Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of History, 2016.
The "White Island" specifically centers on the construction and articulation of
white privilege in the making of private and public spaces in Northeast Philadelphia
between the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. It probes how and why white
residents in Northeast Philadelphia, whom had relocated from ethnic neighborhoods to
the quasi-suburban confines of "The Great Northeast," harnessing their economic, residential and political clout to expand and protect their racial interests in the private
spaces in which they resided and the public spaces in which they congregated.
Having benefited from government programs designed to facilitate their
movement to Northeast Philadelphia throughout the 20th century, and profited from
policy inconsistencies and racial proscriptions within liberal policy making and city
planning efforts at the federal and local levels, white residents, commercial developers,
and civic activists, expressing conservative political beliefs, employed their grassroots
institutions throughout Northeast neighborhoods to leverage structural control over, and
to embed racial differences into, the physical spaced they inhabited. Their structural
control of local institutions throughout Northeast Philadelphia also enabled them to
graft a potent combination of subtle, and blatant, racial proscriptions and differences onto
the residential, commercial, recreational and educational spaces throughout their
neighborhoods. In so doing, they created a complex, physical landscape that reflected
their hostility toward urban actors, namely African- American leaders and families and
government policy makers, who threatened to undermine their privileged racial
stature, and the racial differences aligned with it, in the quasi-suburban private and public
settings where it had been etched.
