Ebook511 pages13 hours
Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
()
About this ebook
Northern whites in the post–World War II era began to support the principle of civil rights, so why did many of them continue to oppose racial integration in their communities? Challenging conventional wisdom about the growth, prosperity, and racial exclusivity of American suburbs, David M. P. Freund argues that previous attempts to answer this question have overlooked a change in the racial thinking of whites and the role of suburban politics in effecting this change. In Colored Property, he shows how federal intervention spurred a dramatic shift in the language and logic of residential exclusion—away from invocations of a mythical racial hierarchy and toward talk of markets, property, and citizenship.
Freund begins his exploration by tracing the emergence of a powerful public-private alliance that facilitated postwar suburban growth across the nation with federal programs that significantly favored whites. Then, showing how this national story played out in metropolitan Detroit, he visits zoning board and city council meetings, details the efforts of neighborhood “property improvement” associations, and reconstructs battles over race and housing to demonstrate how whites learned to view discrimination not as an act of racism but as a legitimate response to the needs of the market. Illuminating government’s powerful yet still-hidden role in the segregation of U.S. cities, Colored Property presents a dramatic new vision of metropolitan growth, segregation, and white identity in modern America.
Related to Colored Property
Related ebooks
The Columbia Guide to African American History Since 1939 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChicago on the Make: Power and Inequality in a Modern City Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsClimbin' Jacob's Ladder: The Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBlack Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5New Deal / New South: An Anthony J. Badger Reader Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Groundwork: Local Black Freedom Movements in America Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sorting Out the New South City, Second Edition: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875–1975 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPeculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAfrican American Urban History since World War II Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The New Negro in the Old South Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Strategies of Segregation: Race, Residence, and the Struggle for Educational Equality Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBattling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Black New Jersey: 1664 to the Present Day Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Second Great Emancipation: The Mechanical Cotton Picker, Black Migration, and How They Shaped the Modern South Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLynching and Leisure: Race and the Transformation of Mob Violence in Texas Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Grapevine of the Black South: The Scott Newspaper Syndicate in the Generation before the Civil Rights Movement Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsVirginia Shade: An African American History of Falmouth, Virginia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIn the Balance of Power: Independent Black Politics and Third-Party Movements in the United States Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Getting Right With God: Southern Baptists and Desegregation, 1945-1995 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Ethnic Studies For You
All About Love: New Visions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black Boy [Seventy-fifth Anniversary Edition] Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5100 Amazing Facts About the Negro with Complete Proof Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Conspiracy to Destroy Black Women Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Geisha: A Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Cherokee Herbal: Native Plant Medicine from the Four Directions Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Self-Care for Black Women: 150 Ways to Radically Accept & Prioritize Your Mind, Body, & Soul Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Manchild in the Promised Land Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Black Rednecks & White Liberals Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Salvation: Black People and Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Second Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Stories of Rootworkers & Hoodoo in the Mid-South Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Wretched of the Earth Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Worse Than Slavery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future---Updated With a New Epilogue Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black Like Me: The Definitive Griffin Estate Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Colored Property
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
3 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Over the course of the twentieth century, the federal government oversaw a massive intervention into the housing market that was deliberately structured, from the beginning, on the assumption that whites should be suburban homeowners and blacks should not be. This allowed whites, collectively, to build huge amounts of government-backed wealth and at the same time to tell themselves that their successes were the result of the free market, which naturally required the exclusion of blacks because blacks were, by definition, bad for property values, like other kinds of blight. By denying blacks credit and opportunity to purchase homes at the highly subsidized federal rates, and diverting resources from the cities to the suburbs, government policies worsened, solidified, and naturalized the economic and social disparities they purported only to acknowledge neutrally. At the same time, public housing was resource-starved and strangled, like low-income housing more generally, as unwarranted government intervention into the free market. Is anyone reminded of “get the government’s hands off my Medicare”? If you believe in the existence of white privilege, his restating of how it (1) existed and (2) was made to seem like the natural result of economic laws gets repetitive, but sometimes repetition is necessary, given the collective desire to forget.
Book preview
Colored Property - David M. P. Freund
Enjoying the preview?
Page 1 of 1