The Racial Triangulation of Space: The Case of Urban Renewal in San Francisco's Fillmore District

Abstract

Geographers, planners, and urbanists have rarely focused on racialization as a relational process involving multiple groups, and most work to date adopts a black–white model of race relations. The case study of post-World War II urban renewal in San Francisco's Fillmore District permits geographers and other urbanists the opportunity to examine racial formation as a relational process that differentially positioned African Americans and Asian Americans with respect to each other in the redevelopment process. This positioning resulted in differential outcomes for these two communities, even though both had been segregated into this multiracial and multiethnic neighborhood up until the mid-twentieth century and, as a result, shared a common history and mutual geography. This article utilizes archival research, personal interviews, and theories of racialization from ethnic studies and critical race theory literature to examine, as political scientist Claire Kim put it, the “racial triangulation” or “positioning” of Japanese Americans and African Americans in the Fillmore's redevelopment. I argue that this positioning was a spatial process that located Japanese Americans and African Americans differently with respect to the imagineering behind the district's urban renewal and with respect to the political process behind redevelopment. This spatialized racial triangulation, in turn, intersected with discourses of blight and Cold War Orientalism with the latter discourse eliding differences between Japanese-American spaces and Japan and resulting in the construction of a Japanese Cultural and Trade Center.