It’s 9 o’clock in the morning and the start of the semester. Your social battery didn’t charge enough over break to be talking to dozens of people, but small talk and introductions are unavoidable this first week. When prompted, each person gives their spiel: Name, year, major, maybe a fun fact and of course “Where are you from?” That question always makes me a little uneasy. I usually answer with a simple “Livonia.” That answer though feels ingenuine as it doesn’t feel like the city belongs to me and frankly, even from a young age, I understood that it never did. I have vivid memories of an elementary school-aged me explaining how I lived in a “white neighborhood.” I knew it belonged to them.
Even as homeowners, the Kouassi family rented that space. We could not take pride and ownership of our neighborhood as a home. We didn’t get the full benefits of suburbia that everyone else did. Why did my family drive 20 minutes every day to Detroit and then 45 minutes every day to Troy to take me to school when other kids in the neighborhood simply took the bus to neighborhood schools? Why did my family, especially my father, go to work and straight back home, not taking walks around the block or making friends with other families in the neighborhood? And, when we first moved in, why were there eggs thrown at our house and dead birds left at our door? You guessed it: racism and not being welcomed within that environment. As intense as my family’s story may sound, it is a microcosm of the larger issue of housing inequality and residential segregation in this country.
Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton’s “American Apartheid” suggests that racial segregation between Black and white populations in the U.S. has been steadily increasing since the mid-1800s. Due to rampant anti-Black racism post-abolition, indices of Black-white segregation almost doubled in northern cities and almost quadrupled in southern cities between 1860 and 1940. In historical eras that preceded this, while residential segregation existed, class was a leading factor in where people lived. Poor white sharecroppers could be seen living alongside freedmen. Subsequent legislation and actions, however, would serve as a catalyst for residential segregation becoming increasingly racialized.
Between the mid-1910s and 1930, during the Great Migration a large influx of Black Americans moved northward and westward to escape racial violence and gain access to new industrial jobs. As competition for these jobs increased between “native” white people, white immigrants and Black Southerners, discrimination and tensions began to reflect this dynamic. Pre-existing anti-Blackness and this new resentment manifested in a combination of private and institutionalized practices, which barred Black Americans from living in certain communities, leaving them segregated and isolated amongst themselves. Some common practices that were utilized included zoning restrictions and the buying out of Black residents. Others included restrictive covenants written into deeds, which made ownership or renting of properties by Black people illegal, blockbusting, redlining and physical violence. At the same time, white Americans were benefiting from the subsidization of suburbanization. After World War II, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Affairs began giving generous loans to white families moving into white, suburban neighborhoods. Clear lines began to form between groups, thus creating the “Black ghettos,” void of resources and opportunities, and the “white neighborhoods” that a younger version of me could clearly identify.
Even after the Fair Housing Act outlawed these more overt forms of discrimination in 1968, the intense racial segregation persisted via more covert forms of discrimination. Banks began to discriminate by either not supplying loans to Black families or by only considering more risky loans. Real estate agents would strategically only show certain homes to Black families and white families would participate in white Flight by leaving a neighborhood after a Black family moved in, for fear of their property value dropping or of integration. Living in proximity to Black families became a threat to white families’ social and economic capital. Within six months of my family moving into the neighborhood, a white family moved away. Then within two years of our move, another white family left the neighborhood. While I don’t know the exact reason for their leaving, in many ways, this echoed the trends of the past. My family represented a threat to them, their property value and their community’s white purity and homogeneity.
My Black family is not a threat. None of the Black families that have been subject to discriminatory housing practices were. We are like any other family. We have family dinners, we sing and dance together, we tend to our lawns, we laugh, we cry, we survive and we ignore the isolation of our house’s walls. So when I introduce myself in class, sure, I will still say I am from Livonia. However, when I say it, I will say it without pride because I know Livonia, and cities like it around the country, as well as their people and their practices, are and have historically been a threat to my family and people that look just like me.
MiC Columnist Lauren Kouassi can be reached at lkouassi@umich.edu.