The  disciplinary distances between black studies and human geography often crudely repeat archaic geographic aims, valuing white, patriarchal, and European understandings of space over the work of nonwhite geographers and geographies. Connecting black studies and human geography opens up three meaningful points: first, as mentioned, are the ways in which disciplinary and epistemological desires privilege traditional geographic options; second, are the ways in which traditional geographic aims in fact illustrate how blackness and black subjectivity are implicit to the production of space; and finally, are the ways in which alternative imaginary and real formulations of space and place disrupt and augment existing geographic narratives and maps. It has been argued that the reasons for the disconnection between black studies/black lives and academic geographic investigations are located within the discipline of human geography. In the special issue of The Professional Geographer, which is subtitled "Race, Racism and Geography, " several authors explicitly or implicitly suggest that race is "marginalized and fragmented within geography."20 What each of the essays makes clear is that race is not completely absent from geographic investigations-in recent years in particular, "race" has been a critical analytical category for some geographers. Rather, the critique these human geography theorists impart is that race is not integrated into wideranging understandings of spatial power and geographers' commitment to social justice: "no aspect of the discipline, and no spatiality, has escaped racialization" yet racist practices, discourses, colonialist heritages, and whiteness "permeate the epistemological foundations of geography and the institutional structures and practices that shape [its] work environment. "21 And while several of the authors contributing to "Race, Racism and Geography" do not focus on black lives specifically, they do outline how race/racism is segregated or underacknowledged due to disciplinary practices. In this way, they provide a glimpse into where black geographies fit, or do not fit, within spatial analyses: the long commitment of geography and its practitioners to patriarchal and imperialist projects, such as mapping, exploration, conquest, and domination; the ease with which nonwhite women, men, and children are excluded from canonical geographic investigations and/or limited to objects of study (oddities in the seamless white landscape), rather than relevant geographic subjects (producing, critiquing, and writing human geographies); the paucity of nonwhite women and men within geography departments; sexual and racial epistemological and physical segregations; and, the lingering positivism implicit in geographic investigations, which tends to document racial inequality without analyzing other genealogical and heterogeneous processes of racialization, race, and difference.21 What is both troubling and telling about the disconnection between human geography and black studies are the ways in which this gap perceptibly augments traditional spatial patterns that strategically arrange and define the planet from a unitary vantage point: if black people and communities are left out of, or are simply objects in, geographic studies, they are inevitably cast as unavailable or unreliable geographers and geographic subjects; black knowledges, experiences, and maps remain subordinate to and outside other traditional geographic investigations. Thus, the few critical geographers who are committed to analyzing and dismantling the geographies of race and racism suggest that while the world is fundamentally racialized, "race" is rarely incorporated into research projects, the classroom, institutions, or the everyday conceptualizations (and consequently the real production) of space and place.23  This omission produces a cycle in which knowledges seem to bifurcate: traditional geographic patterns and practitioners organize the outer world and subordinate difference and non-dominant communities; knowledges and experiences are spatialized accordingly, as presentwhite/absent-black or dominant-white/subordinateblack; blackness is perceived as inevitably, or naturally, ungeographic and/or ghettoized. The "natural" center (of knowledge, of place, of ethical geographies, for example) is reified as "naturally" central to geographic explorations, while difference/ blackness is either absent, or only understood as outside of, rather than mutual to, the production of space.2
 disciplinary distances between black studies and human geography often crudely repeat archaic geographic aims, valuing white, patriarchal, and European understandings of space over the work of nonwhite geographers and geographies. Connecting black studies and human geography opens up three meaningful points first the ways in which disciplinary and epistemological desires privilege traditional geographic options; second, are the ways in which traditional geographic aims in fact illustrate how blackness and black subjectivity are implicit to the production of space; and finally, are the ways in which alternative imaginary and real formulations of space and place disrupt and augment existing geographic narratives and maps. "no aspect of the discipline, and no spatiality, has escaped racialization" yet racist practices, discourses, colonialist heritages, and whiteness "permeate the epistemological foundations of geography and the institutional structures and practices that shape [its] work environment. " this gap perceptibly augments traditional spatial patterns that strategically arrange and define the planet from a unitary vantage point: if black people and communities are left out of, or are simply objects in, geographic studies, they are inevitably cast as unavailable or unreliable geographers and geographic subjects; black knowledges, experiences, and maps remain subordinate to and outside other traditional geographic investigations.  This omission produces a cycle in which knowledges seem to bifurcate: traditional geographic patterns and practitioners organize the outer world and subordinate difference and non-dominant communities; knowledges and experiences are spatialized accordingly, as presentwhite/absent-black or dominant-white/subordinateblack; blackness is perceived as inevitably, or naturally, ungeographic and/or ghettoized