Our work is part of a broader reckoning with the legacies of racist housing policies. We cannot address the inequities of the present without an understanding of the past. So we created Mapping Prejudice to shed new light on these historic practices. This history has been willfully forgotten. But racial covenants did the work of Jim Crow in northern cities like Minneapolis. Contemporary white residents of Minneapolis like to think their city never had formal segregation. Racial covenants dovetailed with redlining and predatory lending practices to depress homeownership rates for African Americans.
They also limited access to community resources like parks and schools. In Minneapolis, these restrictions served as powerful obstacles for people of color seeking safe and affordable housing. Structural barriers stopped many people who were not white from buying property and building wealth for most of the last century. This research is showing what communities of color have known for decades. We are expanding the geographic focus of our work to incorporate new communities. This allowed us to build a map that shows how these racial restrictions were embedded in the physical landscape. We have led community members in the work of unearthing thousands of racial covenants that reserved land for the exclusive use of white people. In the bluer countries, fewer people said they would not want neighbors of a different race in red countries, more people did.We are a team of geographers, historians, digital humanists and community activists seeking to expose structural racism. So I went back to the source, compiled the original data and mapped it out on the infographic above. Unfortunately, the Swedish economists did not include all of the World Values Survey data in their final research paper. (The study concluded that economic freedom had no correlation with racial tolerance, but it does appear to correlate with tolerance toward homosexuals.)
Some respondents, picking from a list, chose “people of a different race.” The more frequently that people in a given country say they don’t want neighbors from other races, the economists reasoned, the less racially tolerant you could call that society. The survey asked respondents in more than 80 different countries to identify kinds of people they would not want as neighbors. So they turned to something called the World Values Survey, which has been measuring global attitudes and opinions for decades.Īmong the dozens of questions that World Values asks, the Swedish economists found one that, they believe, could be a pretty good indicator of tolerance for other races. When two Swedish economists set out to examine whether economic freedom made people any more or less racist, they knew how they would gauge economic freedom, but they needed to find a way to measure a country’s level of racial tolerance.
0 kommentar(er)
