9.10: Enforced Ethnic Regions

Some ethnic regions evolved on their own, but others created to purposefully isolate minority groups. For generations, North American Indians were forcibly removed from their lands and restricted to smaller parcels of land known as reservations. Sometimes, reservations were near or on the ancestral lands occupied by the tribe or nation of Indians. Occasionally, however, Indians were relocated to reservations many hundreds of miles from their homelands. The infamous Trail of Tears was a product of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which led to the relocation of some 46,000 American Indians to Oklahoma from various tribal homelands in the American Southeast. Oklahoma’s grasslands climate and environment made survival difficult for Indians from the humid, forested regions of the upland South and Central Florida.

9-19: Trail of Tears Map. How different or similar are the topography, climate, flora and fauna of Oklahoma to the homeland areas from which Indians were removed? Source: Wikimedia

Ghettoization

Ethnic ghettoization is a more organized effort by multiple parties to enforce the maintenance of established ethnic identities and structures of power that benefit one group over others. Historically, the term ghetto has been used to identify areas of a city where specific minority groups were forced to live. In recent years, the term has been largely used by Americans in reference only to poor African-American neighborhoods. It is important to recognize that ghettos have a very long history, can be found in almost every country on earth, and any minority group may be ghettoized. Certainly, the Chinatown districts in many US cities qualified as ghettos during much of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, before legal changes made housing discrimination unlawful. The Nazis confined Jewish people to ghettos during their reign of terror across Europe. Today, the less value-laden term, ethnic enclave is used by social scientists to describe neighborhoods dominated by a single ethnicity. Some more well-off ethnic enclaves are called ethno-burbs. The large concentration of Asians in Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Valley is a good example of an ethno-burb.

9-20: Altgeld Gardens: Chicago, IL. This public housing project built after World War II to house black veterans after the war was built on an abandonned landfill. It remains a black neighborhood and numerous toxic hazards remain in the vicinity. Source: Wikimedia

It is reasonably easy to understand why a group of people invested in racist/bigoted ideologies and/or sheer ignorance would seek to isolate people who are different from themselves. Keeping groups geographically separate makes it easier for groups in power to maintain the status quo. Residential integration of various ethnic groups invites children from different groups to become friends, maybe fall in love, make babies or just learn from one another. Perhaps the most important thing ghettoization discourages is marriages between people of different ethnicities or races. Bigots fear any dilution of the “purity” of identity, whatever that identity is based upon (race, religion, nationality, language, etc.), and residential proximity threatens that. More importantly, allowing people from different groups to live together makes it difficult for people from a dominant group to exercise and maintain political and economic power over the subjugated group(s). Isolating subjugated groups is the best way to perpetuate the ignorance that is the ultimate source of racial and ethnic prejudices.

Restrictive Covenants

Following the Civil War, a wide variety of strategies were developed to limit the geographic distribution of African Americans in the United States. Early on, very simple legal measures were enacted that restricted African Americans to certain locations, especially in the Jim Crow South. Such laws were declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 1917 (Buchanan v Warley). As a result, more sophisticated segregation methods quickly emerged. Restrictive or exclusionary covenants were written into the deeds of sale for many homes sold during the next 50 years. Deed restrictions typically prohibited owners from doing mundane things like building garages, fences, or porches, but they sometimes also forbade the sale of the house to specific ethnicities. Black people were frequently the target of these discriminatory deeds, but Jews, Catholics, Chinese, and other ethnic groups also found themselves the target of restrictive covenants. It was once illegal to sell or rent property to Jewish people in Beverly Hills.

After 1948, when the U.S. Supreme Court found restrictive covenants also unconstitutional. Another round of tactics designed to maintain housing segregation emerged. Realtors, fearing a loss of profits through the degradation of home values in integrated neighborhoods, would simply refuse to sell houses in white neighborhoods to people from ethnic minority groups. Other practices made it harder or more expensive for specific ethnicities to buy or rent in white neighborhoods. Banks and other lenders also practiced mortgage discrimination, which effectively kept ethnic homebuyers out of selected neighborhoods by denying loans or making them irrationally expensive. There is evidence that this last practice continues today, albeit more clandestinely.

Blockbusting and White Flight

One of the most controversial practices, known as blockbusting was used to some effect, especially in cities in the Industrial Midwest. Realtors engaged in blockbusting would convince white homeowners in a majority white neighborhood that the arrival of a black family into the neighborhood had eroded the value of all the houses in the neighborhood. If the realtor could convince the white owners of this argument, the realtor would buy the property at below actual market value from the white home owner ̧ and often seek to sell it to a prospective black homeowner at above market value. Real estate speculators, land developers, and lenders all made substantial profits from the scam. White and black homeowners alike lost money. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 outlawed blockbusting, but only after most of the damage was done. Blockbusting no doubt accelerated the most common, legal, process of ethnic segregation, known as white flight, in which white people moved from heterogeneous inner-city locations to homogenous, largely white suburbs and exurbs. Court-ordered desegregation busing of students during the 1970s may have accelerated white flight and invited even greater residential segregation in many U.S. Cities.

9-22: This sign was erected in 1942 near a proposed housing project in Detroit. Rioting followed. Note the use of the American flag, during World War II. Eventually the National Guard arrived to protect the black residents. Source: Wikimedia.

Steering

More benign, perhaps even subconscious, actions also create and maintain ethnic neighborhoods. One realtor behavior called steering may be still widespread today. Steering happens when a realtor, trying to sell a prospective buyer a house, focuses the buyer’s attention on houses in neighborhoods predominated by persons of the prospective buyer’s ethnicity. Whether this is always a purposeful, discriminatory act, or simply a logic geared to help find people homes in neighborhoods where they “feel at home” is less clear.

Public Housing

Even some of the actions taken by national and local governments seem to have contributed to the ghettoization of minority groups. There is some debate about the intentionality of the government and the overall long-term effects of American public housing policy, but it does seem clear that public housing projects designed to offer affordable housing to inner-city residents did, at the very least, contribute to the maintenance of ethnically segregated neighborhoods in many cities where “projects” were built. Public housing projects were by the 1970s emblematic of the ghettoization of African-Americans in the United States. Other government policies, including the Interstate Highway Act, redlining and Federal Housing Authority polices are discussed later.