White Picket Fence Research Articles

Beyond the White Picket Fence: American Indians, Suburbanization, and Homeownership

Beyond the White Picket Fence: American Indians, Suburbanization, and Homeownership

The white picket fence: how Millennials and Baby Boomers view the American Dream

The white picket fence: how Millennials and Baby Boomers view the American Dream

Predicting the Rental Values of Houses in Bangalore City Using the Linear Regression Approach

Abstract: In recent years, Karnataka, one of the hotspots for real estate development, has seen an increase in demand from prospective home buyers and investors and is expected to witness further boom in the sector by 2020. What things should a potential home buyer consider before purchasing a home? Location, property size, proximity to offices, schools, parks, restaurants, hospitals or the stereotypical white picket fence? And the most important factor — price? Now with the lingering impact of COVID-19, enforcement of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act (RERA) and lack of confidence in developers in the city, apartments sold in India fell by 3 percent in 2019. In fact, property prices in Bengaluru fell by nearly 5 percent in the second half of 2019, according to a study published by real estate consultancy Knight Frank. Buying a house, especially in a city like Bengaluru, is a tricky decision. While the main factors are usually the same for all metros, there are more to consider for Silicon Valley in India. With the help of the millennial crowd, vibrant culture, great climate and plenty of job opportunities, finding out the price of a house in Bengaluru is difficult. This post reflects an effort to solve the mentioned problems. In this paper, the authors have tried to develop such a system which in turn will provide a very accurate prediction of house prices in Bengaluru city. The authors have tried to create a user-friendly interface design that will allow users to choose options according to their requirements and get an estimated house price according to their needs.

Agrarian Mythologies

Agrarian Mythologies Debra Bricker Balken (bio) Britt E. Halvorson and Joshua O. Reno tell us at the outset of Imagining the Heartland: White Supremacy and the Midwest that the election of Donald Trump to the Oval Office in 2016, and the rise of his MAGA followers, spawned a long-standing interest to consolidate their research into the cultural tropes and aesthetic languages that grew from the Corn Belt since the Great Depression. Both anthropologists, this collaborative duo has lived in Michigan, an experience they present as bona fides, or personal reflections, alongside their fused scholarship. In these authors' hands, the Midwest is mined for its "seeming ordinariness," a narrative that they argue masks a deep-seated racism that can be read in representations that embody Whiteness, both through its histories, literary traditions, and visual arts, as well as more recently in mass media discourse. Certainly, the heartland has not always been viewed as a preserve of tolerance: that is, immune to racial and class prejudice despite its geographical isolation from the Northern colonies and slave-holding South. On the contrary, there has been ample study of its imagery to reinforce that artists and writers who spent time in the Midwest were attuned to the social fissures that stemmed from segregation and difference. However, Halvorson and Reno focus only on a small handful of Regionalist artists, novelists, and filmmakers, figures who were bent, they claim, on countering the progressive ethos that drove antithetical movements such as modernism which was a global direction. Already, Imagining the Heartland reveals its limitations and is on shaky ground. Foremost among the many conceptual flaws and contradictions that pervade this book, is the assumption that the Midwest has been fantasized primarily as a rural territory that depended upon "agrarian mythologies" to shape its accumulated depictions of flat, endless plains planted with either [End Page 105] wheat or corn all to vivify not only plentitude and bounty but the virtues of hard work, self-sufficiency, and middle-class conformity. This iconography of mundaneness, as they see it, extends to entrenched stereotypes of a god-fearing, white picket fence America whose populations are homogeneous rather than a racialized entity, its White folks idealized through painting and literature for their homespun values and Christian morality. Admittedly, this view of the Midwest as a pastoral oasis was a conceit employed by Thomas Hart Benton, an artist who hailed from Missouri and whose prominence and visibility was such that he appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1934. After briefly engaging abstract forms as a painter in New York, Benton reversed course and became an academic artist before he returned to Kansas City in the mid-1930s where his murals and canvases similarly utilized traditional, by then retro, tactics such as verisimilitude or realism to convey the heartland and its authenticities. The prominent undulating line and curvilinear forms that define his bodies and landscapes purposefully exaggerate the traits of his middle western subjects while distilling a patriotism aimed at undermining what Benton considered as the extravagant degeneracy of modern art wherein the expression of the artist's subjectivity was made a wellspring of originality and invention. To be sure, his new-found identity as an artistic patriarch on the Great Plains drew from latent declarations of antisemitism, homophobia, and misogyny. However, not all the Regionalists succumbed to a stratagem of agrarian idealization braided with White nationalism. In fact, the story is not as one-sided, unequivocal, and seamless as Halvorson and Reno let on. Benton's overt goal may have been to destabilize the modernist expressions that still emanated from cities such as New York during the Depression, but a dip into the representations that issued from the studios of his Regionalist cohorts such as John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood—who were frequently constructed by critics as an aesthetic triad—reveal little unity outside of their revival of Renaissance-type painting techniques. While Wood yielded to the puritanism associated with small town Iowa farm life in paintings such as Stone City (1930), where nature is a benevolent, verdant, stabilizing force, the artist did not play into the same "agrarian mythologies" in American Gothic (1930), a painting that thrives on...

