A Shout Out to the Westside of Whoville: Why Majority-Black Neighborhoods Exist
I am a fan of the Christmas classics, especially from the Temptations, the Whispers, Nat King Cole, and others. I also enjoy old tunes reimagined as hip new grooves by singers such as Chris Brown, Mariah Carey, Fantasia, and Christina Aguilera. However, this year, I noticed a lyric from a Christmas song by Busta Rhymes and Jim Carey, Grinch 2000, that made me reflect on America’s history of housing segregation.
At the end of the song, Carey gives a “shout out to the Westside of Whoville.” Even though this lyric made me laugh at first, I began thinking about America’s oppressive policies that racialized space. The “Westside of Whoville,” then, represents the collection of cities across America that consciously created majority-Black neighborhoods through forced segregation and housing discrimination.
Many people take pride in being raised on the Black side of towns in places such as the Southside of Chicago or the Westside of Detroit, Atlanta, or Las Vegas. While property is a path to accumulate wealth; our residency also creates a sense of belonging and identity. So, pride in our upbringing and shared identity is a good thing. However, we cannot take pride in how low-income neighborhoods of color were created. Black enclaves were consciously designed to put “social distance” between certain ethnic groups and others and sanctioned by federal policy, systemic racial exclusion, and ongoing efforts to restrict the resources and networks that make the American dream affordable and accessible to all.
More specifically, these Black enclaves, also called “the hood,” exist because they have been victimized by bank redlining, real estate steering, restrictive covenants, income inequality, disinvestment, and generational poverty. Without our government’s purposeful imposition on racial segregation, other causes such as private prejudice, white flight, and self-segregation still would have existed but with far less opportunity for expression. Therefore, the Westside of Whoville shares the history of property ownership built on the violent colonization of Indigenous People’s lands, the brutal enslavement of Black people, and America’s broad exploitation of laborers. These dynamics work together to suppress Black economic mobility.
As citizens in this democracy, we bear a collective responsibility to enforce our constitution and rectify past violations whose effects endure today. Whatever routes we or our particular ancestors took to get us to this point, we are all in this together now.