This is Not the America I Know:

Reading Anti-Blackness within American Landscapes

During and after the siege on the US Capitol by white supremacists on January 6, 2020, the trope “This is not the America I know” resounded from media commentators, politicians, and the social media accounts of millions of everyday Americans. According to this narrative, the assault deviated from our nation’s image as a racial melting pot. Yet, as many African Americans recognized, the January 6th siege was part of a larger continuum of spatial violence in which white supremacy is sanctioned by the state and marks public and private spaces as the property of whiteness. The “this is not the America I know” narrative thus exposes what I refer to as the white unseen--an intentional thought pattern and epistemological process in which acts of white violence and the everyday terrors, trauma, and tensions faced by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)--that renders white racial violence invisible. This chapter examines white racial violence as one of many white supremacist place-making practices that are shaped by and reshape the American landscape.

Dr. Aretina Hamilton is a Cultural Geographer whose work explores the intersection of Anti-Blackness, racial trauma, violence and place-making.  As a public scholar, her research examines the place-making practices of African Americans and re-conceptualizes cartographies of anti-Blackness. Her dissertation project, Black Queer Cartographies, which is under contract with UNC Press, explores the physical and symbolic spaces of exclusion and belonging for Black lesbians in Atlanta, Georgia. She argues that African American lesbians in Atlanta created a queer palimpsest, or a multi-tiered space that challenged the dominant culture’s erasures of Southern Blackness and queerness.

As one of the founding members of the Black Geographies Speciality group, her work is also deeply invested in the creation of Black epistemological thought, Black place-making in the academy, and the creation of Black radical spaces. In the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Dr. Hamilton has been writing and speaking widely about racialized trauma within the academy and the everyday sites of intellectual violence.

Dr. Hamilton received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Kentucky with a Certificate in Gender and Women's Studies. Currently, she is the Director of DEI Programs, Training, Education, and Development at Brandeis University.