J P O'Malley

Racism and real estate

If racism presupposes that different ethnic groups cannot live harmoniously together, then segregation puts that theory into practice. Carl H. Nightingale’s Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities, teaches us that separating cities along racial colour-lines, has always concerned one commodity: real estate.

Cities, Nightingale observers, are places where people of several races are meant to come together. But this has not been the case. Instead, residential segregation and city-splitting politics — across the globe — has ensured that by putting a coerced colour-line in place, white-power has remained the definitive norm.

Tracing the trajectory of segregationist politics from 1700, to the present day, Nightingale notes that racial segregationists have consistently worked within three kinds of institutions: governments, networks of intellectual exchange, and the real estate industry. All three have been critically important in the West’s rise to global dominance.

City-splitting politics dates back to when cities first came into being over 7,000 years ago. It was only in the late 18th century, however, that Europeans injected the concepts of race into the political landscape of segregationist politics.

With the advent of The Enlightenment, and inspired by the writings of Francois Bernier — who equated skin colour with cultural characteristics — philosophers like David Hume, and Voltaire, began to project the idea of a hierarchy of races: placing whites at the top, and the darkest races at the bottom.

Once the concept of race acquired a new universal meaning in the late 1700s, leading intellectuals at the time, believed cities had to be split along urban colour-lines, in order for &”civilisation” to progress. This ideological shift into white and black town systems first began in Calcutta, when the parliament in Westminster passed the Regulating Act of 1772 — a law which aimed to overhaul the management of the East India Company’s rule in the vast subcontinent.

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