The deed is done?: Challenging white innocence in racial covenants research

Keywords: housing, racial covenants, racial capitalism
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Mapping Racism and Resistance in Milwaukee County, a multi-year project identifying and mapping racially restrictive housing covenants and Black resistance to them in Milwaukee, is one of many examples of surging interest in understanding the role of racial covenants in predatory accumulation and exclusion within urban racial regimes of property. Working in collaboration with the Mapping Prejudice project and following their methodology of identifying racial covenants – a process that involves obtaining digitized property records, using OCR and python scripts to identify racial language in the text, and volunteer transcription racial covenants – our project is now in the community-engaged stage of collaboratively documenting and mapping the racial covenants. For many participants, racially restrictive covenants serve as powerful evidence of structural racism, illustrating the active, intentional construction of whiteness as property by local developers and realtors, insurance companies, institutions, and individual homeowners whose racist logics and intents are made visible in the historical documents. One response that racial covenants researchers throughout the country have observed is a desire on the part of some individual homeowners, non-profit organizations, and policy makers at variety of scales to redact racial covenants from the historical record. In this presentation, I place these responses within structures of white innocence and within broader debates challenging reductionist interpretations of racial segregation in housing and historical real estate practices (Michney and Winling, 2020; Markley et al, 2020; Gioielli, 2022; Imbrocio, 2021).