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Segregation In Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun

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Segregation is when people are separated by reasons of race, employment, wealth, living conditions, and education. However, integration is the coming together of people or any given reason. Throughout the history of the United States, neighborhoods have been segregated which caused violence and crime. They have also been integrated and brought peace and unity. The play “A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry, she explains the hardships African Americans experience with segregation. She further argues how difficult it is for Blacks to integrate themselves into White neighborhoods. The author also suggests that Blacks face poverty issues as a result of Whites not allowing them to live around them. Race is a factor that causes segregation …show more content…

Hansberry explains that when The Younger family wanted to buy a house up at Clybourne Park, an entirely white neighborhood, the would be neighbors sends Mr. Lindner, from the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, to offer the Youngers money in return for staying away. He offered them $6,000 not to move in because the value of the neighborhood would be reduced . The value of the neighborhood would drop if Blacks would move in because the majority of the whites would move out. The name of such occurrence is called “blockbusting”. Blockbusting was a business process of U.S. real estate agents and building developers to convince white property owners to sell their house at low prices out of fear that racial minorities would soon be moving into the neighborhood. That would be used to lure the minorities especially African Americans out of these neighborhoods so the overall profit of the houses would not drop due to them moving in and the Whites moving out. The way the neighbors reacted was quickly a sign that the Younger family is not welcomed in the society. According to blackpast.org “Middle class African Americans, who were otherwise denied access to previously all-white neighborhoods, were now offered admittance at artificially inflated prices set by the speculators”. Now, that means that the people living in these all white societies were proposed something called a “black tax” which the prices

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Nichols enhanced and streamlined the use of restrictive covenants. Using the fears of property values decreasing, Nichols added a racial restriction into the deeds. In all of the deeds for the land he developed was this restriction, “None of said lots may be conveyed to, used, owned or occupied by negroes as owners or tenants. ”1 While this might seem like an isolated instance, restrictive covenants occurred all over the United States in the early 20th century. J.C. Nichols employed an addition that would enhance the covenant and make it more appealing to the “desired” homeowner; that addition was a self-renewing contract every 25 years.2

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The idea of equality for all people, regardless of their race, is instilled in the American society of today. Unfortunately, this idea has not always been present, which ultimately has caused many issues for America’s society in the past. As discussed in the book Our Town: Race, Housing, and the Soul of Suburbia, David L. Kirp focuses on the inequality that was found between the low-income blacks and the middle class whites in a South Jersey town, Mount Laurel. At the time, the whites had a goal of running the blacks out of the town by making the costs of housing expensive enough where blacks could not afford it. This lead to unequal treatment for the blacks who lived in Mount Laurel compared to the whites when it came to housing opportunities.

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She points out that around the time the separations start, puberty and the questions of identifying themselves start to arise, making the black kids feel like outcasts to the white kids. While kids start to segregate themselves, the issues at hand being to strengthen, making them harder to fix as the kids age. With segregation rates as high as they still were, Kozol then goes on to argue that schools reflect lives of the students attending the schools, which corresponds to the dominant races of the school. I agree with what Kozol argues that white schools are normally better built and nicer, reflecting the higher income families. Dominantly black and Hispanic schools reflect much lower income families and are typically broken down, such as one elementary school he described.

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Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat”. Buying the property at a low price, then selling at a high rate to lower income black families just to gain profit. Another example Coates uses is a black family in a white neighborhood, who had a cross burned outside their front lawn. Coates used pathos very well in this article. He wants the reader to understand the hardships that were created for

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Black residents were being forced to leave out of fear of violence, terror, and losing everything they had worked for. Out of the 58 families who owned their property, 24 sold theirs for extremely low-ball offers. Some had to sell theirs for one-third of what they paid due to the exigent circumstances. The remaining 34 property owners just left theirs and fled.

