FEATURE
Segregated Suburbs How majority white communities foster harmful color-blindness in schools and at home.
BY ABBY NEFF
W
hite suburbs. White picket fences, bright green grass, cookie-cutter homes and screams of children running through their backyards: just another day in American suburbia. Down the streets, behind the windows and doors of every home, who lives within these townships and cities? A white hand opens a car door, a white hand waves at a neighbor, a white hand holds a dog leash or pushes a stroller. Now what happens if the hand has a darker complexion? The Pew Research Center surveyed Americans between 2012 and 2016, finding that 68% of suburban county residents are white, while only onein-ten suburban counties are majority nonwhite. Consider the classic American Dream: finding a job, marrying “the one,” buying a home and starting a family. In a debate against moderate centrist in 1965, American essayist, activist and poet James Baldwin declared the American lifestyle was exclusively available to white people. “The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro,” he says. What does that mean? According to Glennon Sweeney, a researcher at the Kirwan Institute for The Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University, the concept of suburbs did not come about until the early twentieth century. “Prior to 1890, the word ‘suburb’, it was a word, suburbs existed, but there weren’t planned suburbs. ‘Suburb’ was really just referring to anything outside of Central City, anything peripheral to the city,” Sweeney says. “But in the 1890s, there were these groups that got together,and they started to build the first planned suburbs,” she says. With the establishment of the first planned suburbs, a phenomenon called “white flight” began to occur. Specifically, in Columbus, white flight came in three waves throughout the twentieth century.
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According to Sweeney, there was a distinct racial, ethnic and cultural hierarchy in the United States. Wealthy white Protestants were at the top, and Catholic and Jewish communities were specific targets of inequality. Anyone who wasn’t white, however, was “at the very bottom” of the hierarchy. “When they were building these communities, what they did is they created these restrictive covenants and home deeds to make sure that only the white, Protestant, wealthy people they wanted were going to live in these neighborhoods,” she says. “So, they restricted ... anyone who was not white... they [also] restricted Jews and Catholics.” The development of suburbs accelerated after World War II as soldiers returned from war. Levit town in Long Island, New York, served as the first model for suburbs, and were created as an appealing alternative for veterans and their families that wanted to leave the city. An example of targeting that developers of Levit towns practiced was a written restriction on agricultural land use and the types of animals, such as chickens and goats, that were allowed in a specific suburb. At the time, Sweeney says, those animals were most commonly associated with Black Americans. Suburban laws and zoning codes evolved overtime, and with the exclusion of chickens came a minimum square footage requirement for a home, and even minimum cost requirements to build a home. “This was really to ensure that only wealthy people were moving into these neighborhoods,” Sweeney says. “Class, race and ethnicity played a very big role.” By the middle of the Great Depression, there was a shift from short mortgages with hefty down payments to mortgages that were federally insured. Redlining, a policy designed to determine risk in a neighborhood, emerged as a method to determine what people obtained a federally insured mortgage. “And it didn’t matter if they were wealthy
