Arrests in Black and white. (Data compiled from FBI Uniform Crime Reporting, 2015)
All in all, we would like to encourage you to think about why some crimes (or crime, generally speaking) are racialized as “Black” and are erroneously linked with “Black culture.” Furthermore, given that whites are more likely to be arrested, what are the factors that may prevent us from even considering the notion of white criminality? Why are crimes that are most likely to be committed by whites chalked up to the individual or seen as an aberration (e.g., mass school shootings, serial killing), rather than as a sign that there is something wrong with white people? Or, in other words, what are the implications of focusing on disproportionality by population size rather than probability of occurrence by people across age, gender, ethno-racial, or class groups?31 How would our discussions and policy recommendations change if we did shift our focus?
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Location, Location, Location
Racial disparities in one realm of US society are intricately related to disparities in other domains. But like the problem of the chicken and the egg, it’s difficult to tell where it all starts. How do we best understand how privileges, advantages, burdens, and disadvantages that are systematically distributed across racial groups influence the ability or even the probability that any one person will attain the American dream? Let’s consider housing, or where people live, because where one lives is inextricably linked to many other factors that allow people to access quality education, wealth building, and even good health outcomes. Why do people live where they live? Some of the reasons can be chalked up to personal preference, but it should be made crystal clear that personal preferences actually pale in comparison to the huge historical forces and accumulated public policies that help us to best understand why we live where we do.
Over time, residential segregation has been decreasing, but phrases like “other side of the tracks” and “rough neighborhoods” are popular racial euphemisms for poor, Black neighborhoods, or ghettos, “a word that accurately describes a neighborhood where government has not only concentrated a minority but established barriers to its exit.”32 Though it sometimes feels that racially homogeneous neighborhoods are natural—you know, because “birds of a feather flock together”—we should keep in mind that political leaders implemented policies in order to intentionally segregate US neighborhoods by race. Racial zoning, restrictive covenants, redlining, urban renewal, annexation, spot zoning, expulsive zoning, incorporation, and redevelopment represent some of the innovative policies developed at various levels of government to accomplish these goals. Scholars like Jessica Trounstine, Richard Rothstein, and Ira Katznelson show not only that there were laws and policies put in place in the early twentieth century that explicitly allowed for the development of white neighborhoods and suburbs, purposefully excluding Black citizens in the process, but that this segregation inherently and systematically advantaged white Americans and disadvantaged Black Americans and other people of color, on average. It still does. Old policies stay alive through their legacy (e.g., white wealth accumulation, persistent racial segregation), and some race-neutral policies are still pursued in order to have a similar effect (e.g., zoning).
This is a long list of wrongdoing to cover in one book, so we’ll just study one perverse housing policy to give you a sense of not only how the US government took the lead in providing additional benefits to some of its citizens while leaving out others but also how policy developed almost a century ago still influences contemporary patterns of residential segregation and thus racial inequality in housing (and education and employment and health and wealth): redlining.
The concept of “redlining” comes from a rubric developed by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), a government-sponsored corporation created in the early 1930s. The appraisers of this organization divided neighborhoods into categories based on the occupation, income, ethnicity, and race of the inhabitants in efforts to make determinations about where banks would be “safe” to provide home loans, including Federal Housing Administration (FHA)–backed loans. Green areas were pristine, racially homogeneous areas where “American Business and Professional Men” and their families lived; these areas were predicted to be in demand in good times and in bad. Blue areas were “still desirable,” and though they “reached their peak,” they were expected to remain stable for many years. Yellow neighborhoods were “definitely declining” with a “threat of infiltration of foreign-born, negro, or lower grade populations.”33 Finally, there were Red neighborhoods, which were considered the worst for lending: Black and low-income neighborhoods.34
In order to attain a high-quality, low-interest, government-backed loan, it helped (a) to be white and (b) to want to purchase a home in a neighborhood that the government deemed safe to invest in—Green or Blue (though a Yellow neighborhood’s status could be upgraded by building a wall to clearly separate itself from a bordering Red neighborhood). Whites were able to purchase federally subsidized homes in neighborhoods that were exclusively white. Meanwhile, neighborhoods where Black people lived were not eligible for federally insured loans, and Black Americans were, for many decades, legally prevented from living in areas that weren’t redlined. What this means is that Black people were not provided the opportunity to buy a home with the same federally backed resources as white Americans were, and furthermore, this policy meant that Black neighborhoods were not invested in as white neighborhoods were. If Blacks wanted to access home ownership, they were not only relegated to ghettos but also required to rely on predatory, high-interest, nonregulated loans or other black-market (no pun intended) systems of financing.
As mentioned, these HOLC categories were developed nearly eighty-five years ago, but their influence still reverberates today. We can think of neighborhoods and suburbs such as Levittown in New York and Pennsylvania (built by the same Levitt & Sons family business) that did not allow Blacks to buy for decades and today are still overwhelmingly white. While people were able to buy homes for about $7,000 in the early 1940s, today homes in Levittown, New York, are sold for upwards of $500,000. Meanwhile, in neighborhoods on the West Side of Chicago, where Blacks were segregated and made to rely on predatory financing, some homes twice the size of those in Levittown may be purchased now for around or even less than $150,000. This area is still predominantly Black.
Relatedly, in the case of Durham, North Carolina, the areas that were “redlined” in the 1930s, such as Wall Town, are still predominantly Black and low income today (although this area is undergoing gentrification). And the Green areas, such as Trinity Park, are still wealthy and white. These HOLC maps even influence the location of trees in the city! In the 1940s, the city of Durham planted trees in the Green neighborhoods. Now, the city cannot afford to plant trees in the Red areas, where low-income Blacks still live today, because they have to use money to maintain the trees in areas that were historically white and still are today. Research shows that trees influence levels of pollution in the air, which means that there may be more pollution in Black neighborhoods than in white neighborhoods.35 This specific kind of inequality is referred to as environmental racism, but as we see here, this is business as usual. Nobody needs to do anything sinister for this kind of inequity to persist.
Thinking as a rational actor, one is likely to want to live in a “better” neighborhood—one that is, at base, safe, clean, and has good amenities, one where your home will accrue greater value and equity over time. Indeed, the American dream hinges on the notion of climbing up the social and economic hierarchies and purchasing a nice home for your family, but research shows that even attaining