Racialized Housing Policy and Mixed Race Identification: A Study of Chicago’s Legacy of Housing Segregation

The politics surrounding Chicago’s history with housing segregation provides a stark example of targeted and long-lasting racial discrimination in the United States, which would lend itself to an analysis of this sort. While the effects of redlining and housing segregation has been well documented on the level of monoracial groups, the effect of these policies on the current demographic breakdown of the city and where mixed race individuals fall in regards to the issue remains unclear. The concept of mixed race individuals is not a phenomenon exclusive to the new millennium. However, the sheer number of Americans with mixed race backgrounds has increased since the middle of the 20th century. This raises questions of where mixed race individuals stand in regards to racialized issues. Do mixed race people feel as though these issues are less likely to affect them than their mono-racial peers and as such are they able to perhaps transcend traditional racial relations as some have hoped or have the ethnic backgrounds of these individuals not had any more meaning than those of the generations before them? Specifically, I am curious to examine the relationship between Chicago’s legacy of housing segregation and mixed race residents today