We have a lot of work to do to understand the depth, breadth, and impact of the racialization of housing and credit markets over the course of the twentieth century, and especially since the 1970s. Housing vouchers, the low-income housing tax credit, education policy, the financialization of mortgage markets, and myriad other practices have all shaped who can live where, who can build wealth from their home, and who lives in a neighborhood that is safe and clean with good schools and positive life outcomes. Every piece of the American metropolis, from the downtown skyscraper to the exurban McMansion, is part of a thoroughly racialized landscape, a palimpsest of redlining, mortgage deductions, zoning laws, road subsidies, and exploitive credit practices, all of which have layered together to inscribe race into every part of the city-building process.
But didn’t redlining really matter, you may ask? Didn’t it play a major role in shaping race and space in our cities? Yes, to the degree that the practices and policies that produced those HOLC maps are arguably the wellspring for all of these other racial practices and policies. But to focus on the maps and to use them as the primary data set in our analysis of why a particular neighborhood is too hot, too poor, and too crime ridden, is to not only to make a scholarly miscalculation that fails to get us close to an accurate picture of the causes of contemporary racial inequalities. It’s also to let ourselves off the hook for the hundreds of different local, state, and national policies, enacted from 1940 all the way up to the present, and all of the everyday decisions we, as individuals, make about where to live, where to send our kids to school, how we commute, and who gets to live in our neighborhood, that perpetuate and reinforce racial inequality, making us coperpetrators of structural racism. It is primarily whites who are and have been responsible for this, but we all need to pay attention to the complex mix of personal decision and public policy that has created our vastly-unequal cities.
One of the biggest challenges any scholar or educator who wants to help their students and community understand race in America faces is moving past the idea of racism as solely a moral issue. This one is tough, because was have been taught for decades to only consider racism as an issue of personal morality. Despite the power of Martin Luther King Jr.’s oratory and message on the economic and political structures of racism, we only remember the moral lessons. When we find a tool that shows how it’s not just about having hate in your heart, but benefitting structurally from the advantages of Whiteness, we want to grab onto it and use it in whatever context possible. I have used the concepts of redlining and HOLC maps in almost every history course I have ever taught that discusses twentieth-century America. They are powerful. But they can also result in a conceptual inversion, whereby the attempt to tell a structural story actually becomes a moral one. The world that produced redlining becomes simply another world, in the past, where people were immorally racist, made immorally-racist decisions, and enacted immorally-racist policies; in other words, not the world—or country—we live in today.
