Between Enjoyment and Discomfort: Affective Geographies of Whiteness in Urban Belgium

In this article, I explore the affective embodied experiences of White people and People of Color when navigating diverse spaces, and especially encounters with racial difference, in multiracial neighborhoods. Data comes from sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork and seventy (walking) interviews conducted with White residents and residents of Color in two diverse neighborhoods in Antwerp and Ghent, Belgium. On the one hand, I demonstrate the ambivalence in the embodied experiences of enjoyment and discomfort expressed by White people about navigating their diverse neighborhood. I examine how White residents explicitly stress their enjoyment of visiting racially diverse spaces in their neighborhood, how they engage with these racially diverse spaces and what strategies they employ to mitigate discomfort. I argue that White residents’ enjoyment of engaging with those racially diverse spaces is intrinsically linked to their ability to avoid discomfort. For many White people, enjoying diversity results in a commitment to living in a diverse neighborhood and visiting diverse neighborhood spaces whilst avoiding embodied experiences of discomfort remains necessary to make this enjoyment possible. On the other hand, I explore how, for many People of Color, the embodied experience of discomfort is increasingly an everyday, unavoidable reality in navigating their neighborhood that is closely linked to Whiteness. In a national context where Whiteness is the norm, as well as in an urban neighborhood context that is increasingly whitening, I examine the strategies that People of Color develop and employ in order to navigate the discomfort related to White(ning) spaces. In doing so, I aim to contribute to an affective understanding of Whiteness and how White spaces and racial hierarchies are (re)produced through the everyday, embodied navigation of multiracial urban neighborhoods.