The Dialectic of Race and the Discipline of Geography

This article uses a biographical approach to trace the ways in which major thinkers in the discipline and, in particular, past presidents of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in their Presidential Addresses have conceptualized race. Race thinking emerged during the Enlightenment and, in geography, became more explicitly environmentalist through the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century. By the mid-twentieth century, environmentalism was surpassed, but most human geographers, including cultural geographers, urban geographers influenced by the Chicago School of urban sociology, or radical geographers, tended to avoid projects on race. I want to highlight the advances in antiracist scholarship by geographers of color since the 1970s. They have received too little attention, although they influenced a new generation of geographers.