Redlining maps show racism and white supremacy ‘in 1930s Technicolor’

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“But then you find the maps,” like this one of the Chicago metropolitan area in 1940.

This is how Robert Gioielli describes the insight and specificity of the maps highlighted in the article “The Tyranny of the Map: Rethinking the Red Line”, from The Metropole, the official blog of the Urban History Association .

Gioielli’s message emphasizes the difficulty of teaching and learning about the ongoing impacts and consequences of past state-sanctioned discrimination.

“The violence of slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration is usually the easiest to illustrate and explain, because it’s the most horrific. It’s also because generations of Americans have learned that racism is just a matter of violence that stems from hatred, mostly sneering Southern plantation owners and rednecks in white hoods Racism is about bigoted interpersonal interactions, we are told, and therefore ingrained in our own morality Structural racism, especially as it relates to American cities, can be more difficult to communicate.

Stories, documentaries, oral histories and even photos cannot communicate much. Denial, disavowal, and refusal to consider the ongoing consequences of culturally embedded historical policies and laws are barriers to learning.

In 1938,

“A federal agency, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), has created “home security” maps of major US cities. These maps document how loan officers, appraisers, and real estate professionals assessed mortgage risk in the days immediately before the surge. suburbanization in the 1950s. Neighborhoods considered high-risk or “unsafe” were often “marked” by lending institutions, denying them access to capital investments that could improve housing and economic opportunities for residents. »

The cards reveal

“Racism and White Supremacy in the Midst of the 1930s, Wizard of Oz in Technicolor. Detailed and accurate, all the more valuable because nearly every major American city had one, and students can find places and neighborhoods that “they know, lived, had family. For a scholar of 20th-century United States history, especially one who researches and teaches urban and environmental history, HOLC maps have long been a key slide of my teaching presentations, something to build the whole lecture or unit or even the course in. that’s what structural racism means, when the state and its private capital partners decide the winners and losers, create generational wealth in a community and condemn other groups to be deprived of resources for decades.”

The Mapping Inequality Project is the most comprehensive integrated accessible database of such maps.

Redlining is a state-sanctioned practice of discrimination operated by the private sector. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor examines in Race for Profit, contract clauses, redlining, blockbusting, and private-public property regimes are other contemporary and historical ways of controlling space to enforce segregation. These discriminatory “best practices” of the real estate industry have made it resistant to change in adhering to new fair housing legislation.

These maps demonstrate the consequences of state-sanctioned discrimination created and reproduced through politics and law, which impacts media coverage and the creation of cultural meaning.

These policies, at least for housing appraisals, can be traced to the Federal Housing Administration’s underwriting manual, published in 1938. The manual was the management element of public policy.

“For a neighborhood to remain stable, it is necessary that properties continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally contributes to instability and declining values.”

As Yamahtta Taylor writes,

“The premise of these underwriting criteria set out the rationale for redlining and shaped FHA practices well into the 20th century. The Supreme Court’s 1948 Shelley v. in the sale of homes the ruling, however, was read narrowly, applied only to covenants, and did not prohibit housing discrimination against African Americans or other non-whites, only the specific role of the State in its implementation or application.

Linking segregation to competition and land ownership, i.e., maintaining spaces reserved for whites assumes the supremacy of one group of people, cultures and communities over another.

Again, Yamaha Taylor:

“The FHA and later the Veterans Administration (V) blackout of African Americans was virtually complete; ten years after the National Housing Act of 1949, less than 2% of properties insured by the FHA went to non-whites The results devastated the ability of African Americans [and other nonwhites] to modernize their homes. »

It’s not just about owning property, it’s about building equity and increasing net worth.

In other words, policies have an impact on the life chances of different populations. Limiting access to preventive or crisis health care, housing and education means people will die faster and more often. New research shows that populations living in conservative areas die faster and younger. When policies are guided by the ideology of not spending money on the poor because they get what they deserve, and the rich work harder, it’s hard to learn about inequality structural, because it also inevitably means placing oneself in this structure. But that’s another post.

If you stick with Gioielli’s message long enough (or this one, for that matter), the very maps that reveal technicolor white supremacy also obscure other dynamics, social forces, and decision-making political and economic entities.

Specifically, regarding redlining, Gioielli began to “question whether the concept, particularly as communicated through these cards, has outlived its usefulness.”

“Its simplicity and direct visual force made it almost too powerful. The decades of structural inequality and political decision-making since the 1930s have become hidden, blinding us to all the other ways in which individual, corporate and government produces the very – unequal metropolises that many of us live in and contribute to today I fear it has become too easy to blame the architects of that system of a century ago, putting on hats blacks on hundreds of faceless and nameless bureaucrats.Through a process of trying to understand the origins of a key aspect of structural racism, have we actually backtracked and constructed a new moralizing history that obscures more than it does? ‘enlightened ?”

Focusing on the FHA maps, highlighting the devastating effects of structural racism, they did not map “local private actors in every U.S. city fully endorsed, sponsored, and aided in the design and implementation of redlining policies”. Because maps are algorithms with keys and logics, there are always limits, assumptions, biases and boundaries; other maps can be designed.

As a result, the Homeowners Loan Corporation residential security cards (HOLC cards), which formed the basis of this powerful analytical tool demonstrating the depth and breadth of redlining in its consequences, were only a part of the whiteboard.

The jewels explain,

“These important new insights help us understand that while the actions of the HOLC and other federal agencies in the 1930s were fundamental to making racialized housing markets national policy, they were not cut off from everything in Washington. , DC. They were the product of and the prevailing practices and ideologies in cities across the country.”

These dominant practices and ideologies are still present today. The maps are world-making calendars. They mark the imagination of knowing in time the place, the people, the flora and fauna, the names and the meanings. Maps are boundaries that create meanings attached to these demarcations and to the humans living in bordered adjacent areas. Maps are also contested forms of knowledge.

As Gioielli counsels,

“Changing our way of thinking doesn’t mean we let the federal government off the hook. On the contrary, our popular obsession with the HOLC card is allowing generations of local realtors, “home” banks and real estate developers in every major American city to retire. the hook.”

Winner of four National Book Awards from trade associations, shortlisted for the 2019 National Book Award, and 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for History, Race for Profit does this intellectual work to help change the way we think.

“Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued long after housing discrimination was outlawed. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining ended, and close relationships between regulators and industry created incentives to ignore irregularities.Meanwhile, new policies designed to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit black homeowners.The federal government guaranteed city mortgages in a attempt to overcome resistance to lending to black buyers as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation Bankers, investors and real estate agents took advantage of perverse incentives, targeting black women most likely to miss house payments and slip into poverty foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, in the late 1970s, the first national programs to encourage black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in black communities across the country. The push to improve black homeownership had become a gold mine for real estate agents and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention. »

How does new knowledge impact conclusions already drawn when we learn something? What is the impact of additional information on questions about other outcomes, causes and effects, and consequences? This kind of recognition could be an antidote to anti-intellectualism.

According to sociologist Avery Gordon,

“Whatever its specific form, anti-intellectualism is ultimately a refusal to theorize. It is a refusal to think critically, to see general assumptions operating, or ‘limited domain assumptions’, or “global assumptions”, in large-scale social organizations and in everyday actions, thoughts, or inactions.”

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