It’s pub day! “Rooting Race in Place” is the 1st published paper from my project, Whiteness in Crisis, a large in-depth interview project of White southerners generously supported with research grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation and Russell Sage Foundation. A short thread…
doi.org/10.1093/socpro…

RSF author/former scholar Colin Gordon writes for The Hill on how segregated suburban neighborhoods complicate the political calculus for both parties.
thehill.com/opinion/campai…

The suburban voter strategy isn’t as black and white as it used to be thehill.com/opinion/campai…

9/ Rendering such restrictions unenforceable in 1948 and illegal on their face in 1968 did not—and could not—undo the damage that had been done.

8/ Finally, I trace the legacy of private restriction through the lens of “durable inequality,” repositioning local and federal policies as a pattern of emulation, leverage, institutionalization, adaptation, accommodation, and inertia.

7/ In a chapter focused on local legal battles in St. Louis, I dig beneath the “equal protection” logic of Shelley v Kraemer, and show the ways in which white realtors and black realtors, white homeowners and black homeowners, negotiated, and accommodated patterns or restriction

6/ Early on, most relied on eugenics-inspired hierarchy, offering long lists of those excluded which willfully conflated race, ethnicity, national origin, and religion. By the 1930s, they had retreated to the single designation of inclusion: Caucasian only.

5/ The catalogue of private restrictions, thousands of private declarations of racial discrimination, offer a remarkable window onto the way in which white Americans thought about race and racial categorization, across the first half of the last century.

4/ This also flips the script on the conventional “redlining” story. Federal policies did not segregate the American city; out of deference to private realty interests they failed to challenge, and doubled down on, patterns of segregation that were already firmly in place.

3/ By any measure, racial segregation was largely accomplished during the era of private restriction, roughly 1910-1950. I consider segregation not just as an outcome—but as a process shaped by private action and public policy.

2/ this was especially true in the urban Midwest. Such restrictions were far more prevalent than is commonly assumed: in suburban St. Louis County, for example, over 80 percent of the 1950 single family residential stock was designated for those “wholly of the Caucasian Race.”

1/ Patchwork Apartheid draws on a unique dataset of private restrictions, mapped to the parcel level, in five Midwestern counties. It argues that private restrictions (deed covenants and subdivision restrictions) were the foundational mechanism of racial segregation .....

Now that Patchwork Apartheid is in a bookstore near you, I thought I'd offer a quick run down of what are its core arguments and (I hope) its contributions 👇russellsage.org/publications/p…

New this week from Russell Sage! 20% off with promo code “patchwork” at russellsage.org/publications

New from RSF. How do we understand the impact of private race restrictions?

russellsage.org/publications/p…

The US’s miserly welfare state is known for forcing people to work rather than shielding them from the most exploitative jobs. And in Iowa, GOP lawmakers are taking the Dickensian cruelty further: they’re considering loosening restrictions on child labor. jacobin.com/2023/03/iowa-r…

Iowa Republicans want to loosen age-old restrictions on child labor — and make sure employers are protected even if children are injured or killed at work. jacobin.com/2023/03/iowa-r…

On Iowa’s child labor bill: jacobin.com/2023/03/iowa-r…

Nice to see this available online (part of the JAPA Anti-Racist Planning special issue):

The Rents of Whiteness tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

Gary Gerstle’s new book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order tackles important questions about democracy, economy, and war. But it fails to answer a basic question: why governments in capitalist democracies are compelled to serve capital.
catalyst-journal.com/2023/02/the-lo…