This paper draws on the non-fiction writings of James Baldwin to introduce a novel conception of white guilt that is consistent with standard philosophical views that guilt is fitting only in cases of direct moral culpability while addressing practical criticism that white guilt is at variance with the aims of social justice movements. Taking on Baldwin's perspective on whiteness as a subjective choice, I develop an Identity-Based Account of white guilt describing the emotion as tracking culpability for a pernicious form of self-identification. My central claim is that white guilt is fitting because in experiencing the emotion, one is simultaneously recognizing the role their own identity plays in providing a source of justification for actions that sustain a system of injustice. Conceived in this way, responses to white guilt demand taking part in corrective political action as a means of moral self-creation. / Master of Arts / In the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and others due to police and vigilante actions, there has been a noticeable shift in racial sentiments among white individuals in the US and globally, leading to increased reports of white guilt. This paper explores the concept of white guilt as a negative, self-conscious emotion experienced by white people in response to their behaviors, attitudes, or perceived racist injustices. It addresses two main concerns: the appropriateness of white guilt when many white individuals lack direct culpability, and the effectiveness of outcomes driven by this guilt in combating racial injustice. Drawing on James Baldwin's writings, the paper proposes a novel understanding of white guilt, focusing on white individuals' self-perception rather than their actions.

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The dissertation is a philosophical approach to politicizing place and space, or environments broadly construed, that is motivated by three questions. How can geography be employed to analyze the spatialities of environmental justice? How do spatial concepts inform understandings of environmentalism? And, how can geography help overcome social/political philosophy's redistribution-recognition debate in a way that accounts for the multiscalar dimensions of environmental justice? Accordingly, the dissertation's objective is threefold. First, I develop a critical geography framework that explores the spatialities of environmental injustices as they pertain to economic marginalization across spaces of inequitable distribution, cultural subordination in places of misrecognition, and political exclusion from public places of deliberation and policy. Place and space are relationally constituted by intricate networks of social relations, cultural practices, socioecological flows, and political-economic processes, and I contend that urban and natural environments are best represented as "places-in-space." Second, I argue that spatial frameworks and environmental discourses interlock because conceptualizations of place and space affect how environments are perceived, serve as framing devices to identify environmental issues, and entail different solutions to problems. In the midst of demonstrating how the racialization of place upholds inequitable distributions of pollution burdens, I introduce notions of "social location" and "white privilege" to account for the conflicting agendas of the mainstream environmental movement and the environmental justice movement, and consequent accusations of discriminatory environmentalism. Third, I outline a bivalent environmental justice theory that deals with the spatialities of environmental injustices. The theory synergizes distributive justice and the politics of social equality with recognition justice and the politics of identity and difference, therefore connecting cultural issues to a broader materialist analysis concerned with economic issues that extend across space. In doing so, I provide a justice framework that assesses critically the particularities of place and concurrently identifies commonalities to diverse social struggles, thus spatializing the geography of place-based political praxis.