“The stories of mid-20th-century authors were very much about a new silence around race, even as race continued to shape everyone’s lives in those emerging urban and suburban spaces.”

– Dr. Adrienne Brown, Associate Professor in English and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago

Dr. Adrienne Brown reads cities the way professors read novels: carefully, and with lots of attention to what’s written between the lines. Adrienne teaches in the departments of English and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago, and she draws on buildings and literature to trace the ways in which space is racialized—both geographically, in where people live, and conceptually, in how we define complex concepts like vacancy, ownership, and home.

In this episode, Adrienne walks us through the ideas in her book, The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership. It uses textual archives to examine the long-entwined relationships between race and mass homeownership. In it, Adrienne highlights how Black women’s experiences reveal a fuller picture of what property ownership looked like in the United States over the past century. She points to the work of  artists and architects who challenge our understanding of space and the built environment, and she poses questions about how America might imagine more just ways of living in urban environments.

Learn More About Adrienne’s Work

Adrienne’s most recent book, The Residential is Racial: A Perceptual History of Mass Homeownership (Stanford University Press, 2024), uses textual archives to examine the tightly-woven relationships between race and mass homeownership. You can purchase the book here.

She also wrote The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), which won the Modernist Studies Association’s 2018 First Book Prize. It explores how artists and residents viewed the intersection of architecture and race in modernist, urban environments. You can purchase that wonderful book here.

Adrienne is the co-editor of Race and Real Estate (Oxford University Press, 2015), an interdisciplinary examination of race, property, and citizenship.

At the University of Chicago, she is the Faculty Director of Arts + Public Life, a University initiative that uses education, community engagement, and artistic expression to foster community in the South Side of Chicago.

SOURCES OF INSPIRATION MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE

Adrienne described how mid-twentieth-century writers sometimes took “these odd detours to write pieces that are just about their neighborhood.” The main plot of the story might have been mostly about something else–but there were moments when they attempted to capture place: what suburbs were like, what race was like; what it was like to have a lot of resources or not to. Here are people she specifically mentioned:

Ralph Ellison (1913–1994), a writer and scholar best known for The Invisible Man. He also wrote a series of essays about Harlem – here is one he published in Harper’s Magazine about how Harlem was full of energy and creativity, but how it also felt weirdly cut off from the rest of the country by its poverty and by American racism.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000), a poet and teacher who powerfully captured Black experience, has a lot of things named after her in Chicago–schools, parks, buildings, monuments. She’s arguably the city’s most beloved literary figure. At the end of this episode of the podcast, Adrienne quotes from Brooks’s poem, “Beverly Hills, Chicago.”

Thomas Pynchon (born in 1937), a novelist who—although not a California native—wrote extensively about Los Angeles and the surrounding area. Adrienne referenced his piece “A Journey Into The Mind of Watts,” published in the New York Times, which was an exploration of the Watts neighborhood after the 1965 riots. 

John Cheever (1912–1982), novelist and short story writer who depicted life in American suburbs just as the suburbs were starting to boom. Here at The Shape of the World, The Swimmer is one of our favorites of his short stories. In it, an affluent man in Westchester County decides to make his way home from a party by swimming the entire way, which in suburbia means he hops from one private backyard swimming pool to the next. (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well for him.)

Lorraine Hansberry (1930 – 1964). Adrienne talked about Hansberry’s play, “A Raisin in the Sun,” which tells the story of a Black family in Chicago grappling with whether they should purchase a home in a white neighborhood. It’s one of the most well-known and familiar plays in the United States, and continues to be frequently staged; but if you haven’t seen the play, you probably know the movie with Sidney Poitier Ruby Dee, and Louis Gossett, Jr.

Adrienne referenced Marshall Brown, a current American architect who first made Adrienne question her use of the word “vacancy.” He is a professor in architecture at Princeton University, where he also directs the Princeton Urban Imagination Center. See more of his work here.

Adrienne mentioned Amanda Williams, a recipient of one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius Awards.” Williams is an architect-turned-artist whose work examines the relationship between race and space. Some of her work specifically comments upon Hyde Park, where the University of Chicago is located. Williams’s best-known project, called Color(ed) Theory, drew attention to the discrepancy of investment in Black Chicago neighborhoods versus other neighborhoods in white areas. Williams repainted eight vacant houses in the palette of colors she’d observed in commercial products marketed toward Black consumers: one house got painted the color of dark purple of a Crown Royal whiskey bag; another was the bright reddish-orange color of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Learn more about Amanda Williams’s work here.