Slate, September 18 2018, Black Space, White Blindness
In John Sayles’ 1984 movie The Brother From Another Planet, a card shark is riding a northbound A train that is about to make the 66-block jump from Midtown to Harlem. “I have another magic trick for you,” he says. “Wanna see me make all the white people disappear?” The conductor announces the train is going express, skipping the Upper West Side; white passengers disembark.
The joke is a bit outdated; a 40-year exodus of black Americans and the more recent influx of gentrifying whites put blacks in the minority in Greater Harlem a decade ago. But it speaks to a familiar truth about the way that even urbane, liberal whites think about black neighborhoods: as places not to go.
Courtney Bonam used to hear a version of that in Chicago, where she taught psychology and African American studies at the University of Illinois, Chicago, before joining the University of California, Santa Cruz. “I’ve never heard anyone say, ‘I don’t want to live on the South Side because black people live there.’ But I’ve often heard people say, ‘I wouldn’t live south of Roosevelt or west of Western.’ That’s coded language and people feel just fine making comments like that.”
In a series of studies, Bonam has found that white Americans hold ironclad stereotypes about black neighborhoods. They’re likely to infer from the presence of a black family that a neighborhood is “impoverished, crime-ridden, and dirty,” though they make none of those assumptions about an identical white family in the same house. They’ll knock the value of a house down by $20,000, or nearly 15 percent, if they believe the neighborhood is black.
Results like these jibe with previous research indicating prejudices toward black space. One study found that more black and Latino residents increase the perception of social disorder. Another showed that putting more black people in a neighborhood decreases the perception of its quality. The sociologist Sharon Zukin has used Yelp to contrast perceptions of black and white gentrifying neighborhoods in New York.
When assigning class status to people, the participants gave virtually the same rankings to white and black profiles. But when assigning class status to houses, knowing the race of the neighborhood led to widely divergent outcomes. Most strikingly, white participants were almost incapable of assigning middle-class status to houses in black neighborhoods. Bonam calls this phenomenon “invisible middle-class black space.” People who are ready to accept the middle-class status of a black person can’t do the same with a neighborhood.
This has real consequences. One of Bonam’s experiments from 2016, which she modeled after real-life situations, asks participants whether they approve of the siting of a potentially hazardous chemical plant. You can guess what happens: All else held equal, there’s more support for putting it in a black neighborhood.
There has been plenty of explicit racism in the construction of the American city, from highway projects to school sites to lending, and that legacy stays with us. But this subtler devaluation of black space, Bonam posits, happens every day and influences how people connect to and protect these places. That might mean people with formal, institutional responsibilities—like a mortgage specialist at a bank, or a firefighter, or a city planner—as well as others who might not think to re-examine their own perceptions, like a driver going too fast on a residential street.
