Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America by Dianne Harris (review)

In his 1903 opus The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois informed white America that contrary to vicious stereotypes at the time, “the aim of the Negro” was not to “Africanize America [or] bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism. . . . He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.” A half century later, Lorraine Hansberry dramatized that Du Boisian quest to transcend the “color line” in her play A Raisin in the Sun. Lena Younger, matriarch of a proud African American family, had just made the audacious decision to purchase a house in an all-white neighborhood, and Hansberry made sure the audience understood what motivated the move. Was she seeking to immerse her family in a sea of whiteness? Or take her stand in the struggle for black liberation? No, Younger just wanted “the nicest place for the least amount of money for [her] family.”

I kept thinking back to that line, a simple, powerful declaration of what freedom meant to black people in post–World War II America, as I read Dianne Harris’s book Little White Houses, a penetrating exploration of the “cultural work” that homes performed in the construction of white racial identities from 1945 to 1960. Few scholars have so effectively drawn attention to the most unremarkable aspects of the built environment. In exhaustive detail Harris shows how the mundane material objects and features of these new homes in new subdivisions would come to shape personal and collective identities, project messages of belonging and exclusion, influence a host of policies and institutions, and, ultimately, work to redraw the racial boundaries of citizenship at a critical moment in the nation’s history. Complementing her rich descriptions of the worlds of home buyers, builders, and marketers with a remarkable collection of images of the interiors and exteriors of postwar homes, print advertisements, and architectural renderings, Harris has produced a book that will be sure to engage readers and influence scholarship for many years to come. It is a book that deserves worthy comparisons to other groundbreaking works by Dolores Hayden, Gwendolyn Wright, and Lizabeth Cohen, among others, on the vernacular architecture and cultural landscape of postwar America.¹

Harris grounds her sweeping national study in a familiar place: her grandparents’ home in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley. Rudolf and Eva Weingarten, German Jews who fled Europe on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power, exemplified the struggles, aspirations, and anxieties of an entire generation of Americans who sought refuge on America’s new suburban frontier. “They obtained citizenship as quickly as possible, and they did everything they could to assimilate, to become as ethnically ‘white’ and American as possible” (x). Harris returns to the story of her grandparents’ home in a series of vignettes that begin each chapter. In the introduction she makes the case for why the ordinary postwar home matters and discusses the theoretical formulations that inform her approach to the subject (of particular note is Slavoj Žižek’s notion of ideological cynicism). In the eight thematic chapters that follow, Harris explores different aspects of the home as a site and a mechanism of identity formation for people like her grandparents who were seeking to enter into and become firmly ensconced in the middle class—and, not unrelatedly, to become white. As they strove to acquire and display the cultural hallmarks of whiteness in and through their homes, Harris shows, the very meaning and significance of whiteness changed in profound and subtle ways.

In chapter 1, Harris broadly surveys the “political, cultural, and economic forces that shaped the racialized housing market of the postwar era” (28). By now many readers will...