A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas by Kelly Houston Jones

Reviewed by: A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas by Kelly Houston Jones John S. Sledge A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas. By Kelly Houston Jones. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2021. 284 pp. $59.95. ISBN 9–780–8203–6020–1. In his monumental Bancroft Prize-winning book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, NY, 1972), Eugene D. Genovese provided just two references after his index entry for Arkansas. Every other Confederate state got more, as did Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. While but one example of Arkansas’s coverage in the truly vast literature on American slavery, Genovese’s neglect was typical. At the time that he was researching and writing, southern historians paid scant attention to slavery in the trans-Mississippi. There was only one book that addressed the Toothpick State’s situation in depth, Orville W. Taylor’s Negro Slavery in Arkansas (Durham, NC, 1958). Modern scholars rate Taylor’s study higher than James Sellers’s woefully biased Slavery in Alabama (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1950), but it antedated a deluge of research and writing that have significantly altered and expanded our understanding of antebellum slavery, on both sides of the Big Muddy. Comes now Kelly Houston Jones, whose new work, A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas, advances beyond Taylor and provides a keener understanding. Jones, an assistant professor of history at Arkansas Tech University, has produced a “bottom-up study” (4) that pays especial attention to place and environment in the lives of Arkansas’s enslaved people. Her sources include census reports, court records, tax rolls, territorial records, family papers, diaries, pension files, Works Progress Administration slave narratives (used with appropriate caution), and books. Newspapers, however, are notably absent. This volume presents dissertation research, and, as is common with such efforts, employs an academic vocabulary. That, combined with the hefty cover price, will limit its popular appeal. But the research is important, and anyone with an interest in the subject should attend. As Jones demonstrates, antebellum Arkansas was not like the older southern states. Admitted to the Union in 1836, it remained thinly [End Page 336] populated twenty-four years later, with the capitol, Little Rock, home to less than 4,000 residents. This was tiny compared to most other southern capitols, not to mention the big seaports like New Orleans (168,000 inhabitants), Charleston (70,000), and Mobile (30,000). Most of Arkansas’s people lived along the agriculturally rich river bottoms, with only a smattering toward the West and Indian Territory. As for the landscape itself, not for nothing was it referred to as “the morass.” Brooding swamps and forests needed clearing for fields and homes, and the rugged uplands were unappealing to Texas-bound immigrants. Nonetheless, Jones contends, Arkansas held great appeal to the white plantocracy “as a haven for slavery” (16) from the beginning. Absentee owners were not uncommon, including James Sutherland Deas of Mobile, who held land near New Madrid, Missouri. While men like Deas enjoyed their profits, enslaved people labored under the overseer’s lash against sucking bogs, scrub thickets, and old growth trees. New owners hastened to put their chattel to the plow. According to one slave, he made the long journey from Alabama chained to his fellows in a coffle, and as soon as they arrived, “was put right to work clearin’ land and buildin’ cabins...they just slashed the cane and deadened the timber and when cotton plantin’ time come the cane was layin’ there on the ground crisp and dry and they set fire to it and burned it off clean and then planted the crops” (39). A remarkable photograph included in the book’s black-and-white picture gallery illustrates the ordered landscape made possible by such forced labor. Taken in 1865, it shows the Tappan plantation near Helena from an elevated perspective some distance away. A two-story columned mansion dominates the view, surrounded by a large yard and white picket fence. Trending up a hillside but within a stone’s throw are two broadly separated rows of neat slave cabins featuring wide shed-roof porches. A variety of outbuildings completes the spread...

