Colgate University’s geography department invited Anne Bonds, professor of geography and affiliated professor of urban studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, to give this year’s annual Gould lecture. Bonds presented on her ongoing project, “Infrastructures of Exclusion: Real Estate, Resistance and Racial Regimes of Property in the Urban North,” on Thursday, April 10.
Bonds explored the history of racial covenants, which are agreements often found in property deeds that restrict marginalized groups from buying property. She went on to describe how her team is mapping racial covenants across Milwaukee and shared the initial findings of the project.
Racially-restrictive covenants were commonly used at the turn of the 20th century as a tool to exclude racially-marginalized communities. Sometimes, the exclusion was more overt, but often it was disguised as a tool for “preserving neighborhood character,” effectively keeping predominantly white neighborhoods white. When describing the ramifications of racial housing covenants, Bonds noted their deep-rooted impacts.
“Racial restrictive housing covenants created material spaces of whiteness, ensuring both that non-white people were confined to highly segregated neighborhoods and also denying them access to the housing equity and wealth associated with home ownership,” Bonds said.
To collect information about racial covenants in the Milwaukee area, Bonds and her team harnessed the power of image recognition software, which allowed them to search within digitized archives of property deeds and other relevant documents to create images of covenant clippings. The team uploaded images to a citizen science platform called Zooniverse that allows volunteers to transcribe what they see. This crowdsourcing effort is fundamental to the ultimate goal of the project.
“We are working to make visible the ways in which property operates as an essential component of the extractive economies of racial capitalism,” Bonds said.
Colgate Assistant Professor of Geography Madeleine Hamlin, who helped coordinate Bonds’s visit, highlighted Bonds’s unique approach to the project.
“I think she presented some really innovative research on a topic that a lot of urban scholars think they know a lot about, which is the history of racially-restrictive covenants, but she presented it in a really new and innovative way,” Hamlin said.
Sophomore Georgia Sones attended the lecture and thought it was interesting to learn about racial covenants.
“I had never really heard about covenants, especially racial covenants in general. I’ve heard of redlining, but I didn’t really know they were two separate entities or that they coincide at all,” Sones said.
To add to the data she is collecting on racial covenants, Bonds also highlighted the stories of black activists and entrepreneurs in Milwaukee who resisted and spoke out against the overt racism found in covenants.
“I’m really struck by the interweaving of this big data set with really impactful stories of individual activists and leaders, and the strategies that they used to stand up against racist policies,” Hamlin reflected.
While Bonds’s project is still ongoing, the findings will soon be available to the public in the form of an interactive online map. Based on the team’s current data collection status, she predicts only 30 more days of data collection.
