This article explores the discursive function and rhetorical effect of references to place, focusing specifically on the ways place-based ideologies can sustain inequalities in higher education. We draw on two interviews (one with an instructor and one with a student) to analyze the ways habituated, place-based ideologies--what we term "Place"--allow for certain places to function as coded language, perpetuating damaging ideologies. Our approach focuses not on situated, everyday practices of place-making, but instead on understandings of Place that are ascribed from a distance at a site of institutional power, such as the university. We argue that because of Place, specific places become an acceptable--common sense, even--way to talk about race (among other forms of social identification) without acknowledging or unpacking the accompanying ideological baggage or its material consequences.