| Summary: | 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.
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