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Based on this we can conclude that the mere image of being black is shattered and anywhere you go you will be judged as lower class. The fear created by the media make it seem like if you were to rent your home to a black descent, they’ll destroy your home or yet create a hostile environment and make it uncomfortable to other people. Another fear that sticks around with Africans Americans is that they “promote the gang lifestyle or are anti law enforcement” (Glassner 122). Though the realtor shuns African Americans from renting the homes they would not even rent/sale the home to a black family, even if they were well qualified, with higher incomes, and was willing to pay a higher down payment. From the book The Black Image in the White Mind by Andrew Rojecki and Robert Entman, they present us with white beliefs stating “the media conveys “problematic” images of African Americans even after decades of heightened awareness and vigilance to rid the media of stereotypes”.

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While gentrification is the removal of lower income minorities from a deteriorated urban neighborhood in hopes to “revive

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Introduction Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” led a great quest for the Younger household. Raisin is set in subsidized housing in Southside Chicago, in which three Black female relatives live and interact with their brother, husband, and son Walter. African Americans were frowned upon before the writing of “A Raisin in the Sun”. However, it her notorious story provided individuals of multiple races new hope for life. In 2006, Diana Adesola Mafe provided the world with her opinion of “A Raisin in the Sun”.

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One way in which this fear is implemented is by increasing the inequality between races. Urban planning, in particular, has played a large role in this as it has historically advantaged some people while putting others at a disadvantage. From gentrification and racial disparities in law enforcement to practices such as blockbusting and redlining, it is apparent that policies and decisions made by city planners were not designed to benefit everyone equally. Particularly the Housing Act of 1949 and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. Both of these policies displaced residents through the use of eminent domain and condemnation laws (Budds, “How Urban Design Perpetuates Racial Inequality – And What We Can Do About It”).

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Wealth is one of the factors why residential segregation is an increasing problem. Golash- Boza explains, “Residential segregation happened when different groups of people are sorted into discount neighborhoods” (271). It is because of housing segregation

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They argue that institutional racism in the housing market enacted by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), private loan and real estate institutions and actors, and white residents effectively and permanently isolated African Americans. Institutionalized racist practices of the housing market such as redlining and steering, coupled with white flight and structural disinvestment in African American neighborhoods, effectively isolated African Americans and further contributed to the creation of black ghettos. Thus, residential segregation concentrates poverty, erodes institutional and economic support, and ultimately causes its residents to normalize their problematic social environment of high levels of joblessness, teenage pregnancy, drugs, and violence. If the segregation of African Americans were to be resolved by their economic achievement and class mobility, middle-class African Americans should be able to enter white neighborhoods of comparable income levels. However, as Massey and Denton show, once the threshold of “too many black families” is crossed, white flight occurs and poorer black families move into the neighborhood, creating (and expanding) racially segregated

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Public Policy on Housing Discrimination Executive Summary Housing discrimination and segregation have long been present in the American society (Lamb and Wilk). The ideals of public housing and home buying have always been intertwined with the social and political transformation of America, especially in terms of segregation and inequality of capital and race (Wyly, Ponder and Nettking). Nevertheless, the recent unrest in Ferguson, Missouri and in Baltimore due to alleged police misconduct resulting to deaths of black men brought light on the impoverished conditions in urban counties in America (Lemons). This brings questions to the effectiveness of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in devising more fair-housing facilities (Jost).

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For bringing the home within the reach of a black purchaser, however, the speculator extracted a considerable price.” (Jamelle Bouie,How we built the ghettos, page 2) This is like when Lena the mother of Walter and beneatha bought a new house and only had to put a small down payment on it in order to buy the

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Racism is a major issue that has effected many people since its discovery. Racism is the hatred by a person of one race pointed at a person of another race. A Raisin in the Sun deals with the impact of racism on the life of the younger family.

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Lance Freeman, an associate professor of urban planning in Columbia, wanted to investigate if there was any displacement going on in two predominantly black neighborhoods that was briskly gentrifying. Much to his dismay, he couldn’t find any correlation between gentrification and displacement. What was surprising to Freeman was his discovery, “poor residents and those without a college education were actually less likely to move if they resided in gentrifying neighborhoods”. (Sternbergh, 19) Freeman adds, “The discourse on gentrification, has tended to overlook the possibility that some of the neighborhood changes associated with gentrification might be appreciated by the prior residents.” (Sternbergh, 19)

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