MISCmedia by Clark Humphrey » Blog Archive AVERAGE WHITE TOWN?

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AVERAGE WHITE TOWN?

August 21st, 2011 by Clark Humphrey

OK, so Seattle is one of America’s most predominantly caucasian big cities.

But it’s not nearly as totally white as some people seem to think it is.

Enter Sarah Lippek, who offers “a few words on the purported whiteness of my hometown:”

If you do not see people of color on your block, at your job, or in your schools, it is decidedly NOT because Seattle’s population is too white. It’s because your block, your job, and your school are actively maintaining racial segregation.

Lippek then explains our town’s history of restrictive “racial covenants” in real estate contracts. From there, she relates that while minorities aren’t legally forbidden from owning homes in large parts of the city any more, the legacy continues:

These boundaries were drawn by racist law, and are enforced by income inequity, imprisonment and disenfranchisement, the property-tax based education system, the drug war, repressive police strategies – and by white peoples’ continued willful blindness to the very existence of people of color in the city.

One Response

Art Marriott writes:
August 22nd, 201112:29 pmat

Clark,

As far as “racial covenants” are concerned, some time back we got a bit of a lesson in how recently such barriers were taken for granted.

We bought our house in 1976, the year after we were married. It’s one of those three-bedroom Wedgwood Cape Cods that Al Balch and his partners cranked out like mad immediately after World War II. Not exactly mansions, these were for GI Joe to move into after he mustered out, married Rosie the Riveter–and probably took her old blue-collar job at Boeing–and started making Baby Boomers.

In the late 1980’s our own growing family (and our having become weary of cooking in what my sister-in-law dubbed a “one-butt kitchen”) led us to refinance to fund a modest remodel. The title search turned up something we hadn’t noticed the first time around: The developers had imposed a covenant on the neighborhood (long since nullified by more recent law) prohibiting “any but members of the white race from being domiciled in said residences, except when employed as domestic help”.