“I Live Here”: How Residents of Color Experience Racialized Surveillance and Diversity Ideology in a Liberal Predominantly White Neighborhood

In many liberal predominantly white neighborhoods, white residents view their communities as inclusive yet they also engage in racialized surveillance to monitor individuals they perceive as outsiders. Some of these efforts center on people of color in neighborhood open spaces. We use a diversity ideology framework to analyze this contradiction, paying particular attention to how residents of color experience racialized surveillance of their neighborhood’s publicly accessible parks and swimming pools. This article draws on data from neighborhood documents, neighborhood digital platforms, and interviews with residents of a liberal, affluent, predominantly white community that was expressly designed with public spaces open to non-residents. We find that resident surveillance of neighborhood public spaces is racialized, occurs regularly, and happens in person and on neighborhood online platforms where diversity as liability rhetoric is conveyed using colorblind discourse. These monitoring efforts, which are at times supported by formal measures, impact residents of color to varying degrees. We expand on diversity ideology by identifying digital and in-person racialized surveillance as a key mechanism by which white residents attempt to enforce racialized boundaries and protect whiteness in multiracial spaces and by highlighting how Black and Latinx residents, in particular, navigate these practices.

The sedimentation of whiteness as landscape

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, one of the axioms of a “just recovery” was to redevelop the city’s historic high ground. While the call to limit the city’s footprint problematized low-lying geographies, the majority of which were Black, it ignored Lakeview, a low-lying, predominantly white neighborhood devastated by Katrina. Despite its vulnerability to flooding, Lakeview has thrived in the years following Katrina. Property values are rising and public and private investments are rolling in. Lakeview’s unquestioned future and its (re)valorization in the wake of the storm speak to how racial regimes of property have informed the reconstruction of the city and to the role that urban planning plays in constructing and valorizing landscapes of whiteness. This paper interrogates the ongoing lives of whiteness, asking how whiteness operates as an invisible substrate within planning and property regimes. Utilizing the concept of sedimentation, it explores how planning takes part in concretizing racial formation processes and suggests that the project of sustaining white geographies lays bare deeper questions about the ways that planning enacts multi-scaled, racialized regimes of property. This article excavates the emergence of Lakeview from the backswamps of a delta city to examine the unquestioned valorizations of whiteness as a landscape.

Inconceivable Middle-Class Black Space: The Architecture and Consequences of Space-Focused Stereotype Content at the Race–Class Nexus

White Americans tend to stereotype a Black neighborhood as lower class and less desirable than a similar White neighborhood. A strong mental image of Black areas, in general, as lower class and undesirable contributes to this perceptual race-gap. The present studies show that a weak mental image of middle-class Black space as middle class and desirable may also contribute. First, stereotype content analyses reveal how Whites’ diffuse mental image of middle-class Black space— rundown, suburban, clean, crime-ridden—overlaps with both Black and middle-class space stereotypes. Second, the more difficulty Whites experience imagining middle-class Black space as invariably middle class and desirable, the more likely they are to stereotype a Black (vs. White) neighborhood as low quality, feel less connected to it, and devalue a house there. Whites’ diffuse mental image of middle-class Black space may thus contribute to ongoing racial injustices (e.g., wealth disparities, residential segregation).

Raisin, Race, and the Real Estate Revolution of the Early Twentieth Century

Lorraine Hansberry’s hit play of 1957, A Raisin in the Sun, centered on the decision of an African American family in Chicago, the Youngers, to move to a house in a white neighborhood. The play is set in the post–World War II era, but many of its scenes and actions relate back to real estate practices that began at the turn of the century and that continued to evolve into the midcentury and to some degree beyond. During those decades, housing development and finance increased dramatically in scale, professionalization, and standardization. But in their concern for their predominantly white consumers’ preferences for segregation, real estate developers, brokers, financial institutions, and finally governmental agencies adopted standard practices that excluded African Americans from many housing opportunities and that then reinforced white preferences for housing segregation. Many seemingly minor features of the play reflect the way that African Americans had been sidelined in the earlier decades’ evolving real estate practices—not just the family’s overcrowded apartment, but also more subtle cues, such as the source of the initial funds for the new house, the methods for its finance, and the legal background of the white homeowners’ effort to discourage the purchase. This essay pinpoints these and other small clues, and describes how standardizing real estate practices dating from the turn of the century effectively crowded out African American consumers like the Youngers, with consequences that we continue to observe in modern patterns of urban segregation.