The New Noir: Race, Identity, and Diaspora in Black Suburbia

Most Black people in the United States now live in the suburbs. To some this may be surprising. Suburban development in the postwar period has usually been understood as a history of the formation of entirely white communities that segregated themselves spatially, legally, and socially with the aid of local and federal administrations from the majority-minority cities they often orbited. But the crabgrass frontier that suburban historian Kenneth Jackson described in the mid-1980s was always more porous than it appeared. To date, scholars of Black suburbanization since Jackson have focused primarily on the “complex role of race and class for Black people” in suburban spaces (p. 5). Books like Living with Racism (1996) and Black Picket Fences (1999) have demonstrated the extent to which Black Americans who made it through the wringer of social mobility in the United States experienced the social and economic benefits of suburbia unevenly and irregularly. For them, white picket fences and green lawns did not translate to the stereotypical expectations of class stability and safety. They also have examined the ways in which Black Americans negotiated racial identity, racism, and the culture of class in these spaces.Orly Clerge's ethnographic study, The New Noir, heads in a different direction. It takes into consideration the fact that “since the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, the flow of hundreds of thousands of Black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa have transformed Black mobility and cultural geography” (p. 7). The New Noir expands our understanding of immigration, the Black middle class, and suburban culture through an exploration of the development of what Clerge has termed the “Black diasporic suburbs” (p. 2). To understand “the localized identities and practices of the Black middle class in the twenty-first century,” Clerge saliently argues that we must break the mold of the nation state and “use a more global and comparative perspective” that considers international histories of race, migration, and politics (p. 13). In doing so, Clerge reconfigures the boundaries of the literature on the Black middle class by exploring how diaspora and migration shaped the ways in which members of the transnational Black middle class in New York City negotiated racial identity and class formation.The introduction lays out the stakes of the book, particularly focusing on consumption practices and the culture of food. Clerge focuses on seemingly quotidian tasks and activities that provide a window into the “cultural worlds of [the] multiethnic Black middle class” (p. 5) A trip to the local store, she points out, “is an opportunity to see the multiplicity of regional and national culture that animate suburbia” (p. 3). The second and third chapters take the reader through the historiographies of migration and place through the lens of suburban placemaking and Black Atlantic world diasporas. They explore how cross-national racial formations and migrations shaped trans-geographical journeys of “Black Americans, Haitians, and Jamaicans from slavery to the middle class.”Chapter 4 examines the cultural economies of the Black middle class and the importance of inter/intragroup differences created by successive waves of migration to make sense of the “structure and culture of class” in diasporic Black suburbs. The next chapter builds on the ideas of the previous one to examine the experiences of being a first-generation member of the Black middle class. Her interviewees articulated class origin stories of “downward, lateral, and upward mobility.” The final two chapters unpack the meanings of “race, nationality, and regionality” for the Black middle class through an exploration of how residents of these places, individually and collectively, understood and negotiated racial identity. Chapter 6 outlines Clerge's term “racial consciousness spectrum,” which is a “framework for categorizing interethnic and intraethnic racial identities and practices.” While sociologists often claim that middle-class Black immigrants “distance themselves from Black identities,” this chapter challenges that argument by analyzing the “diversity of definition and performances of Blackness” among residents of the diaspora suburbs. Chapter 7 investigates the “centrality of nationality and regionality in the lived experiences” of “Black Americans, Haitians, and Jamaicans” in the workplace, neighborhood, and at home. Finally, the conclusion, “Mustard Seeds,” rehashes the main interventions of the book and provides a strong agenda for future researchers to look into how “suburban Black millennials,” both immigrants and those born in the states, negotiate race and class in the twenty-first century.

A Horse Is a Horse

A Horse Is a Horse

Revisiting Tulsa: Understanding Amphetamine Addiction in the Early Photography of Larry Clark

Revisiting <i>Tulsa</i>: Understanding Amphetamine Addiction in the Early Photography of Larry Clark

Dreaming the impossible dream? An exploratory study on the expectations of Dutch clients with multiple problems concerning the co-production of public services.

Currently, many policymakers try to encourage client involvement during the public service delivery process and make it a co‐production. Clients are encouraged to act as active agents and embrace an integrated approach to address their problems to empower them. However, different studies have raised questions regarding to what extent these ambitions are appropriate for clients with vulnerabilities, such as clients with multiple problems. Aiming to further explore this issue, we studied the expectations of clients with multiple problems concerning the co‐production of public services. We interviewed 46 clients with multiple problems at the start of their support trajectory. All 46 participants lived in five districts in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and were recruited via community‐based primary care teams. Our study indicates that co‐production ambitions might not resonate with clients with multiple problems. The study shows that these clients’ expectations are driven by their feelings of being overwhelmed and stressed out by their situation, feelings of being a victim of circumstances, bad experiences with public services in the past, their evaluation of what counts as a problem and the envisioned solutions. These clients expect public service providers to take over, fix their main problem(s) and not interfere with other aspects of their lives (not an integrated approach). Although participants seek a ‘normal’ life with, e.g., a house, work, partner, children, holidays, a pet, and no stress (a white picket fence life) as ideal, they do not feel that this is attainable for them. More insight into the rationale behind these expectations could help to bridge the gap between policymakers’ ambitions and clients’ expectations.

