“There Goes the Neighborhood…”
Dublin Core
Title
“There Goes the Neighborhood…”
Description
We don’t teach our kids the truth about segregation. We don't want to acknowledge or take responsibility for it.
Our government created segregation where it did not exist before. Our government made it impossible for developers to build housing for black people and for realtors to sell to black families. Our government built highways through black communities and forced black people into public housing, which it then declined to maintain. Our government gave white people loans and low mortgages, built them well-funded schools and new homes in the suburbs. Our government gave whites the American Dream while systematically disadvantaging black people, robbing them of the basic human right and the single most valuable source of generational equity—a home.
Today, bias and discrimination are just as pervasive as in previous decades. In this project, I wanted to visually represent our government’s deliberate miseducation about the history of segregation, and why and how it is still around today. The main image—a redlined map of Brooklyn—represents what many of us are taught: that segregation happened in the 20th century, and then the Civil Rights Movement fixed everything. This narrative glosses over the countless forms of discrimination perpetuated by institutional agents of segregation—our government, mortgage and real estate companies, police and HOAs. This web of intricate and deliberate actions to create inequality is reflected in this piece as the obscured, fragmented text behind the redlined map.
There are no simple solutions to this systematic strategy of discrimination. There is no easy way to right these wrongs. But the least we can do is to take some responsibility for the fact that there is inequality because we wanted it this way. And it will take just as much aggressive and systematic action to start dismantling this system of oppression as it took for us to create it.
Our government created segregation where it did not exist before. Our government made it impossible for developers to build housing for black people and for realtors to sell to black families. Our government built highways through black communities and forced black people into public housing, which it then declined to maintain. Our government gave white people loans and low mortgages, built them well-funded schools and new homes in the suburbs. Our government gave whites the American Dream while systematically disadvantaging black people, robbing them of the basic human right and the single most valuable source of generational equity—a home.
Today, bias and discrimination are just as pervasive as in previous decades. In this project, I wanted to visually represent our government’s deliberate miseducation about the history of segregation, and why and how it is still around today. The main image—a redlined map of Brooklyn—represents what many of us are taught: that segregation happened in the 20th century, and then the Civil Rights Movement fixed everything. This narrative glosses over the countless forms of discrimination perpetuated by institutional agents of segregation—our government, mortgage and real estate companies, police and HOAs. This web of intricate and deliberate actions to create inequality is reflected in this piece as the obscured, fragmented text behind the redlined map.
There are no simple solutions to this systematic strategy of discrimination. There is no easy way to right these wrongs. But the least we can do is to take some responsibility for the fact that there is inequality because we wanted it this way. And it will take just as much aggressive and systematic action to start dismantling this system of oppression as it took for us to create it.
Creator
Anika Bednar
Format
Roadmaps, Tissue paper, Printed research, 3’x5’
Files
Citation
Anika Bednar, ““There Goes the Neighborhood…”,” Ray Warren Symposium 2022 Art Gallery, accessed May 18, 2024, https://rws2022artgallery.watzekdi.net/items/show/13.