While the white privileged class’ control over property and society as a whole through this possession of property has long been evident, Cheryl Harris’ Whiteness as Property traces the history of how this dominance came into fruition, and how this organization became codified through legislation, which allowed for the explicit racial motivations to become less obvious.
I’m certainly not a stranger to the history that Harris outlines in her piece, as it relates heavily to my own research with Baltimore, which I would consider to be the historic capital of American housing discrimination policy and evidence to just how integral access to quality housing is to the health of a community. Baltimore was unique from its southern counterparts in its position as a city with a significant African American population because of its failure to assert control over black residents through legislation barring them from exercising their right to vote (largely due to the fact that the proposed standards around knowledge of American government systems stood to prevent the large German immigrant population from also being able to vote). Instead, this process of maintaining white dominance over black people came through decisions of who could live where, and whether city funds would be allocated toward the upkeep of these areas.
This showed itself in a number of forms through the end of the 19th century and over the course of the 20th century, with the effects of some of these decisions carrying on into the present day. One way was through British investment in the development of Baltimore’s Roland Park neighborhood, which was the first planned suburban community in North America. Here, investors were eager to investigate the profit potential in segregated housing developments, and designed the neighborhood with explicit points made in their contracts that African Americans, Jews, and Catholics were permitted to own any of the properties, providing further opportunities for ensuring that concentration of wealth would remain among whites. Later, a decade before the start of redlining (which the city would also pioneer), Baltimore became the first city to institute discriminatory housing policies, and served as a model for other cities who were interested in pushing similar legislation. This control dug deep– regardless of how much money black families possessed, they had little agency for the most part over where they were actually allowed to live. Even after redlining was banned in the middle of the 20th century, action continued to be taken to both peripheralize black residents within their own city and place greater emphasis on large-scale commercial projects in which black residents couldn’t partake outside of low-paying positions.
As Harris outlines in her piece, we know that this intersection of whiteness and property extends beyond the issue of white people simply having access to property ownership. It implies having access to social connections that propel certain groups into positions of power and maintaining control over historically marginalized populations as a means of ensuring the survival of the settler colonial, white supremacist project. While Baltimore couldn’t take away the black right to vote, their housing policies took away so much more. Although redlining policies haven’t been in practice since the passing of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, their legacy is readily visible within the city. Mapping quality of life throughout the different neighborhoods, the same sections of Baltimore that were determined undesirable for housing ownership during the 20s and 30s continue to have the lowest rates of high school graduation and participation in higher education and higher arrests and mortality rate. Freddie Gray, the Sandtown-Winchester native who died while in police custody in 2015, had, like many Baltimore youth in low-quality housing in West and East Baltimore during the latter half of the 20th century, lead poisoning due to low-grade paint used by the city. Vacancies and homelessness are at a high. There are so many stories pointing to how this history of anti-black discrimination has become an education issue, a public health issue, a survival issue.
Access to not only property, but quality or desirable property has always been and remains crucial to the health of a community. It isn’t as simple as how people contribute work to the land, as we have seen how it can be exploited.