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    Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America
    Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America
    Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America
    Ebook511 pages13 hours

    Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America

    By David M. P. Freund

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    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.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateApr 13, 2010
    ISBN9780226262772
    Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America

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    • 5/5
      Over 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.

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    Colored Property - David M. P. Freund

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