Nicely lays out many of the factors chronologically.

I have a couple of quibbles, but for the most part it is a great read.

Sometimes, you have to read these things as a reminder that white people didn't even want to live near you. As if you were a disease.

And even today, all anyone thinks about is "property values", and how black people depress the market... so, even though you don't want to call yourself being racist, it's just being fiscally pragmatic, WHEN you decide to move, it shows how insidious institutional racism really is.

One of our old family friends, a middle class black family, moved out of their neighborhood because it was getting "too black" for fiscally pragmatic reasons.

As I said. It's the Benjamins. No one wants their house to depreciate.

But if living next to a black family is unacceptable to some percentage of home-buyers... then everyone suffers.

Thanks for posting this.

#notallwhitepeople

There may have been things that kept your family from leaving the hood, but it wasn't the banks and the government. And if you DID leave the hood and move to a nice neighborhood, the property values weren't going to AUTOMATICALLY drop.

I have never said that poor white people don't exist. Or that it's not an uphill battle to get out of poverty. The article is about a systematic effort to keep black people in substandard, overcrowded housing.

It's not about you.

Thanks for telling me what I do and don't get.

I'm going to go beat myself now for being a bad white person.

I hope that does something to assuage my guilt for oppressing millions of people for hundreds of years.

I didn't say that YOU oppressed people.

I just said that this is an example of white privilege.

Wow.

Try being the only white family in a working-class Hispanic neighborhood in a middling-sized California city during the 1960's. Really brings home what it means to be a minority in more ways than one.

We had neighbors with multiple degrees, and neighbors who didn't finish high school. We had migrant farmworker families and entrepreneurs, clerks and doctors sharing houses in the same 8 block area. The rents and values of the houses, no matter how well kept, were only a little bit higher than the even smaller black neighborhood. While we weren't hassled, we weren't really welcomed. I remember our grandmotherly neighbor (who's grandkids, like all the other kids in the neighborhood, would not play with us)politely asking Mom why we didn't move to the nearby area where all the apartments were - where we wouldn't stand out, and "people were more likely to speak our language". We knew that neighborhood, it was where we had to go to socialize with kids our age - and where crime was higher.

I remember Mom, equally polite, telling her the barrio was the only neighborhood where we could afford a place where she had enough yard she could garden and provide supplemental fruit and veggies. After that, it wasn't bad walking out front - but there still were a lot of louder talk from our neighbors who always seemed to be knowing someone "who was looking for a place to live" and how it was "too bad" that there were "no houses to rent" on our block.

When my folks saved up enough to move (as in, Dad finished off paying for his Master's Degree and got enough full-time pay saved up to put down first and last month's rent), no one blinked when we moved into a similar 1930's era neighborhood with higher property values - inhabited with white families of retired Air Force officers, lower-level managers and "minor" professionals. And there I saw how the few foreign-born mothers and grandmothers in the neighborhood were treated when they weren't white, and how my Mom was treated by the other ladies in the neighborhood for being friendly to these women.

But, that's the way it was back in the 1960's. And honestly, it is pretty much similar to what I saw in the "post racial" 1980's into the 1990's in other small California cities. While there is some integration occurring in newer housing developments and as a result of attrition along with gentrification, there has been very little actual move to integrate the older neighborhoods.

Haele

It really wasn't acknowledged or taken head on as a problem to be solved well into the late 80s.

The fallout is that in places like Wauwatosa (Walker's home town) black people are seen as unusual in many neighborhoods. Black and Hispanic students enrolled in classes I taught at a College in western Milwaukee talked about the need to drive around 'tosa to avoid problems with police...

I can't speak to the veracity of police still harassing people of color, but can verify fear of that remains active.

Those rich suburbs are full of Asian-Americans, Muslim-Americans, Indian Americans, etc. as those ethnicities flood the professional fields. Hell those Nigerian Americans are now the most educated group in the US and they earn roughly 10% more household income than the average American.

It isn't just a white out in the burbs anymore.