Saving (G)Race: The (near) impossibility of Blackness in Architecture is a talk by Craig Wilkins that was delivered on 2017-11-15 during the 2017 PARSE Conference on EXCLUSION.
Architects help shape the world around us. Their work is both poetic and powerful – it has the innate ability to both lift and oppress. Kim Dovey wrote that the will to form is really the will to inform; that the desire to build something is really the desire to say something. Since, in my experience, Black Folk always have something to say, why is it that there are so few people of color in architecture?
Despite being 12% of the population, African-Americans constitute a little more than 3% of the architectural faculty and 2% of all registered architects in the United States – the latter a number that has remained relatively flat for over 30 years while every other ethnic group has increased. It becomes highly probable that this under-representation is simply a natural occurrence. In The Aesthetics of Equity, I begin with the hypothesis that something other than desire or ability was responsible for this condition. In this talk, I will sketch the structures that have keep such conditions in place and offer strategies as to how they might be mitigated, if not dismantled.