Racial Order of Suburban Communities: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

The steady growth of the post‐war suburban Black middle class has been overshadowed by the mis‐characterization of the suburbs as conformist and racially homogeneous. Until recently, race remained an ever present yet unexplored dimension of studies of suburban communities. However, new suburban histories and a growing collection of black middle‐class suburban community case studies replace the monochrome descriptions of suburban life with an analysis that places the suburb within its regional, political, economic, and ideological landscape.

Urban geography II

“…A former ‘sundown town’, 1 Ferguson is a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, a major American city known for its racial segregation (Farley, 1983; Massey and Denton, 1993) and home to the infamously racialized Pruitt-Igoe housing project (see Bristol, 1991). The demography of Ferguson has changed over the last three decades from a former haven for whites fleeing St. Louis to an increasingly diverse suburb (Rothstein, 2014), a development that mirrors larger trends in suburban demography in the USA (Smith et al, 2001; Murphy, 2007; Short et al, 2007; Haynes, 2008; Allard and Roth, 2010; Neidt, 2013; see also Schafran, 2013). To urban geographers, particularly those who have been attendant to the mutually constitutive relationship between neoliberalism, racialization, and urban governance in American cities (Heynen et al, 2006; Gilmore, 2007; Wilson, 2007; Hankins et al, 2012; Bonds, 2013; Brahinksy, 2014; Derickson, 2014; Inwood, 2015), this finding by the Justice Department could hardly be surprising.…”