“The ultimate power is our mental power, our consciousness, our awareness.” (Na’im 2008) The preceding quote is from the book Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery written by Dr. Na’im Akbar a professor and psychologist. He is referring to the three pathways he believes African Americans can use to strengthen their power in America. The reason African Americans need to reach their ‘ultimate power’ is to fight the psychological wounds that slavery has left on black-skinned Americans whose ancestors were kidnapped from Africa and forced into slavery on American Southern plantations. The main challenge of reaching a goal of ‘ultimate power’ is that so many obstacles are set in front of African-Americans so they cannot achieve success. One strategy that was used successfully starting in about 1940 is called White Flight because whites left cities for the suburbs but blacks were not able to gain the same opportunity.
White Suburbanization is another phrase used to describe the phenomena of White Flight. The challenges African-Americans faced were difficult but new research suggests there was a silver lining after white flight for blacks living in city centres. The effect of white flight has been researched in many studies in order to understand the effect on African Americans. Three different research studies are discussed below in order to better understand if the world has changed and African-Americans are doing better in modern times. One discusses racial discrimination in the home buying process, another is about the ‘silver lining’ of white flight, and the last is about mixed income neighbourhoods designed for more stable communities.
Maria Kryan (2008) conducted research in order to find out whether or not race makes any difference in the experience of trying to buy a house. Other research projects concentrate on racism from the point of view of income, discrimination and preferences but Kryan (2008, p. 581) studied the process of searching for a home to compare the experiences of Caucasian and African-American consumers. Kryan (2008) wanted to learn about the process for both renters and buyers. The location included three counties in the Detroit urban area. In 2004 people from the area were met face-to-face and asked questions about their experiences when they had been searching for their home. The three main research questions formed for the study are listed below.
- “What are the strategies people use to find housing, and what are their racial differences in those strategies?
- “Do whites and African-Americans report similar or different experiences in the search for housing?
- “Do the locations in which people search for housing vary by race?” (Kryson, 2008, pp. 584)
The questions were designed to try to understand the different parts of the home search process. The amount of time needed for the search took, the number of information sources and kinds of facts use, the size of the area searched as well as how many neighbourhoods and houses were visited during the search.
Kryson (2008, pp. 584) explained that her article “was the first step towards addressing the larger questions of how individual level housing search strategies, experiences, and decisions might, in the aggregate, serve to perpetuate or attenuate patterns of racial inequality in housing.” Aggregate means the combined features taken as a total. To perpetuate means to be responsible and to attenuate means to ease means. The results from the research did not show very much difference in the time that whites and blacks spent searching for a home, but other characteristics pointed to some racial differences. For example the research showed the home shoppers usually use real estate agents of the same race. White home searchers especially use white real estate agents while blacks were more likely to use mainly black but also white-skinned realtors. Kryson (2008) wrote that this might explain how segregated neighbourhoods stay segregated. “To the degree that real estate agents are marketing homes in neighbourhoods that are themselves racially segregated, then this race matching of real estate agent and client may be a nexus at which segregation is perpetuated.” (Kryson, 2008, p. 598)
Another interesting racial difference is that African-Americans must offer a greater number of applications and bids than Caucasian-Americans. All in all African-Americans reported in the answers to their surveys that they felt hassled and that people were taking advantage of them much more than whites. Earlier research has shown that psychological and monetary stress is worse for African-Americans during the house buying process. The research by Kryson (2008) used controls on a variety of characteristics like income levels but none of them explained away the racism element.
Other social scientists have done earlier research concluded that African-Americans choose to live in racially segregated communities, in other words black majority communities. But the research by Kryson (2008) did not agree with this conclusion. Many of the reasons require more study to be sure but the data on the Southfield suburb of Detroit pointed to an unmistakable racial difference. The Southfield suburb is described as the “inner ring suburb” . . . “which is a prosperous middle class community where housing values and median family income are quite high and where the population is 54 percent African-American” (Kryson, 2008, p. 599). Interestingly white home buyers searching for a house in the Southfield suburb only amounted to 8 percent (from about 1996 to 2007). (Kryson, 2008) The results of the Kryson (2008) study raised many questions that need further research but the research was extremely important for showing the existence of racial discrimination in the home search process. Unfortunately the racial discrimination is still evident even after the passing of the Fair Housing Act in 1968 in the Civil Rights Act, Title VIII.
