Majority White Communities Foster Color-Blindness in Schools and at Home

by Abby Neff

White suburbs. White picket fences, bright green grass, cookie-cutter homes and screams of children running through their backyards: just another day in American suburbia. Down the streets, behind the windows and doors of every home, who lives within these townships and cities? A white hand opens a car door, a white hand waves at a neighbor, a white hand holds a dog leash or pushes a stroller. Now what happens if the hand has a darker complexion?

The Pew Research Center surveyed Americans between 2012 and 2016, finding that 68% of suburban county residents are white, while only one- in-ten suburban counties are majority nonwhite. Consider the classic American Dream: finding a job, marrying “the one,” buying a home and starting a family. In a debate against moderate centrist in 1965, American essayist, activist and poet James Baldwin declared the American lifestyle was exclusively available to white people.

“The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro,” he says.

What does that mean?

According to Glennon Sweeney, a researcher at the Kirwan Institute for The Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University, the concept of suburbs did not come about until the early twentieth century. “Prior to 1890, the word ‘suburb’, it was a word, suburbs existed, but there weren’t planned suburbs. ‘Suburb’ was really just referring to anything outside of Central City, anything peripheral to the city,” Sweeney says.

“But in the 1890s, there were these groups that got together, and they started to build the first planned suburbs,” she says.

With the establishment of the first planned suburbs, a phenomenon called “white flight” began to occur. Specifically, in Columbus, white flight came in three waves throughout the twentieth century.

According to Sweeney, there was a distinct racial, ethnic and cultural hierarchy in the United States. Wealthy white Protestants were at the top, and Catholic and Jewish communities were specific targets of inequality. Anyone who wasn’t white, however, was “at the very bottom” of the hierarchy.

“When they were building these communities, what they did is they created these restrictive covenants in home deeds to make sure that only the white, Protestant, wealthy people they wanted were going to live in these neighborhoods,” she says. “So, they restricted ... anyone who was not white... they [also] restricted Jews and Catholics.”

The development of suburbs accelerated after World War II as soldiers returned from war. Levittown in Long Island, New York, served as the first model for suburbs, and were created as an appealing alternative for veterans and their families that wanted to leave the city.

An example of targeting that developers of Levittown practiced was a written restriction on agricultural land use and the types of animals, such as chickens and goats, that were allowed in a specific suburb. At the time, Sweeney says, those animals were most commonly associated with Black Americans.

Suburban laws and zoning codes evolved overtime, and with the exclusion of chickens came a minimum square footage requirement for a home, and even minimum cost requirements to build a home.

“This was really to ensure that only wealthy people were moving into these neighborhoods,” Sweeney says. “Class, race and ethnicity played a very big role.”

By the middle of the Great Depression, there was a shift from short mortgages with hefty down payments to mortgages that were federally insured. Redlining, a policy designed to determine risk in a neighborhood, emerged as a method to determine what people obtained a federally insured mortgage.

“And it didn’t matter if they were wealthy communities or not,” Sweeny says. “There were middle class Black suburbs that were redlined as well, because it wasn’t white people who were the only ones building suburbs, Black people were as well. Financing them became an issue.”

According to Sweeney, the overarching trend of restrictive policies served one purpose: to deny Black property ownership.

“And that was intentional because in the 20th century, in the United States of America, property ownership was the primary mechanism by which Americans built wealth,” she says.

The value of home ownership prompted a boom in the mass production of homes, opening sub-urbanization to the middle class, a lifestyle formerly exclusive to wealthy elites. However, Black, Latino, Jewish, Catholic and other families were still excluded from the new suburbs, while their own neighborhoods were being red lined.

That initiated an era of “white flight:”the migration of white families to the suburbs once Black families moved into their neighborhoods in cities and metropolitan areas. Realtors would then buy the white homes at a discount and sell them at a higher rate than the original price, a practice known as “Blockbusting.”

“They’d literally go door to door and tell everyone a Black family moved in,” Sweeney says.

White families reacted to integration after the Brown v. Board decision in 1954 by fleeing into white suburbia, ushering in a covert form of segregation through the late 1950s and 60s, which still affects suburban residents educationally, economically and even psychologically. Kimberly Rios, a social psychologist at Ohio University, explained that there are highly referenced studies which show that the amount of diversity where a child is raised impacts how they perceive their identity, specifically regarding their race and ethnicity.

“Ethnic minority kids were more likely to, when describing themselves, mentioned their ethnicity early, relative to white kids,” Rios says. “But when white kids were in a school where their group was less prevalent, where they were even in the minority, or where there were just fewer white kids, then they would also tend to mention their ethnicity first.”

