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Hands Up! Why We All Can't Breathe

In order to preserve the racial and economic superiority first of the suburbs, now of the exurbs, zoning regulations were rewritten to prohibit the alteration of homes in white neighborhoods that would allow less affluent buyers and renters to move into those neighborhoods. Meanwhile, older suburbs into which African-Americans were crowded were rezoned as industrial areas, meaning houses could be subdivided and industry could locate there, insuring that public services like schools would be underfunded and that the same environment that had bred crime in the inner-city slums, whether inhabited by African-Americans, Irish, Jews, Italians or any other group, would provide the same social instability that gave rise to antisocial or even criminal behavior by some in those communities.

Thomas J. Hubschman