Reading Matthew Desmond’s “Evicted” has brought me more understanding of the housing climate
that we currently deal with in our society. Desmond discusses many issues and
strong points, which have resonated with me. After reading the book, I came to
the conclusion that this system was not built for people of color, specifically
black people. My connection comes from Desmond going back in history and
explaining that “racial oppression enabled land exploitation on a massive
scale.” He brought up history that we have all learned before in a social studies
course but connected it in ways I didn’t think of.
The racial oppression that Desmond discusses starts with
slavery, when black slaves could only profit from the dirt but were not able to
own the land (Desmond 250). Issues continued into the Civil War when the free
slaves had opportunities for landownership but due to the Reconstruction era,
affluent whites were able to keep a virtual monopoly on the soil; plantations returned
as sharecroppers which caused black families to fall “into a cycle of
subsistence farming and debt while white planters continued to grow rich.”
Racial divide has constantly been an issue in America, since
its inception. Our issues within the country have been raised over and over
again, with the black community trying to go from 3/5ths of a person to a full
and accepted member of society. All throughout the twentieth century there were
the issues of bad mortgages, tenement housing and ‘ghettos’, Jim Crow laws, red
lining and the Civil Rights movement. There has been very little change for the
black community and the system seems to have made little/ slow change to
improve and provide similar or the same opportunities for the white
counterpart.
Desmond makes the point early on saying “If incarceration had
come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction
was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women
were locked out.” (Desmond, 98). The system (all) were not made for us, they
were made for people who were considered equal and worthy of being considered
so; the wealthy, white man.