Chapter Eight - Segregation by Design

CHAPTER EIGHT

Segregation by Design

RACISM ISN’T JUST a slur.
It’s a floorplan.

In America, after the Supreme Court finally struck down segregation in schools, the battle didn’t end. It just moved zip codes. Racism didn’t need signs anymore. It had maps, mortgages, and zoning laws.

Redlining was the blueprint.

In the 1930s, government-backed agencies drew literal red lines around neighborhoods deemed “risky” for investment, which almost always meant Black. Banks denied loans. White families moved out. Black families were locked in.

Property values dropped. Schools decayed. Wealth couldn’t build. It wasn’t random. It was policy.

Meanwhile, highways got built through Black neighborhoods, not around them. Gentrification pushed communities out, then renamed their streets. Prisons replaced jobs. Liquor stores replaced clinics, because profit showed up where health didn’t. And when white suburbs got sidewalks and funding, inner cities got over-policing and neglect.

This wasn’t passive.

This was intentional.

Public housing was often segregated by race from the start. Gated communities advertised “safe neighborhoods” without ever saying what they meant. School districting turned education into a postcode lottery, one shaped decades earlier by those same red lines.

And prisons? Prisons became the new plantations, the modern version of extraction dressed up as law.

Mass incarceration surged in the 1980s and ‘90s, driven by policies that targeted Black and brown communities. Mandatory minimums. Three strikes. Stop and frisk. The war on drugs was never just about drugs.

It was about geography.

It was about race.

This chapter of racism didn’t wear hoods or robes.

It wore suits. Sat on planning commissions. Voted in city councils. Signed with paperwork.

Segregation never died.

It just got better at hiding.