On American Babylon

This book is dense as hell, but it’s so full of fantastic analytical nuggets that I can’t fault Self for that. Self’s starting point is the recognition that there are generally two stories told about the postwar era: the first about the growth of suburbanization, the second about the Civil Rights Movement. However, rather than looking them as separate stories, Self’s goal is to unite them into one bigger narrative. In doing so, he pairs the Civil Rights Movement and the rapid suburbanization of postwar America with the story of the New Deal order, which is often told alongside either of these.

As told in other works like The Second Gold Rush: Oakland and the East Bay in World War II and Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community, the East Bay experienced dramatic growth thanks to the development of the defense industry during the Second World War. As a result, a mix of Okies and black southerners made their way to northern California in order to find employment and develop better lives than they otherwise could in the Great Plains and the Jim Crow South. As the war came to an end, white inhabitants often moved to the suburbs around Oakland while African Americans did not have the same opportunities and mobility to do so.

In this book, Self argues that “white flight” is a misnomer (at least in the case of Oakland). White inhabitants did not move to the suburbs in order to flee from black people, they moved to take advantage of cheap housing, low property taxes, and other economic benefits given to white people. They came to take these things, alongside racial segregation, for granted. When black Oaklanders struggled for civil rights—ultimately adopting black power politics and creating the Black Panther Party—and its accompanying expansion of the welfare state, white suburban homeowners followed up with what is commonly referred to by other historians as backlash (Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 illustrates this really well), but Self refers to as a “tax revolt.” However, this tax revolt disproportionately affected black Oaklanders by contributing to the privatized, overdevelopment of the suburbs and the accompanying public, underdevelopment of the city.

To Self, this is critical, to the point that the first line in his text is, “The most significant political, economic, and spatial transformation in the postwar United States was the overdevelopment of suburbs and the underdevelopment of cities.” I asked some friends if they agreed or disagreed with this perspective, and at least one of them unequivocally agreed. I also think there’s a lot to this, and Self does a great job of illustrating this. Yet, some claims in the text—like this one—seem a bit too bold and Self’s goal is not to write a history of the entire United States, but rather a study of a few communities that show larger processes in American history. This might be a fair claim for a study that looks at a number of metropolitan areas, but that isn’t this book.

Nevertheless, I think Self is right, and his analysis is on point.