Race & Place (pt 3 of 3): Crossing the Border
There are certain reoccurring themes that remain consistent when you proceed in a dialogue about race. One of those principles is “Whiter is better and blacker is worse”. It saddens me to write that, but for the most part, that does seem to be the underlying school of thought. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about how you present yourself at school or in the workplace, the texture of your hair, the color of your skin, who you choose to date, where you work, the school you attend, or the like, society, at some point, adopted the principle that whiter is better and blacker is worse (that simple notion is enough for a 3 part series by itself… but alas, another day).
That has important implications for our discussion on Race & Place as well.
Within the real estate market, it’s well documented. Black people move in; white people move out (white flight, in case you wanted the specific term). Even if white people don’t move out, they’ll be penalized for staying. “How so?”, you may ask? The property values for the neighborhood usually go down. The market doesn’t seem optimistic about the future of the neighborhood at that point (I don’t want to oversimplify this; I acknowledge there are many variables at play here, and race is probably just one of them). Whiter communities, on the other hand, tend to get more of a premium in the real estate market. That is, those communities are universally considered more appealing and more desirable, and people pay a premium in the market to live there.
To be fair, it’s not like it’s only white people that have this view (ie. whiter is better). Many, many black people do as well (it’s part of a complex socialization process, after all).
That’s where things get really interesting.
Part of that is to be expected… I already mentioned colorism (ie. skin tone), hair texture (lots of black women wrestle with the idea of having “beautiful” hair, which usually means looser or straighter hair that resemble their white, female counterparts), and even dating (in some circles, dating a white man or a white woman is the pinnacle of social status), but the application for real estate is a bit more nuanced. When a black person (lower income or middle class) talks about moving to a better neighborhood, almost universally, that means moving to a whiter neighborhood.
How else do you get into a community with a better school system?
Or more green space, parks, and community amenities?
Or healthier food options, or fewer liquor stores?
Certainly not by moving to a blacker community. More than likely, you’ll need a neighborhood with a higher percentage of white residents. If you’re looking for a come up, you’ll need to follow the white people.
This has been the case for awhile. You can even go back to a well-known television series, The Jeffersons, which aired in 1975. It’s right there in the theme song:
“We’re movin’ on up,
to the east side.
To a deluxe apartment in the sky.
Movin’ on up,
to the east side.
We finally got a piece of the pie.”
In case you were wondering, The Jeffersons were moving from Queens to Manhattan. You don’t have to know much about New York to know that’s a come up. You can read about Queens and Manhattan in the 70’s, as well as Queens and Manhattan in 2019. Trust me, there’s no shortage of content on the internet about segregation and socioeconomic disparities in a city like New York. My point is, for the Jefferson family to “move up”, they needed to go to Manhattan, where the black community would inevitably be quite smaller than what it was in Queens.
Middle-class and upper-class black neighborhoods are more of the exception than the norm. Again, this is well documented. There’s some existing research by Stanford scholars that argues middle-class black families are more likely to live in low-income black communities than middle class white families are to live in low-income white communities. The findings situate well in our discussion of Race & Place, particularly crossing the border. Once you get your new job, you can continue living in your predominantly black community, where people are struggling financially, or move to a much better neighborhood where you’ll potentially be the only black family on the block, and you may not even be wanted there by your neighbors.
Hmmmm, decisions decisions. The Jeffersons opted to make the move. But as you would imagine, it wouldn’t have been the easiest choice to make, back in the 1970’s. The Civil Rights era was still fresh in the mind of every black family at that point. But even 50 years later, in 2019, crossing the border can still be a calculated decision. For both black (ie. moving into white communities) and white people (ie. moving into black communities).
I lived in Philadelphia for 3 years. Admittedly, Philadelphia is probably one of the better cities to observe, first hand, residential segregation and socioeconomic disparities. I could use a number of examples, but maybe I’ll highlight West Philly and University City. For context, West Philly is the western part of the city (hence the name), and it has a fairly large black population, which is true for most of Philadelphia. University City is in West Philly; however, the demographics are fairly different, as University City has the University of Pennsylvania (Penn, for short) and Drexel University, both world renowned institutions for higher education (the former is an ivy league institution).
In some ways, I feel like the distinction between these neighborhoods is a tad bit silly, although I think it serves the schools well. After all, you have people moving from all over the world to go to school at these private universities, and a quick Google search of “West Philly” will yield all kinds of results. Yes, it’ll feature amazing food trucks, but there’ll also be reports about shootings. Yes, it will yield amazing community events, but there will also be reports about marijuana, heroin and/or other drugs. While I certainly can’t know for sure, I imagine it makes recruitment a bit easier to draw lines in the sand and erect that border.