Co-creating the Psychological “White Picket Fence”: Three Gay Couples’ Relationship Reconfiguration

Many gay couples engage in nonmonogamous relationships. Ideas about nonmonogamy have historically been theorised as individual pathology and indicating relational distress. Unlike mixed-sex couples, boundaries for gay couples are often not determined by sexual exclusivity. These relationships are built along a continuum of open and closed, and sexual exclusivity agreements are not restricted to binaries, thus requiring innovation and re-evaluation. Three white South African gay couples were each jointly interviewed about their open relationship, specifically about how this is negotiated. In contrast to research that uses the individual to investigate this topic, this study recruited dyads. The couples recalled the initial endorsement of heteronormative romantic constructions, after which they shifted to psychological restructuring. The dyad, domesticated through the stock image of a white picket fence, moved to a renewed arrangement, protected by “rules” and imperatives. Abbreviated grounded theory strategies led to a core category, “co-creating porous boundaries”, and two themes. First, the couple jointly made heteronormative ideals porous and, second, they reconfigured the relationship through dyadic protection. The overall relationship ideology associated with the white picket fence remained intact despite the micro-innovations through which the original heteronormative patterning was reconfigured.

White Picket Fences: Fulton Sheen’s Influence on the Social Role of Catholicism in the 1950s

“Life is Worth Living” was a well-received Catholic show that aired in 1950s America and was hosted by the venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen. The popularity of the show can be easily tied back to Sheen’s on-screen charisma and dramatic delivery of American Christian concepts. The show aired Tuesday nights at eight opposite the popular Milton Berle show and Fulton Sheen even won an Emmy for the Most Outstanding Television Personality for his performance in 1952. However, the show is representative of a brief era of normalcy before the change of the 1960s. The unification of Catholic morals and cultural values presented by Sheen in the show helped renew public interest in Catholicism through appealing to a common national identity during an era of an expanding religious marketplace. So through examining “Life is Worth Living,” the social values of faith and the changing religious views can be illuminated upon.

Taking Back the Suburbs: The Fair Housing Act at Fifty

Though many Americans still picture a "suburb" as an all-white enclave with big houses bordered by white picket fences, suburbs today look quite different from the 1950s stereotype. Most suburbs are racially diverse, and even increasingly impoverished. The city-suburb dichotomy that has defined American politics for decades is breaking down. Nevertheless, political battles, at least rhetorically, continue to be fought along familiar geographic lines. But this state of affairs can't go on forever. Either old living patterns will reassert themselves benefitting the right, or new political coalitions will be forged, taking advantage of modern political topography, benefitting the left. Which way things go may end up depending on the survival and enforcement of the Fair Housing Act—the very law that so dramatically changed the American metropolitan landscape in the first place.

At a Dinner Party for White (Wo)men, and: “Mirror, Mirror: Mulatta Seeking Inner Negress”, and: Call Me “Mistress”

At a Dinner Party for White (Wo)men, and: “Mirror, Mirror: Mulatta Seeking Inner Negress”, and: Call Me “Mistress” Chet’la Sebree (bio) At a Dinner Party for White (Wo)men [T]he other plates are creatively imagined vaginas…The Sojourner Truth plate is the only one in the collection that shows—instead of a vagina—a face. —Alice Walker, in response to Judy Chicago’s 1970 exhibit The Dinner Party Everyone else is invited to meet their vaginas—different denominations and colors— except me, the magical negress. My boxalways absent because desire is not a privilege for disenfranchised womendescendent from slaves— we, still, their dark continent. They cannot imagine my yawning labiabecause I do not pink at their touch, cannot imagine me wet when I want to be,decidedly igniting follicles on my body. At best, undressed, I am invisible, neutered, neutral—a breast-faced mammy assuaging centuries of shame with archetypical depictions of tears and rage—a place at the table they refuse to learn to set. [End Page 15] “Mirror, Mirror: Mulatta Seeking Inner Negress” —after Alison Saar She taint white; she taint black—Alison Saar dreams in gold leaf and tar: black women with domesticity stacked on our backs,baggage bound to us by our braids. In cast iron and wool, in mountain and book,I am not mulatta seeking inner negress, but negress seeking validation for who I am— hued yellow-brown with thick thighs and wide hips,twice-educated with a tongue primed for lashings. Mirror, mirror, as I child I wished I were mixed,jealous of Sally’s descendants— a reason for their exclusion, confusion,an excuse for being partial to green-eyed glint. I was illiterate in Philly Ebonics; my cousins fluent.Told by them I talked white. Told by whites I acted right. They’d say nigger like a litmus testfor their Oreo theories, see if I’d flinch or become performance they thought fittingof my corkscrew curls and full lips. [End Page 16] Call Me “Mistress” Set your knees on concrete, lick my feet, and prepareto give me everything that’s not subversive—whitepicket fence and son, daughter, dog combo. No—make me a factory of tiny writhing tyrants, make mehomely, androgynous, exotic. Restructure my prayers—give my light to God. Tame the me who wantssex à la Négresse. Be who someone keepstelling you to be. Make me your manic pixie, make meyour [insert fantasy]. You are in control of this. This isyour worst nightmare. But you’re in luck. Time’s up.Jam the money between my teeth and leave. My name’snot “Mistress.” It’s Eve. It’s Sally. It’s ___________. [End Page 17] Chet’la Sebree Chet’la Sebree was the 2014–16 Stadler Fellow, and her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Guernica, and Gulf Coast, among other publications. Copyright © 2018 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Scott W.AllardPlaces in Need: The Changing Geography of PovertyNew York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2017. 288 p. $32.50 (pbk.).

