Using Eugenic Theories to Redline American Neighborhoods
ACUMEN News Report
Redlining, a discriminatory pattern of disinvestment and obstructive lending practices that impede home ownership among African Americans and other people of color, has had a long, varied, and vicious history across the country.
In the District of Columbia, that history has played out against racial, political, and socioeconomic constructs that have been perpetuated for generations. That history is vividly documented in an exhibit, “Undesign the Redline,” at Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library, in Northwest.
The interactive construct of “Undesign the Redline” offers a provocative framework through which District residents can learn more about the deep, systemic, and entangled crises redlining created, including structural racism and the economic disenfranchisement. Touring one neighborhood after another, visitors get a rare glimpse of the pejorative and crude nature of redlining.
“On a personal level, a few touchpoints come to mind when touring this exhibit. I heard in my own home from my own folks, how neighbors or friends were denied loans,” David Bowers, Vice President and Market Leader, Mid-Atlantic Market told ACUMEN. “When you witness folks of my parents’ generation who came to the area who struggled and pushed for equity and equal opportunity and they were professionals and working people, you understand they were fighting a system.”
Bowers said that despite having the city move from predominantly white to majority Black, and now shifting now demographically back to white charts more than racial shifts, but changing policies to attract new people in public and private sectors.
“The exhibit makes a great link between redlining and policies like urban renewal, and the crackdown on drugs. “Undesign” deconstructs, so when people talk about this and come back and engage with others, they can refute with real facts, that opportunities have not been equal,” Bowers told ACUMEN. “Redlining is not accidental. People fought and planned to keep Blacks, women, and others, out. It was intentional to and designed to legally make it so you cannot have access. It was intentional and Enterprise wants to inform people, anger people, and move people.”
#EugenicallySpeaking, the home represents both the soil from which the crop of fit, eugenically sound Americans would grow, and the incubator within which ideas about race hygiene, respectability, womanhood and manhood, and citizenship would be nourished. The vast majority of eugenic texts and treatises assert that the home environment serves as a breeding ground for the poor germ plasm of its inhabitants. Eugenicists like Paul Popenoe, whose textbook Applied Eugenics remained in print and used in colleges across the country until the 1950s, the home determines the I.Q., propensity for criminality, immorality, and usefulness of the children born within it.
'"No matter how much one may admire some of the Negro's individual traits, one must admit that his development of group traits is primitive, and suggests a mental development which is also primitive," Popenoe asserted. He also connects poor heredity and home life with the collapse of marriageability, finding poor mate selection -- especially women not suited to make their bodies the wellspring of the nation, or to stay home and rear children -- a primary cause. For immigrants and non-White women, he classifies their breeding as a burden on society and their children as problematic. How natural, it would seem then, to have staunch opposition to non-White families potentially contaminating the most vital source of race progress?
Historian Laura L. Lovett found that “American eugenicists in the 1930s saw housing programs as a vehicle for a new form of reproductive regulation promoting large families for the so-called fit while limiting family size among the so-called unfit.” From housing developers, federal agencies, and real-estate associations, according to Lovett, a eugenically informed racial hierarchy was used to not only justify redlining and preferential home loans but to also discourage reproduction among African Americans and immigrants.
Additionally, by purposefully retarding resources available to those in redlined neighborhoods, a habitus developed that fueled joblessness, poverty, criminal activity, and violence. In this environment, those with the financial wherewithal to leave, ran, while those unable to leave, continued to bare children who were subject to a thoroughly dysgenic setting.
While historians tend to focus on the recent history of redlining, its thrust ran parallel with the popularizing of eugenics in America, and gained leverage with white displacement theories during the Great Migration. In one 1928 study of race and housing published by The Institute of Social and Religious Research called "Negro Problems in Cities," data suggested that many Whites in urban areas saw the migration of Blacks into areas like Chicago, Detroit, New York, and St. Louis as a sign of national degeneration. The mere presence of African Americans working alongside them in factories, serving alongside them in the military, and living alongside them in newly constructed family housing helped facilitate White American mob violence, resulting in years of race riots in those cities.
"In Chicago, the first rapid expansion of the old southside area led to such intense friction that more than sixty bombings of Negro residences occurred, and these incidents culminated in the bloody riots of 1919," the authors note. "Since that time, however, there has been further rapid expansion of Negro residence areas with very little friction. The riot seemed to clear the atmosphere and bring about the realization that the rapid expansion of Negro population makes the expansion of residence areas inevitable."
White resistance to integrated neighborhoods has also been coalesced by the informal and unspoken mandates of banking institutions, realtors, and homeowner associations that a single non-White person living in a neighborhood depreciates the value of White property.
"One thing that stirs the white people in these neighborhoods to opposition is the depreciation of property values when Negroes come in. It was observed during the Chicago study and during this study, however, that the areas that are usually penetrated by Negroes in their expansion are in neighborhoods that are already depreciating in value. There are numerous signs of such depreciation which often escape the observation of neighborhood residents who are not keen observers. Single-family residences begin to give way to boardinghouses and apartments. Flats are built, and sometimes business or manufacturing establishments come into the neighborhood. Thus an exclusive residence section is cheapened. If one of these depreciating sections lies close to a Negro neighborhood, or if it has good transit service to places where Negroes work, the time finally comes when Negroes are willing to pay more for property there than the white occupants are, and the transition begins. It is a perfectly normal operation of real estate supply and demand which cannot readily be accelerated by promotion or retarded by agitation."
Redlining grew out of the policies developed by the Franklin Roosevelt Administration to reduce foreclosures during the Depression. Federal housing agencies including the HOLC and the FHA determined whether areas were deemed unfit for investment by banks, insurance companies, and other financial services companies. The areas were physically demarcated with red shading on and were based on the area’s racial composition rather than income levels. By blotting these neighborhoods from economic security – often denying loans to homeowners and businesses – these neighborhoods quickly declined and could then be further charted for economic exclusion.
“Undesign the Redline” offers, in addition to the interactive exhibit, several workshops and curriculum on the history of structural racism and classism, how these designs compounded each other from 1938 Redlining maps until today.
The exhibition will be housed at the Cleveland Park Neighborhood Library April 11 - July 11, 2024. The exhibit is open during regular library hours, with optional guided tours available: Wednesdays at 10:30am, Saturdays at 2pm, Sunday at 1:30pm.
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