Rose, 1970; 1972). While Rose’s work is perhaps
the most important historical statement by a geo-
grapher that spatial inequality is foundational to
American life, his concept of race remained a
static one, for the problem he identified (at least
in his geographical publications) is one of spatial
distribution rather than racism. This theoretical
conservatism foreclosed the possibility of con-
struing anti-racism as anything but another
problem in planning.
The early work by Morrill, Rose and a small
handful of others notwithstanding, there was
simply very little interest in questions of racism
from a human rights perspective. This approach
seems ironic among professional geographers
occupying positions in geography departments
that had burgeoned just after World War II, when
the defeat of Nazism was widely viewed as a
defeat of racism. But the immediate post-war
period in advanced western, especially English-
speaking, countries where geography flourished
was the period of great denial. Such countries
participated actively in creating international
human rights documents, such as the United
Nations’ International Declaration of Human
Rights, thereby imposing a particularly western
vision of equality in which ‘race’ was denied as
a means of creating human difference, but
geographers erased such concerns from within
their professional ambit. Perhaps they thought
that the struggles of World War II had solved the
problems; certainly they viewed racialization as
outside the geographer’s responsibility.
If racial difference was denied, so was racism;
it would be some time before critics began to
recognize that the practice of denial was in effect
one of allowing segregation and the impoverish-
ment of racialized groups, especially in the
United States, but increasingly throughout the
western world and in former colonized nations,
now referred to as the ‘developing world’. We
live with the result today, in a dominant set ofinternational human rights instruments produced
in the advanced western nations according to
their norms, with little regard for the ways in
which the knowledge and human circumstances
that inform those instruments might be quite
different in other parts of the world, particularly
those parts occupied by racialized others. The
power of the colonial vision continues.
The great denial was reinforced by geographers
and other social scientists who defined themselves
as neutral observers, neither reflexive nor agents
of social change. They could act as observers of
and commentators upon the political processes
that produced certain types of landscapes and
spatial patterns, but they could not engage in what
Pile (2000) has recently called ‘political thinking’,
or thinking that would result in shifting the
geography of the world according to a moral
vision. Claiming a responsibility to remain thus
detached served to reinforce the denial of racism
as a social issue. This perspective began to shift,
however, as more and more geographers recog-
nized the impossibility of a neutral stance and
began to place more emphasis upon the concerns
that beset the society around them. Issues of
racism began to see some discussion in the ‘rele-
vance debate’ that swept the discipline during the
early 1970s (for an overview see Johnston, 1991:
Chapter 7). The debate ranged from a focus on the
role of geography in influencing public policy in
general (Chisholm, 1971) to addressing social
inequality (Eyles, 1973) to redressing global
inequalities (Slater, 1973). For the first time, geo-
graphers as a group began to debate the relation-
ship between ethical and positive science.
The issue of racism was explicitly taken up with
the establishment of the journal Antipodeat the
annual meeting of the Association of American
Geographers, held at Ann Arbor, Michigan in- As someone who claims that the discipline
has paid too little attention to questions of ‘race’, it
is interesting for me to look back on a comment by
Johnston (2000), who has gone so far as to state that
Antipodehad ‘little Marxist material in its earliest
issues, and ... more focus on race than class’. True,
the early ‘radical’ geography expressed strong,
even overwhelming concern for the conditions of
life in increasingly segregated American black
neighbourhoods, as well as in developing countries.
And they did not fail to point out that the majority
of the impoverished and underprivileged of the
world were people of colour (Blaut, 1974; Bunge,
1971; Harvey, 1972; 1973; Smith, 1974). Blaut’s
definition of imperialism as ‘white exploitation of
the non-white world’ could not have been more
explicit (1970: 65).
But, in a remarkably perceptive contemporary
critique, Leach (1973) suggested that neither a
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