In the chapter named “Power Suburbs and the Construction of Race” by Becky M. Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese, the authors discuss suburbanization and its effects on racial segregation in postwar America. They claim that, while white people could access the market freely, which gave them access to property ownership and upward mobility, “blacks and other racial minorities faced hostility at every level of the suburban housing market.” As a result, suburban areas became dominated by white people, who saw the poorer minorities who could not gain access as inferior. As a result, the authors claim that a sense of white identity and supremacy formed in the suburbs that turned the inhabitants against minorities. At the same time, minorities struggled to access the suburbs despite the barriers before them, which often led to conflict, sometimes of the violent variety.
The first notable point in the chapter is that white people did not want to live near minorities because they thought it lowered the value of a property. The authors claim that this view was “encouraged by public policy and years of promotion by the real estate industry.” Newly middle-class families that had recently acquired a home did not want its price to drop. As such, they would consciously exclude minorities, assisted by a network of public and private entities also interested in doing so. The second noteworthy point was that the segregation of African Americans and other minorities was deliberate. The authors claim that cities would create dedicated areas for them “so that black communities could grow without upsetting segregation or provoking neighborhood violence.” These efforts contributed to the formation of race-based communities and identities that deepened the racial divide.