Scott W.AllardPlaces in Need: The Changing Geography of PovertyNew York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2017. 288 p. $32.50 (pbk.).

White picket fences & other features of the suburban physical environment: Correlates of neighbourhood attachment in 3 australian low-density suburbs

This study examines the relationship between neighbourhood attachment and five groups of physical characteristics of low-density suburbs: (1) street layout, (2) pedestrian environment, (3) neighbourhood connectivity, (4) public space provision, and (5) dwelling form. Although much research has investigated whether neighbourhood attachment is influenced by the urban design characteristics of high density contexts, there is little evidence of the impact of such characteristics in suburban environments with lower population densities, such as the types of low-density suburbs that ring Australian cities. Surveys were conducted in Victoria, Australia, to examine how these five groups of characteristics might impact residents’ neighbourhood attachment in three suburbs with equivalent socioeconomic profiles. Questionnaires were delivered to eight streets of different layout in each suburb, and via on-street face-to-face surveys in public spaces adjacent to neighbourhood libraries. The results of five separate regression models indicated that all five groups of physical neighbourhood characteristics significantly predicted neighbourhood attachment. Home ownership, length of residence and age were also found to have strong correlation with neighbourhood attachment. When length of residency is controlled for, it was found that five physical variables were the best predictors of neighbourhood attachment: provision of open spaces, street type, trees coverage, sidewalk provision and number of community spaces. Only the provision of open spaces had greater impact on attachment than length of residency. Hence, the study findings suggest that both social and physical factors should be considered in the planning of suburban neighbourhoods.

Passing Rhetoric’s Kaleidoscope

Passing Rhetoric’s Kaleidoscope

Queering the White Picket Fence: a social justice take on heteronormative parenting

This paper deals with LGBTIQ parenting from a critical pedagogical perspective. We start with the parenthood-parenting dichotomy that served as a foundation for developing an analytical framework in which we have analysed other dichotomies, apart from the mentioned one, whose interdependency creates multiple and at the same time privileged and discriminated identity of an individual. Following the presented analytical framework, we approached the case study of one reorganized lesbian family. The data we obtained offer transformative potent insights, aimed at changing the existing social conditions towards the state of equity and justice.

Behind the White Picket Fence: Power and Privilege in a Multiethnic Neighborhood

Book Review| October 01 2016 Behind the White Picket Fence: Power and Privilege in a Multiethnic Neighborhood Behind the White Picket Fence: Power and Privilege in a Multiethnic Neighborhood. By Sarah Mayorga-Gallo. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 208 pp. Maps, tables, appendixes, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95 (paper). Patricia Mooney-Melvin Patricia Mooney-Melvin Loyola University Chicago Patricia Mooney-Melvin is Associate Professor of History and the interim dean of the graduate school at Loyola University Chicago. Much of her work has focused on urban definition and the ways that neighborhoods have operated in urban areas. Her research interests include social welfare history, public history, memory, and the built environment. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2016) 36 (1): 116–118. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.36.1.0116 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Patricia Mooney-Melvin; Behind the White Picket Fence: Power and Privilege in a Multiethnic Neighborhood. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2016; 36 (1): 116–118. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.36.1.0116 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Diversity and Its Discontents: A Review of Behind the White Picket Fence

Diversity and Its Discontents: A Review of Behind the White Picket Fence

Behind the white picket fence: power and privilege in a multiethnic neighborhood

Behind the white picket fence: power and privilege in a multiethnic neighborhood