On the other hand Leah P. Boustan and Robert A. Margo (2013) conducted research on white flight and concluded that they may have identified a “silver lining” (p. 71). The argument made is that the white flight phenomena caused the opportunity for black home ownership to increase. The data they analysed showed that in 1940 about 33% of white suburban households were owned by former city inhabitants; and then in 1980 the amount of “metropolitan white households living in the suburbs” had increased to about 66 percent (Boustan & Margo, 2013, p. 79). The reported the data also demonstrated that African-American home ownership of houses located in the middle of cities increased from 15 percent in 1940 to 42 percent in 1980. Boustan and Margo (2013, p. 79) estimated that “for every 1000 white households” leaving city centres . . . “on average, around 100 black households became owners . . . from 1940 to 1980.”
The latest trend for some cities is to purposefully develop mixed-income neighbourhoods to promote equality within adverse community. This strategy is called Transit Oriented Development (TOD) and cities all across the United States have implemented or are in the process of implementing TOD. For example in the United States the cities include the San Francisco Bay Area and Salt Lake City. The concept grew from the assumption that a mix of diverse cultures and incomes would help communities function at their best. The concept was developed by Jane Jacobs who proposed that “the mixture of household types, tenures, and incomes that create diverse neighbourhoods are vital components of neighbourhood revitalization” (Heffernan, 2006, p. 20).
TOD is coupled with the goal of affordable housing because people need low transportation costs if they are to go to work, see to their families medical needs and complete all the daily and weekly tasks households need. Heffernan (2006, p. 21) reported that throughout America the average family spends approximately 19 percent of their household income on transportation costs but families with easy access to good mass transit systems only spend 9 percent of their household income on transportation costs. This makes the biggest positive impact on low income families since their household budget is smaller. An important part of the TOD strategy is to offer neighbourhoods who have services within easy walking distance for the people living there. So the neighbourhoods have areas with opportunities for grocery and clothing shopping, medical and pharmacy facilities, day care nurseries, and dry cleaners. The communities also offer easy access to community parks and entertainment centres as well as to an assortment of jobs. The neighbourhoods are purposefully designed to be “stable mixed income communities” (Heffernan, 2006, p. 25). The benefits of this type of community are good for people from different racial ancestry and income levels; because transportation costs are less and negative impact to the environment from households needing to own two or more cars is avoided.
The three different research studies discussed in this essay evaluated the amount of racial discrimination in the home buying process, the ‘silver lining’ of white flight, and the contemporary mixed income neighbourhoods designed for more stable communities. The three projects reported evidence that racial discrimination against blacks does exist in the home buying process, more black home ownership was possible after white flight, and Transit Oriented Development is to be a positive design for neighbourhoods that promote equality. Therefore the challenges to gaining “ultimate power” for African-Americans can be changed so that equality is possible for neighbourhood services and to equal housing.
Work Cited
Akbar, Na’im. (1999). Breaking the Chains of Chains of Psychological Slavery. 2nd ed. Tallahassee, FL: Mind Productions & Associates, Inc.
Boustan, Leah P., Margo, Robert A. (2013). Silver lining to white flight White suburbanization and African-American homeownership (1940-1980), Journal of Urban Economics, 78, 71-80. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jue.2013.08.001.31
McAllister, David. (2009). Realtors and racism in working-class Philadelphia: 1945-1970. In: Kusmer, Kenneth L., Trotter, Joe W., (Eds.), African-American Urban History Since World War II. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Heffernan, Kara. (Ed.) (2006). Preserving and Promoting Diverse Transit-Oriented Neighbourhoods, Centre for Transit Oriented Development: A collaboration of the Centre for Neighbourhood Technology, Reconnecting America, and Strategic Economics. Available from http://ctod.org/
