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  • Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America by Diane Harris
  • Elizabeth Hoffman Ransford
Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America. By Diane Harris. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2013.

For over three decades scholars have been attempting to unpack the complex layers of cultural meaning embedded in American home design. Now Diane Harris offers us Little White Houses, which examines how race influenced the design and representation of the postwar American house.

Harris’ study extends from the end of World War II to the beginning of 1960s, a period of relative fluidity in definitions of whiteness. Even as Jews and other ethnic groups began to attain homeownership—that key element of the American dream—FHA policies denied black families the same opportunity. For Harris, this overt exclusion of nonwhites from the postwar suburbs is only part of the story; the rest involves how “broadly dispersed social practices that were adopted in mass media, by the building trades, and by the design community” (42) worked to define the ordinary house as a middle-class, white space.

Drawing on a variety of disciplines, Harris surveys home magazines, architectural drawings, consumer goods, and television to uncover an unspoken “iconography of whiteness.” Code words like “clean,” “quiet,” “leisure,” and “privacy” served to mark whiteness in rhetoric surrounding the homes, while the spatial contours of the homes themselves—an inward focus, hyper-maintained interior, and open floor plan replete with built-ins—created an environment particularly crafted for middle-class, white families.

Harris shows that home magazines routinely used models and controlled accessories in photo shoots, rendering nonwhites invisible and creating a specific iconography not just of race, but of class, gender, and heteronormativity (she describes a photo shoot where editors posed a female model in a hostess coat with the real gay homeowner). The argument is strongest when Harris demonstrates the practical ways that home design reinforced these representations. Postwar homes effaced nonwhite servility from kitchens, making the wife the “white collar executive” of the home, providing her with a kitchen desk and electrical appliances that removed the stigma [End Page 237] from performance of housework. In yards, black lawn jockeys and lawnmowers branded “Lazy Boy” replaced actual people of color, while at the same time emphasizing the racialized, menial nature of yard work.

At times, Harris’ argument relies on a circular logic: because property owning was a white privilege, everything linked to property owning was therefore white. The focus on race also leads Harris to shortchange some of her more intriguing observations relating house design to postwar anti-communism, the rise in consumerism, and the overarching importance of order in the home and yard—the roots of this obsession deserve a more complex explanation.

Overall, Little White Houses is both lots of fun and incredibly valuable. Harris enhances our understanding of postwar culture by highlighting the invisible nature of structural racism and the work that our built environment does in perpetuating it. White Americans have long viewed themselves as entirely unracialized and their spaces as race-neutral, at the same time benefitting from a segregated housing market and all its implications. Harris convincingly demonstrates that white privilege is not just cultural and economic, but spatial as well.

Elizabeth Hoffman Ransford
Independent Scholar, Grand Rapids, Michigan
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