This seminar investigates the many relationships between racial formation and the built environment. That is, how the built environment—including infrastructure, housing, borders, segregation, taxation, and policing—are integral to processes of racialization, hierarchization, and inequality. The seminar focuses on the American context, but the definition of American boundaries is open to interpretation and contestation. We look at American expansion and political history to see how inequalities have been historically constructed and how they continue to persist. We analyze American internal and external imperialism, militarism, and securitization to better understand how the nation’s myriad spatial entanglements structure life and social relations. The seminar reads a broad set of texts including Toni Morrison, John Locke, Cedric J. Robinson, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Cheryl I. Harris, Charles Davis III, Mabel O. Wilson, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and others. We engage with current discourses on race and architecture and link them to discussions on media, politics, and the contested project of the American nation. Students develop a semester-long research project locating a spatial strategy of their choosing and unpack the social, political, and racial histories and futures of their chosen subject.