I've always hated the suburbs. What I didn't realize is that they were from the beginning designed to segregate blacks from whites, and used by the federal government as an instrument of institutional racism to economically disadvantage blacks.
I was born in Chicago, and raised for eight years in the integrated South Side. The grandson of Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan was in my second grade class. My black friends were so natural to me that I took offense, even at that young age, at racist comments I heard my family drop from time to time.
I thought I hated Seattle when my family moved to Redmond in 1984 - the closed-in skyline, the grey weather, how people wouldn't invite you over for real. But after graduation, having a chance to explore Seattle on my own terms as an adult, I realized it wasn't Seattle I hated but the Eastside suburbs I'd grown up in.
I never explicitly connected the problems of the suburbs to racial inbreeding before, until reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' excellent piece on reparations in June's Atlantic Monthly. Turns out the suburbs were intentionally engineered to be the racially homogenous shit holes they are. Check this out:
In Cold War America, homeownership was seen as a means of instilling patriotism, and as a civilizing and anti-radical force. "No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist," claimed William Levitt, who pioneered the modern suburb with the development of the various Levittowns, his famous planned communities. "He has too much to do."
But the Levittowns were, with Levitt’s willing acquiescence, segregated throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted with protests and a burning cross. A neighbor who opposed the family said that Bill Myers was "probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house."
... As late as 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards’ code of ethics warned that "a Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood … any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values." A 1943 brochure specified that such potential undesirables might include madams, bootleggers, gangsters—and 'a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.
The federal government concurred. It was the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, not a private trade association, that pioneered the practice of redlining, selectively granting loans and insisting that any property it insured be covered by a restrictive covenant—a clause in the deed forbidding the sale of the property to anyone other than whites. Millions of dollars flowed from tax coffers into segregated white neighborhoods.
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