“All the bad stuff happens over there with the black people, in West Philly, but you’re going to be over here, with the white people, in University City.”
Sure, University City has plenty of non-white residents as well (technically I lived in U City, although I would never call it that, because I thought the name was a bit silly), but the demographics of Penn and Drexel are overwhelmingly white (46% for Penn and 50% for Drexel). Remember, in the real estate market, whiter is almost always better and blacker is almost always worse. I think, in some ways, this is compounded by the number of international students that Penn and Drexel have. These poor kids… some of these students are coming from parts of Asia where they’ve NEVER interacted with black people. Like EVER. All they know is what they’ve seen on the internet, in movies, etc.
Penn being situated in a “dangerous inner-city neighborhood” can easily be the difference between someone picking Harvard, Stanford, or Princeton, over Penn. Drexel “bordering a mostly black community” could be the difference maker as young man or woman decides between offers of admission at Drexel, Vanderbilt, and Duke for engineering. Although I certainly can’t know for sure whether or not this was the intention of local constituents, my opinion is it’s politically advantageous to draw the line and say Penn and Drexel are in a different neighborhood (University City) than West Philly.
Penn and Drexel being considered part of West Philly, where all the black people are, may pose to be too much of a liability, long term. I get it. Black and brown communities have lots of challenges in America. There’s no escaping that.
Personally, I think Penn and Drexel are phenomenal institutions (I was considering doing my MBA at Penn, in fact). I have no qualms with them. And I loved every minute of my time in West Philly. I just think given 300 years of historical context of race relations in America, and what I seem to know about how the real estate market works (ie. you can read part 1 and 2 of the Race & Place series, in addition to my post To Be Black in Historically White Spaces), I can’t help but be a tad skeptical of a neighborhood within a neighborhood and the underlying goal.
I think the topic of gentrification makes crossing the border even more contentious. After 35 years of redlining, where there was an aggressive, concerted effort to cut black families off from financial services, trap them in poverty, and exclude them from living in certain parts of town… after 75 years of Jim Crow, where there was a clear agenda to separate blacks from whites, on the basis of superiority and inferiority (there were some particularly enterprising scientists that went as far to say the differences were biological in nature; that notion of biological inferiority, in part, fueled the rise of the Nazis in Germany, so we have a sense of how that turned out)… after maintaining this idea for years that whiter communities are better and blacker communities are worse, many white Americans are circling back to those same dilapidated, run down communities that they previously had no interest in living in, because of all the negroes there… and you wonder why there’s skepticism about your arrival and your underlying intentions? You wonder why there’s frustration? You don’t see why people are unhappy?
People have lived in these communities for YEARS, and it’s been NOTHING to brag about. Suddenly, a few white people move in, and the neighborhood is “turning around” or “up and coming”? Doesn’t that seem… shady? Doesn’t that seem… questionable? Doesn’t that seem… awfully convenient? Heck, these people have lived in poverty for decades, and for some of them, they feel like the only thing they’ve ever had is now being taken away, as rent increases by 30% or they can’t pay their taxes on a property that they own. So, inevitably, they’re thinking to themselves, “What’s left?”
People have struggled in those communities for decades… all of a sudden, some cafes and bike shops open, and the neighborhood is “turning around”. The only problem is not everyone finds a community more desirable because of these amenities. A barbershop could open up, and maybe nobody would bat an eye. Maybe a Jamaican spot could open up, and nobody would think twice, because it’s a black community. But if a café opens or vegan food truck pops up, or a few white residents move in, the community is “on the come up”.
I get it.
Black people don’t really have capital, so they don’t really have the luxury of investing in their communities in that way. So, when the investments in those communities are made, they usually reflect (1) the demographics of the investors (ie. not black), as well as (2) the demographics of the consumers the investments were intended to attract (ie. not black). After all, based on socioeconomics, it’s difficult for a community to revitalize with capital investments from black investors and black residents subsequently moving in.
Structurally, that’ just incredibly, incredibly doubtful.
I want to be clear… I’m a strong proponent of crossing the line. I think America’s strength is its diversity. I also wanted to capture why Race & Place is a complex, emotional, and contentious issue, and in no way will I do justice to crossing the border in 2,000 words (or 6,000 words in a 3-part series on Race & Place).
At the risk of beating a dead horse, I’ll bring our series on Race & Place to a close. But again, feel free to weigh in about residential segregation.
Nnam’