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.