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notes introduction 1 Junod, who gave Drew’s photograph its name “The Falling Man” in a 2003 Esquire article of the same name, is not the first to identify Mad Men’s opening credits with what has become 9/11’s quintessential image. In fact, Junod is responding to controversy in the blogosphere surrounding the advertisement for Mad Men’s fifth season in 2012. The ad features the same silhouette of a businessman in free fall, but because it is a still image and because the skyscrapers have been stripped of their corporate content, the advertisement more strikingly evokes “The Falling Man.” Scholars noted the connection before the controversy erupted , however. See Anker and Edgerton, respectively. 2 In 2006 the Brookings Institution issued a report that revealed that as of the year 2000 more immigrants and people in poverty lived in metropolitan areas outside the city (see Fuentes and Warren). The most recent Brookings Institution report, issued in May 2010, finds that the immigrant population in suburbs has only increased since then: “Suburban Asians and Hispanics already had topped 50 percent in 2000, and blacks joined them by 2008, rising from 43 percent in those eight years.” The report notes a new phenomenon it calls “bright flight,” which refers to the number of young white professionals now opting to live in cities closer to work and amenities, so that the suburban population is not only more ethnically diverse, it is increasingly older and poorer. There are several indications that this trend will continue: in another first, in the nation ’s one hundred largest metropolitan areas, black, Hispanic, and Asian residents now constitute a majority of residents younger than ­ eighteen—­ presaging a benchmark that the nation as a whole is projected to reach in just over a decade . In the meantime, suburbs are home to the vast majority of baby boomers, the first of which turned sixty-five in 2011, increasing the burden on already strained social services. Add to this steadily increasing poverty in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the support structures in these formerly robust communities are at their breaking point. See Roberts and Luhby, respectively. 3 This is not to say that there haven’t also been novels depicting the suburban experiences of immigrants, people of color, and homosexuals since 9/11, such as 1 3 8 n o t e s t o p a g e x v Alicia Erian’s Towelhead (2005), Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2005), Laila Halaby ’s Once in a Promised Land (2007), Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), and Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor (2009), among others. In addition , Karen Tongson offers a queer-of-color suburban archive of novels, performance art, and hip hop that she argues reclaims and reinvents abandoned suburban space. 4 The proponents of neoliberalism insist that an unimpeded market—“the invisible hand of Adam Smith”—is a benign force that invites all to feast at its table. Postwar suburbanization, which made home ownership a reality for so many Americans for whom this had not previously been possible, has therefore been a shining beacon for the neoliberal celebration of individual property ownership . Needless to say, however, evidence abounds that since the suburbs’ inception , property value has been manipulated by exclusionary practices. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton first outlined the argument in American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (1993), tracing the degree to which federal lending practices were, by design, racist. Taking its cue from the earlier Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC), the FHA maintained on a grand scale the practice of “redlining,” a color-coded ratings system that evaluated the risks associated with loans made to specific urban neighborhoods. Those central-city neighborhoods that were racially and ethnically mixed were color-coded red and virtually never received loans (51–54). In addition to the policy of redlining , The FHA also published a technical bulletin entitled “Planning Profitable Neighborhoods,” which advised developers on how to concentrate on homogenous markets for housing (cited in Mary Beth Haralovich, 75–76). When the Supreme Court ruling in 1948 outlawed racially restrictive covenants, homeowner associations quickly learned to rely on restrictive covenants that targeted specific behaviors in order to exclude people of color to protect their all-important property values. Ironically, this approach may have grown out of a proposal from Robert Weaver, noted for being the first African American to hold a cabinet position, who suggested...

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