Post-war economic development improved the living conditions of millions of Americans and elevated a new middle-class consumer identity as a dominant social and cultural aspiration. As early as the Woodrow Wilson administration’s “Own Your Own Home” campaign, American politicians, commercial and real estate interests promoted homeownership as an antidote to left labor militancy.36 The turn to housing and real estate development as an economic growth model and political maneuver against labor insurgency would gain ground amid the Depression. Beginning with the New Deal establishment of the Federal Housing Administration and expansion after World War II under the leadership of Harry Truman, the US embarked on a housing revolution, a process of mortgage lending, massive highway and infrastructure development, and new home construction that transformed millions into nominal property-holders and members of the new middle class. Suburban development and all manner of consumer activity propagated a new consumer-class identity, sweeping away old urban ethnic and proletarian affinities, and cementing the loyalty of more secure workers to the Cold War growth trajectory of defense spending, urban renewal and suburbanization. Woven into this same process of suburbanization were policies that resegregated the black urban poor through tower block public housing, freeway construction and practices like redlining, which combined to devalue and deter investment in central city neighborhoods.
Out of this post-World War II urban-spatial transformation, race emerged as the dominant symbolic language for understanding American inequality. The combination of home ownership, access to suburban school districts, police protection, tax-relief, and relative economic advantage formed the material basis for the conservative positions of many whites who came to support the New Right, but we know that not all whites embraced such conservatism. Relative urbanity, union-membership, civic organizations, religion, familial and community traditions of activism, and other idiosyncratic factors continued to matter in shaping political ideology and policy commitments even in suburbia. “White” became a synonym for middle class, suburban, law-abiding, virtuous, property-owning, hardworking, and self-governing, and “black” came to function as a euphemism for poor, urban, criminal, dysfunctional, dispossessed, lazy, and dependent. Whiteness discourse accepts and legitimizes these symbolic markers of post-war class structure, without undertaking a more nuanced examination of actual material and political interests, how they are formed, articulated and contested within specific historical-local contexts.