Design Debates

This chapter reviews the primary design debates involved in neighborhood formation: whether they can or should be planned all at once and as complete units; their boundedness and centeredness, and their street composition and its effect on internal and external connectivity. All of these debates involve the limits and practicalities of neighborhood identity-building and consciousness, which can be thought of as being on a continuum from most extreme (whole units on clean slates) to more subtle (increasing connectivity via interconnecting pathways). Moving forward, there is hope for design resolution because the choices are not so black and white. Neighborhood design can maintain the positive aspects of identity-building by emphasizing centers (which also minimizes the need for explicit boundaries) and streets that can be simultaneously well connected and pedestrian based.

Chemists Who Work in Industry

Dr. Dorothy J. Phillips (Fig. 2.1) is a retired industrial chemist and a member of the Board of Directors of the ACS. Dorothy Jean Wingfield was born in Nashville, Tennessee on July 27, 1945, the third of eight children, five girls and three boys. She was the second girl and is very close to her older sister. Dorothy grew up in a multi- generational home as both her grandmothers often lived with them. Her father, Reverend Robert Cam Wingfield Sr., born in 1905, was a porter at the Greyhound Bus station and went to school in the evenings after he was called to the ministry. He was very active in his church as the superintendent of the Sunday school; he became a pastor after receiving an associate’s degree in theology and pastoral studies from the American Baptist Theological Seminary. Her mother, Rebecca Cooper Wingfield, occasionally did domestic work. On these occasions, Dorothy’s maternal grandmother would take care of the children. Dorothy’s mother was also very active in civic and school activities, attending the local meetings and conferences of the segregated Parent Teachers Association (PTA) called the Negro Parent Teachers Association or Colored PTA. For that reason, she was frequently at the schools to talk with her children’s teachers. She also worked on a social issue with the city to move people out of the dilapidated slum housing near the Capitol. The town built government subsidized housing to relocate people from homes which did not have indoor toilets and electricity. She was also active in her Baptist church as a Mother, or Deaconess, counseling young women, especially about her role as the minister’s wife. When Dorothy went to school in 1951, Nashville schools were segregated and African American children went to the schools in their neighborhoods. But Dorothy’s elementary, junior high, and high schools were segregated even though the family lived in a predominately white neighborhood. This was because around 1956, and after Rosa Park’s bus boycott in Montgomery, AL, her father, like other ministers, became more active in civil rights and one of his actions was to move to a predominately white neighborhood.

The Problem of Race and Chicago’s Great Tivoli Theater

This chapter historicizes the building of “the great palace theaters” of the early twentieth century, paying particular attention to real-life racial politics. Inspired by the architectural designs of the Chateau de Versailles, the Tivoli Theater was located in Washington Park with its 85 percent white population. The theater, originally built in 1921 for white neighborhood residents, employed a number of black men and women in service capacities. Due to gradual demographic shifts, Tivoli Theater management pursued a policy of separate seating for audiences for the live performances and film exhibitions. The chapter notes that the ornate theaters, including the Regal Theater, which was the black counterpart to the Tivoli Theater, sought to sell the feeling of being upper class while giving access to all classes.

Who Looks Suspicious? Racialized Surveillance in a Predominantly White Neighborhood

In recent decades, neighborhoods across the United States have begun to employ digital media to monitor their communities for outsiders who are seen as suspicious. Yet, little is known about these surveillance practices and their consequences at the individual and neighborhood levels. Such monitoring behaviors are important to analyze not only because of the ways that perceptions of criminal threat are often racialized but also because of the role that private citizens play in initiating contact between strangers and the police. Based on an analysis of e-mails submitted to a listserv in a liberal, predominantly white neighborhood from September 2008 through August 2009, this article explores how residents identify, discuss, and respond to people whom they define as suspicious. Findings show that most suspicious person e-mails focus on black men who are also more likely to be portrayed as unique threats to neighborhood safety. These results suggest that listserv surveillance practices foster racialized notions of criminal threat that both reinforce the boundaries of predominantly white neighborhoods and reproduce the perception of black men as criminals.

Resident and Police Perceptions of the Neighborhood

The successful implementation of community policing programs is dependent on police and residents understanding the needs of their communities. Differences between resident and police perceptions can affect the success of crime prevention strategies. Much neighborhood research highlights residents’ perceptions of their neighborhoods; the perceptions of police officers are often not taken into account. The current research examines police and resident perceptions of three high crime neighborhoods in a Midwestern city in the United States. Results indicate residents and police have different interpretations of the neighborhoods. Resident perceptions of neighborhood measures are relatively consistent across the three neighborhoods. Police perceptions of their relationship with residents and the close-knit structure of the community, however, are more positive in the primarily White neighborhood that has an active crime prevention program. The findings suggest that what the officers see in the neighborhood is driving perceptions, while actual problems might play a secondary role.