WHITE PRIVILEGE, PHOENIX-STYLE

Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014) ("As in cities nationwide, New Deal housing policies made it virtually impossible for nonwhites to participate in the new, federally underwritten markets in residential property. Believing that integration represented a risk to stable property values, FHA official had, at the agency's inception, instituted policies that prevented the agency from insuring mortgages in neighborhoods with any significant nonwhite population while rejecting nonwhite applicants for homes in newly built subdivisions. These policies shaped the practices of the real estate industry in general. Real estate agents pledged to maintain the racial character of neighborhoods as a condition of licensing. 'That the entry of Non-Caucasian[s] into districts where distinctly Caucasian residents live tends to depress real estate values,' wrote realtor Stanly McMichaels in Real Estate Subdivisions, an industry textbook, 'is agreed to by practically all real estate subdividers and students of city life and growth.' Such agreements held firm in Phoenix. As local civil rights activist Lincoln Ragsdale testified at a hearing of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held in Phoenix in 1962, out of 31,000 homes built by three builders in northeastern Phoenix, homes all 'built directly or indirectly, through FHA commitments,' not a single home, 'not one,' Ragsdale testified, 'has been sold to a Negro.'" Id. at 83-84. From the bookjacket: "In 1940, Phoenix was a small, agricultural city of sixty-five thousand, and the Navajo Reservation was an open landscape of scattered sheepherders. Forty years later, Phoenix had blossomed into a metropolis of 1.5 million people, and the territory of the Navajo Nation was home to two of the largest strip mines in the world. Five coal-burning power plants surrounded the reservation, generating electricity for export to Phoenix, Los Angles, and other cities. Exploring the postwar developments of these two very different landscapes, Power Lines tells the story of the far-reaching environmental and social inequalities of metropolitan growth, and the roots of the contemporary coal-fueled climate change crisis." "Andrew Needham explains how inexpensive electricity became a requirement for modern life in Phoenix--driving assembly lines and cooling the oppressive heat. Navajo officials initially hoped energy development would improve their lands too, but as ash piles marked their landscapes, air pollution filled the skies, and almost half of Navajo households remained without electricity, many Navajos came to view power lines as a sign of their subordination in the Southwest, Drawing together urban, environmental, and American Indian history, Needham demonstrates how power limes created unequal connections between distant landscapes and how environmental change associated with suburbanization reached far beyond the metropolitan frontier, Needham also offers a new account of postwar inequality, arguing that residents of the metropolitan periphery suffered similar patterns of marginalization as those faced in America's inner cities." "Telling how coal from Indian lands became the fuel of modernity in the Southwest, Power Lines explores the dramatic effects that this energy system has had on the people and environment of the region.").