Segregation Ended in Some Ways, But Not Where It Matters

When Americans talk about racial segregation, they have a tendency to speak in the past tense. To some extent, this characterization is reasonable. After all, it's not like a business owner can slap a "whites-only" sign on their front door and get away with it today, as they did before the civil rights movement. However, as Alex Woodward wrote in The Gambit, even "though redlining was eliminated with the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, its damage was never undone." As a result, most Americans continue to live in segregated communities. This is by design. In 1924, the National Association of Real Estate Board warned its members not to integrate neighborhoods with "members of any race or nationality … whose presence will clearly be <a href="https://www.nar.realtor/on-common-ground/learning-from-our-past-the-history-of-the-fair-housing-act" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">detrimental to property values</a> in that neighborhood." White people, throughout the country, labeled Black people a troubling presence and endorsed racial stereotypes to justify excluding them from investment opportunities. During the 1930s, the federal government endorsed racial redlining, "color-coded maps ranking the loanworthiness of neighborhoods," to formally segregate more than two hundred cities and towns. While Type A or green neighborhoods were considered "safe," suburban areas largely inhabited by White people, Type D or red neighborhoods consisted primarily of Black, "poor and working class," families and were deemed "hazardous" for their "infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups," actively disincentivizing investment in redlined communities. The housing market treated Black Americans and other minority groups as undesirables, like a fly in the punchbowl, rather than tax-paying citizens. <a href="https://medium.com/afrosapiophile/segregation-ended-in-some-ways-but-not-where-it-matters-2380cac3c894">Read More</a>