II. Residential Segregation and White Privilege

There is an interactive relationship between residential segregation and the reproduction of whiteness and white dominance. White choices are not only the aggregation of individual preferences regarding proximity to blacks. Rather, governmental and private forces-in interaction with each other-in the past created a racialized process of urban/suburban development in which “good” neighborhoods were defined as white and whiteness was defined as good, stable, employed, and employable.

Racial segregation was systematically promoted during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s by federal programs like the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), which made loans to homeowners, and the Federal Housing Authority (FHA), which insured private-sector loans. These programs refused to lend money to blacks. They also actively promoted systems of restrictive racial covenants. The greatest impact of these federal agencies in structuring the market, however, lay in the ranking system-the origins of redlining-that the government used to rank communities in their eligibility for federally-financed or federally-insured loans.

Using these guidelines, HOLC and FHA actually refused to lend money or underwrite loans for whites if whites moved to areas where people of color lived. Private lenders adopted policies in line with federal guidelines. These programs reduced housing opportunities for blacks. But they also went considerably further in the process of socially constructing whiteness and blackness in urban areas. Redlining causes decline in majority-black areas, and it prevents lending in majority-white areas where the presence of “inharmonious” racial groups causes lower rankings.

These federal policies, incorporated into private practices, enforced a system in which whiteness was both required and rewarded as a feature of development. Blacks had no choice to move to suburbia. Whites had no choice to move to integrated suburbia. Racism-prejudice against blacks-is so pervasive in America that the importance of the construction of whiteness is often overlooked in discussions of racial geography. Whites generally express preferences to live in neighborhoods shared with very low percentages of blacks. Blacks generally express preferences for living in neighborhoods that are more evenly racially mixed. Generally, these differences have been treated as creating a “natural” tendency to racial “tipping.” In any community, if five percent of new residents are black, the story goes, those whites who would only tolerate two percent of black neighbors move out. These vacancies are filled by more blacks, and those whites who would only have tolerated five percent of black neighbors move out. In this vision, racial transition is a naturalized process, in which white preference for white neighbors is less examined than hostility to black neighbors. If the preference for whiteness is addressed at all, it is raised in examining whether the use of racial steering or quotas to prevent white flight is permissible. The construction of this white preference for whiteness is not examined at all. Racism is treated as a natural and unexamined force.

Assume for a moment that whites generally tell the truth about their preference for living in slightly desegregated communities. Lending policies of the HOLC, FHA, and private banks in the years of postwar suburban expansion actively discouraged such communities by forging a requirement that the neighborhood be uniformly white before investments would be made or insured. Any developer who had tried to accommodate a white taste for slight desegregation would have paid the heavy price of forfeiting access to the large number of buyers who required federal loans or insurance. Maintaining a development as all white protected white buyers' ability to finance homes, and therefore it protected the developers' ability to sell homes. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of this lesson-that whiteness equalled attractiveness, safeness, and financial security-in the postwar world. The rejection of overt racism in the battle against Nazism, as well as embarrassment over international dismay at America's racial policies during the Cold War, helped lead to the fall of de jure segregation. But suburban development came to mean white development, and whites came to see suburbs as naturally white. The enforcement of whiteness, therefore, prevented the sort of incremental desegregatory developments that might have changed the way suburbia itself was seen by whites.

The federal requirement of segregation as the modern, suburban home-financing system developed placed a stamp of approval on all private forms of discrimination as well. Both real estate brokers and private lenders pursued policies that promoted segregation. Federal action therefore helped to create racialized housing markets: Once racialized community development through control of the real estate finance market was institutionalized as federal policy, any private sector actor who went against the segregated norm would have compromised buyers and their neighbors. Both the ability of the current owners to sell to buyers with federally funded or insured mortgages on resale of the property, and the mortgage insurability of nearby properties, rested on maintaining whiteness in suburbia. Not only were white people socially reluctant to live near black people, but they were also economically rewarded for living near white people. Maintaining a white market paid. The incentives and preferences for maintaining whiteness were systemic, not merely individual.

The Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders, inquiring into the causes of the racial riots of the late 1960s, noted that they did not find whites moving to the suburbs primarily to avoid blacks. The “more basic” reason for white migration to the suburbs was the “rising mobility and affluence of middle-class families.” The suburbs had better schools, living conditions, and affordable housing. But all those qualities of ease and comfort were associated with whiteness, and in turn these qualities increasingly defined whiteness. Jobs moved to the suburbs as well, following the white work force and attracting more white workers. Blacks incur higher time and money costs to commute; blacks possess less information about distant jobs; and suburban locations build employers' fear of white resentment if blacks arrive and remove pressures on employers to avoid discriminating. Some authors emphasize the primary role of housing discrimination in this process; other scholars have proposed that jobs may cause residential choice rather than the other way around. From this perspective, employer attitudes toward prospective employees are extremely important in determining both housing and job opportunities.

Government-sponsored segregation helped inscribe in American culture the equation of “good neighborhoods” with white neighborhoods. The close correlation between employment opportunity and residential segregation meant that “black” was increasingly linked with “inner-city” and with “unemployed or unemployable” in white consciousness; whiteness was identified with “employed or employable,” stability and self-sufficiency. In this way, residential segregation was both product and cause of racial constructions that tended to promote further preferences for whites and further exclusion for black communities and individuals. White neighborhoods in this process of racial construction increasingly seem to be suitable sites for investment, while black neighborhoods seem unsuitable.

I have heard many anecdotal reports indicating that, in applying for office jobs, well-qualified black applicants who put inner-city home addresses on applications or resumes had greater difficulty getting hired than the same individuals did if they used suburban home addresses. For a long time, I believed that studying this set of employer attitudes would require an ambitious project matching applicants and job opportunities to study discrimination in hiring. Recently, two sociologists were able to uncover employer attitudes in a much simpler and more direct way: they asked employers who would make good employees, and the employers frankly revealed their biases. Race was explicitly part of employer consideration of applicants, and race was modified by perceptions about class and space (inner-city residence).

Employers freely generalized about race and ethnicity, expressing negative opinions about people of color-especially African-Americans-and positive ideas about whites. For example, they believed that whites had a better work ethic than blacks. Employers' concepts of race and employability were nuanced by ideas about class-mostly signaled by the way employees dressed and spoke. Space was also important: “inner-city” was equated with “black, poor, uneducated, unskilled, lacking in values, crime, gangs, drugs, and unstable families.” “Suburb” meant “white, middle-class, educated, skilled, and stable families.” Public school attendance was less favorable than private school attendance. Other similar factors, such as residence in public housing, were also seen as signals of status. Class and space distinguished among black applicants for employers, with inner-city blacks associated with lower classes and identified as those the employer thought would have undesirable characteristics as an employee. It makes sense, therefore, that blacks who live in white areas are to some extent identified by greater access to whiteness. And indeed, a recent study showed that blacks in suburbs did better at finding jobs than blacks in inner cities.

The link between residential segregation and poverty therefore depends on the social construction of race. William Julius Wilson correctly points out the need for job development as a need that is common to cities and suburbs, whites and blacks. But the social construction of blacks as unemployed and unemployable will continue to affect interest in developing job programs and the way any programs enacted are actually implemented. The social construction of whites as employed and employable will continue to attract employers and attract development, as well as discourage the employment of blacks. The structural problems that residential segregation brings-distance, inconvenience, lower tax base, more concentrated poverty-continue to be reproduced because of their role in reinforcing and reproducing the social construction of race.