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Reviews
| Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America. By David M. P. Freund. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. xii + 514 pp. Maps, photos, notes, and index. $35.00 (cloth).
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In this book, David M. P. Freund analyzes the racial impact of twentieth-century federal housing policies and programs on national urban and suburban patterns, as well as on the attitudes of white residents of metropolitan Detroit. In one sense, this is already well-covered ground, but Freund contends that most urban scholars mistakenly depict white Americans' racial beliefs as static over time and characterizes their changing rhetoric about race during and after World War II as simply disingenuous. In contrast, Freund poses the compelling question: "If most northern whites had disavowed racism and supported the principle of racial equality, why did so many continue to oppose residential integration?" (p. 5). |
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To answer this question, Freund begins in the 1910s, when zoning advocates from the new profession of urban planning created "a land-use science that simply assumed the legitimacy and relevance of racial science" (p. 58). They then forged political partnerships with realtors and government officials in an attempt to win recognition and authority for their field. By the 1930s, new federal programs—which largely excluded people of color—enforced and thus institutionalized earlier theories of segregation as "a market imperative" (p. 33). |
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This institutionalization occurred at a crucial moment, when New Deal programs were beginning to exercise an immense influence on the housing market by fostering "new supply, demand, [and]...wealth" (p. 174) and standardizing financial and credit practices. Yet the officials who ran these new programs—together with realtors, developers, bankers, and other partners in the private sector—greatly downplayed the growing and extremely significant federal involvement in and subsidization of the housing market. Facing resistance to government intervention in the economy, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in particular took great pains to portray itself as simply an instrument and bulwark of the free market. |
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As Freund contends, this point is crucial, for public acceptance of the free-market narrative effectively masked the impact of federal racial policies. After World War II, the FHA and other federal housing programs that worked through private institutions channeled millions of dollars to white Americans who sought suburban homes, denied similar access to nonwhite people, and then ascribed the resulting racial exclusion to market forces alone. According to Freund, most whites easily embraced the idea that racial segregation was the natural product of the market. Freund then demonstrates how whites in communities such as Troy, Dearborn, and Royal Oak City, Michigan, linked categories such as "property owner" and "homeowner" to whiteness, usually without even talking about race. By casting segregation as the impersonal and apolitical product of market forces—all while ignoring government's huge role in creating it—white northerners thus were thinking about race differently than their prewar predecessors. |
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Freund's account of this process is complex and sophisticated, and it will undoubtedly force urban scholars to recognize what he calls "the gray area between the racial and the economic" (p. 399). This recognition will not come without substantial efforts, however. The book's main characters consist largely of federal officials and their allies in the private sector. The result is a sometimes arduous narrative, a problem magnified by Freund's tendency to repeat many times, sometimes almost verbatim, the same arguments within the space of a few pages. Freund also casts his study as perhaps more unique than it is; other scholars, such as Thomas J. Sugrue and Becky Nicolaides, have also explored the "gray area," or the intertwining of the racial and economic, that Freund examines more thoroughly. Yet these flaws do not change the fact that Freund has produced an important book and one likely to become required reading for all students of urban history and federal public policy.
Charlotte Brooks
Baruch College, City University of New York
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