Parks, Settler Colonial Logics, and Racialization

Lindsay J. Maurer, University of Washington

This is a project about land, power, and racialization, using the specific case of community and state park development in Mendocino County, California in the 1920s and 1930s. The gap in the sociology of race literature on the relationship between settler colonialism and racialization (Itzigsohn and Brown 2020) contributes to Indigenous erasure and incomplete sociological frameworks of race (McKay, Vinyeta, and Norgaard 2020). This absence is particularly entrenched in the literature on racialization in rural contexts (Carrillo, Quisumbing King, and Schafft 2021). To address this problem, this paper builds on Indigenous sociology literature that highlights land as a key site where settler colonialism structures racialization (McKay et al. 2020). This study of land transformation draws on historical archival data to ask: What role did early 20th century park-building projects play in the relationship between settler colonialism and racialization in rural Mendocino County, California? Through an analysis of the settler colonial logics and racial ideologies embedded in park development discourses, this paper will interrogate how Mendocino County settlers encoded whiteness in Pomo and Sinkyone land and contribute a place-based analysis of racialization to enrich our understanding of racialized modernity. References Carrillo, Ian, Katrina Quisumbing King, and Kai A. Schafft. 2021. “Race, Ethnicity, and Twenty-First Century Rural Sociological Imaginings: A Special Issue Introduction.” Rural Sociology 86(3):419–43. doi:10.1111/ruso.12402. Itzigsohn, José and Brown, Karida L. 2020. The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois: Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line. New York: University Press. McKay, Dwanna L., Kirsten Vinyeta, and Kari Marie Norgaard. 2020. “Theorizing Race and Settler Colonialism within U.S. Sociology.” Sociology Compass 14(9):e12821. doi:10.1111/soc4.12821.

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 Presented in Session 186. Confronting the White Supremacist Origins of Current Processes