OUP - Abstract

Buying Into the Middle Class: Residential Segregation and Racial Formation in the United States, 1920-64

Dissertation School: University of Chicago

Pages: 191

Publication Date: December 1999

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Access Number: 10702

Abstract:
This dissertation examines the meaning of residential segregation in the United States between 1920 and 1964. The author focuses on a period in which dramatic historical shifts take place, when class and racial ideologies undergo important reconfigurations and new social articulations result. This period is particularly interesting because it exists at a crossroads where processes of Americanization, mass consumption, urban and suburban development, migration and resettlement interact in dynamic confluence. The author studies fights over housing in order to illuminate ideologies of race and class revealed through expressions of exclusion and desire. At a time when new habits of consumption blurred the boundaries between working class and middle class status and when it became increasingly possible for the average American to become middle class through participation in the mass market, class position became something that needed to be secured in a much more definitive fashion. Measures had to be taken in order to ensure the symbolic value of certain material indicators such as the home or the neighborhood, rendering them stable, unchanging emblems of one's desired status. In this study the author looks at various methods of residential racial exclusions, including the use of restrictive covenants, as means by which class status was secured. This study addresses the question of why residential segregation became so widespread in a period of increasing metropolitan residential expansion, when upward class mobility became a realistic possibility for many Americans. Why was it that when the accessibility of home ownership was at its greatest-in a period of dynamic metropolitan growth-that "non-whites" depreciated property values-reveals ways in which home ownership, social mobility, Americanization and racial exclusion were all closely intertwined. When the racial exclusivity of a neighborhood was threatened, it is clear that in most cases it was not simply the property's pecuniary value that was at stake, but rather the property's symbolic value as a status marker for those who were in the process of constituting themselves as middle class Americans. In a period of rapid social transformation, racial difference was seized upon and made to stand in for weakening class distinctions.

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