Architectural movements come and go. Modernism, postmodernism, Deconstructivism, parametricism. There is an argument to be made that the vibrant contemporary design discourse engaging with Blackness, centering the Afro-diasporic experience and openly criticizing White supremacy is fashionable now and will pass, like so many movements before.

To allow this to pass without action is to discount the lived experience of people racialized as Black and to deny the bloody history and permeating persistence of White supremacy in American life.

To allow this to pass without commitment, to think we can move on to the next flavor of the month, is to say, “Black lives do not matter.”

To allow this to pass without systemic change is to do what Americans who, in James Baldwin’s phrase, so deeply need to think that we are White have been doing for generations. Will we continue to kick this can down the road?

The social upheaval of the 1950s and 60s movement to end Jim Crow segregation has endowed architecture today with a robust infrastructure of community design centers and engagement practices intended to halt the pogroms of “urban renewal” or, as Baldwin called it, “Negro removal”. Black spaces did not matter then, and as the 21st century began with the destruction of New Orleans by federal flood and neoliberal reconstruction, they do not now.

In recent years an increasing number of architecture students, academics, and practitioners have engaged with the modern-day civil rights movement, those who insist without equivocation that Black lives matter as much as anybody else’s. The Harvard GSD African American Student Union’s Black in Design conference and the University of Texas at Austin’s Race and Gender by Design program, both begun amid nationwide protests in 2015 following the acquittal of Michael Brown’s murderer in Ferguson and the murder of Eric Garner in New York City, and the work of hundreds of other educator and student-activists in architecture, are a testament to this movement.

No more Black people should have to die for Black lives to matter to White people. But this is America, founded on genocide and enslavement, the repression and murder of Black people, and these deaths will happen anyway. Our institutions of higher education, of architectural education, were built with Black blood to preserve White privilege and power. Beyond hashtags, beyond marches, how do we demand a different future?

As Annette Koh has asked, what does it mean to say from our position in a citymaking profession that Black lives matter? As Architexx insists, NOW WHAT!? If we are going to fix our broken nation, we need architects and designers who understand the problems we face. If we want to deconstruct the system of White supremacy in and through architecture, we will need to train antiracist architects to do so.

One way we can begin this process is by seeking out and hiring faculty and leadership who understand White supremacy and Whiteness theoretically and practically, and how it is intertwined with other systems of oppression including the cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, imperialism and environmental destruction. Those who are up to this challenge will be often be Black and other people of color. Many will be women, gender nonconforming and nonbinary. What they will teach is not all known to us yet, and that’s exactly why we have to hire them.

This is not an argument for representation alone. It is an appeal to White architects and designers to realize the political power and agency we have in, and through, our profession, and to use it to demand justice. It is a recognition that the profession’s lack of diversity is rooted in systemic injustice, but that the neoliberal capitalist system we exist within would be happy to see different faces teach the same curriculum. That is not enough. In the words of architect Rosa Sheng,

“Under conditions of justice and equity, diversity and inclusion will follow.”