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Colored Property & State Debt with David Freund
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William Saas: I'm curious to know the extent to which you're studying this history. In Colored Property, the very people who were being discriminated against, or who were most negatively affected, or even those most positively affected by the discriminatory policy, you got a sense that those people recognized and talked about and tried to do something about what was happening. I guess my question is: were there people speaking up against this at the time and clearly identifying it and were their voices suppressed? What happened?
David Freund: Yeah, that's a huge story. It's a subplot of my book, which focuses on the way that white people interpreted it. I have a very brief discussion of the amazing work that was done by activists and scholars, both black and white, to challenge these programs. And that's a well developed story. There were a lot of people reacting to it and critiquing it. And there are some early critiques, like Robert Weaver's work before he took over at HUD, and Charles Abrams, and a bunch of housing and civil rights activists, that were sort of developing a heterodox understanding of the role of state power. It is not the centerpiece of my work, but there are scholars doing amazing stuff re-creating those stories.
What I did find—and this is partly because it was my focus—I really went in and tried to understand why white people didn't understand the origins and dynamics of their own kind of structural privilege. That was the starting point for this project. And my big takeaway is that the vast majority of white people became convinced by and deeply invested in this mythology that was spread: that this was not about "race," but rather about some kind of pure and choice-driven "market" dynamic.
One of the stories I track is about folks in the suburbs of Detroit. That was my local case study: how did these people respond to critiques of discrimination in the postwar era? Everytime [a critic] said, "Hey, look, we have segregation, this is unfair, and the government's involved," I was able to reconstruct [how residents] told a colorblind narrative about meritocracy and did so, in large part, by just grabbing onto the very tools, systems, and market mechanisms that had been created by the federal government. They literally turned to the FHA manual and said, "Look, no, no. Just like the FHA says. This isn't about race."
This is what FHA officials were arguing. [And] I believe that they convinced themselves of that. There were certainly some people who were saying, "Well, we really don't want to live near those folks." But this was the master narrative. I reconstructed this not just from public statements. I looked at the correspondence between civil rights activists and FHA officials. The FHA officials always responded with the same line: "Look, we don't shape the market."
In the end, I argue that a broad swath of people who consider themselves white in postwar America drank the Kool Aid. They bought it. It was in their interest to believe that they were not complicit. And it helped shut down a lot of activism and support for fair housing. I mean, we know that activism got a national platform during the Civil Rights movement, but there's another story to be told about enforcement of civil rights and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. I would argue that pushback against enforcement, and eventually, the disassembly of those mechanisms, which is still underway, are fueled by this same kind of willful ignorance and the belief that there are these "market forces" that operate separately from people's ideas about people, about place, and about who should live with who.
David Freund is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, and author of Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (U Chicago Press, 2010).