According to Rios, studies show that in Western societies like the United States, people tend to define themselves by group memberships that make them unique to others. A nonwhite person growing up in a suburb that is primarily white will tend to think about their race and ethnicity more than the average resident.

Rios says research indicates that diversity is seen as less relevant to whites than minority groups.

“So, whites, when they hear about celebrating diversity and acknowledging differences, they tend to feel excluded or left out of these conversations,” Rios says. “And [they] don’t feel like they have enough or as much to contribute as other groups do.”

While parents have a choice in deciding where to raise their families, children do not have a say in where they grow up. When Emma Stiefel was 6 months old, she moved to a suburb outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, for her dad’s job. Stiefel is currently a senior studying data science and history at Minerva in San Francisco, California.

In her early years, Stiefel made friends with the other children in her neighborhood, who were mostly white. When she got to middle and high school, she began making friends whose parents were Asian immigrants.

“But as I got older, and was filtered into AP classes...the classes became less diverse in some ways,” Stiefel says. “There were definitely less Black and Latino kids in those classes, though there were still some, but not as many as there were in elementary school.”

Stiefel says she was introduced to the concept of race and racism through surface level understanding in elementary school but didn’t have to think about it until she got to high school.

“I was taught growing up, and I don’t think this is unique to me, that basically we were living in the glorious aftermath of the Civil Rights movement,” she says. “We would listen to Martin Luther King Jr. speeches in school, and everything was chill.”

The conversations about race that Stiefel experienced are not uncommon in white households.

According to Rios, white racial socialization, most commonly referred to in social psychology as “color blindness,” is sometimes practiced by white parents when they don’t know how to talk about race. She says that dominant group members in a society, like white people in the United States, avoid talking about race because they believe that doing so makes them racist.

“If kids hear from, or they get the idea from their parents that discussing racial differences is not okay, or if they get explicitly colorblind messages like, ‘Oh, you know, these differences [don’t] matter, we’re all the same person on the inside,’ then of course that’s likely to carry over, along with other environmental influences [that] have an impact on the child,” she says.

While the majority of children in suburbs are white, nonwhite families also live in those same suburbs. Olivia Ratcliff-Totty, a senior studying psychology at Ohio University, grew up in Huber Heights, outside of Dayton, Ohio. She is biracial; her mom white and her dad Black.

The dominant group at her high school was white, but the next prominent group of students were Black. “I would say in my life I was more accustomed to white culture.” Ratcliff-Totty says, “And then when I slowly got introduced to more Black culture... that’s when I started understanding both sides a little bit more.”

Ratcliff-Totty says that a particular revelation about her identity led her to understand the way the world views her. “My parents had open conversations with me about race,” she says.“...the biggest thing that they said to me was, ‘You know, Liv, you may be white and...black, but when you’re walking down the street, no one is ever going to say, ‘Look at that white girl.’”

Gideon Kariuki, a sophomore studying public service and public policy at Arizona State University, is a second-generation immigrant whose mother moved from Kenya to the United States. He grew up in a suburb outside of Phoenix, Arizona, and attended a charter school where most of his classmates were white.

“When I started meeting people outside of my school bubble the ‘diversity score’ of my friend group was pretty low,” Kariuki says. “I was the diversity most of the time.”

Activists and researchers throughout the country are currently pushing back against these de-facto segregated suburbs. Sweeney, who is currently working toward a PhD in City and Regional Planning at OSU, says the general population does not understand that discriminatory public policies and housing segregation go hand in hand.

“They see them as one off,” Sweeney says. “They don’t understand how they work together in a very insidious way to really create the segregated--and when I say segregated, I don’t just mean race and ethnicity, I mean class, I mean in every kind of way you can think about really--the segregated society that we live in today.”

Growing up without diverse interactions in non- white, class-segregated communities, Sweeney says, has a profound effect on a child’s socialization.

“It reinforces that culture of poverty narrative, that poor people are poor because there’s something wrong with them,” she says.“Well, poverty in the United States is a direct function of policy.”

Sweeney says in order to build economic and educational equity, access to higher education and workforce development are crucial for people to adapt to a fast-paced economy. She says communicating the need for a policy change to the general public has been difficult.

“People think that if other people get more rights, or more resources or more opportunities, they will lose them,” she says. “We’ve been trained to think that because it is a winner and loser game in the capitalist economy, but it doesn’t have[to be]. It’s a choice we’ve made.”