TY - JOUR AU - Brooks, Jeneve PY - 2014/07/22 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Exploring Home Ownership, Residential Segregation, and the Growing Racial Wealth Gap JF - TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology JA - TRAILS VL - IS - SE - DO - UR - https://trails.asanet.org/article/view/exploring-home-ownership-residential-segregation SP - AB - On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the infamous "I Have a Dream Speech" in which he reflected upon the state of black America one hundred years after slavery: "…the life of the Negro is still badly crippled by the manacles of segregation…the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity." Now more than fifty years since MLK’s declarations, the racial wealth gap between white and black households continues to grow and good portion of this disparity is attributable to historical as well as current patterns of home ownership and residential segregation. This assignment explores these critical issues in more depth. First, students engage in Seiter’s discussion-based classroom activities (2003), critically reflecting on the attainment of family wealth. Next, students watch Episode 3 ("The House We Live In") of the documentary, Race: The Power of an Illusion (Adelman 2003) and later read the research and policy brief "The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap: Explaining the Black-White Economic Divide" (Shapiro, Meshede, and Osoro 2013). After discussing the insights of the film and the report, students write their own paper summarizing the practices and policies that have led to varying rates of homeownership and residential segregation which has increased the wealth gap between blacks and whites. In addition, they conduct their own "personal family inventory," contemplating about their families’ patterns of home ownership, residential segregation, and wealth building and whether or not they have benefited from racial privilege. Students are asked to think deeply about how their answers would vary if they had been born into a different race/ethnicity or family. Finally, the students propose social policy solutions to decrease the racial wealth gap, focusing particularly on home ownership and residential segregation. ER -