“The house we live in” is the final episode of “Race: the power of an illusion”. This episode is mainly focused on individual behaviors and attitudes of institutions that created and shaped race in the United States before and after the Second World War. Additionally, the episode emphasizes the ways through which the institutions gave various groups immensely unequal chances. The main issues raised in the episode are about the definition of whiteness.
The episode shows how unclear it was to define what characterized an American. The early 20th century witnessed dramatic events concerning race in the United States. African Americans, Indians, and Japanese, among other ethnicities, applied to become American citizens in vain. Repeatedly, the courts utilized paradoxical logic to decide who was white; this enabled them to preserve their race. Following World War II, prejudiced federal policies assisted the whites to possess homes in the periphery while it stalled the colored people. The economic gap between those who were considered whites and those who were considered non-whites increased at an alarming rate.
The economic gap between whites and nonwhites worsened when it became clear that only white-controlled zones were funded by the FHA. Interestingly, European ethnicities that were once considered non-whites by law were allowed to blend with the whites. In the process, the Europeans blended and they were allowed to reap the benefits of being white in the United States. This increased their equity as the values of their properties increased rapidly.
In contrast, the non-whites were blocked from increasing their equity through discriminatory policies. The episode also shows how four decades following the Civil Rights Movement, the environment has not been made evenhanded. Moreover, “colorblind” policies, which came about after the Civil Rights Movement, have only perpetuated the inequality among the American ethnic groups.
The episode provides an opportunity to examine if Civil Rights Movement leveled the playing field for various ethnicities in the United States. A close examination of the episode shows that the playing ground was not leveled because the whites had accumulated enough equity to keep them up the ladder in the racial profile. On the other hand, African Americans and the colored groups had a fragile base for accumulating equities.
The change brought about by ‘colorblind’ policies meant that they would remain at the bottom of the ladder. It is quite interesting that the federal government purposely determined the fate of different ethnicities in the United States based on the color of their skin and their culture. Moreover, it is absurd that the federal institutions made perception of the color of the skin based on their beliefs that were propagated by discriminatory myths like white supremacy, among others.
Cultural differences in the various ethnicities created the fear of the unknown when ethnicities interacted for the first time. For instance, when the colored people infiltrated white-dominated suburbs, this move initiated the white’s move away from the suburbs. Moreover, intermediaries utilized this opportunity to defraud both ethnicities by buying houses cheaply from the whites and selling them expensively to the non-whites.
It is worth noting that the difficulty in accepting cross-cultural differences between the various ethnicities created the inequalities thereafter. Despite the immigrants’ desire to learn the language of the land, they were still discriminated against because of cultural differences. The whites were not ready to incorporate the immigrants from different cultures into their society.