Race matters (even more than you already think): Racism, housing, and the limits of The Color of Law

Abstract

As any good American urbanist knows: race matters. But precisely how does it matter? How have the pervasive and enduring modalities of racism (especially anti-Blackness) shaped the American metropolis over the last decades? Several influential attempts to answer these questions have focused heavily on racism’s momentous impacts on housing and related spatial practices. Such accounts have garnered intensified attention with the appearance of Richard Rothstein’s widely heralded The Color of Law. My central contention is that most conventional treatments of how racism impacted mid-century housing and spatial practices (including Rothstein’s) are deeply flawed. While almost obsessively centering racism as determinative, they nevertheless underestimate how fundamental it is to America’s institutions. I focus particularly on market institutions as they shape residential property values. Doing so reveals both a significant historical rereading of mid-century urban America’s highly racialized housing and spatial practices, as well as a more powerful account of ongoing racial dispossessions.