[eesmith]

The term "wanted peace" includes the millions of people who built homes in the suburbs due to anxiety over desegregation in the cities, and preferred the peace of living in an area with an almost all white population, of similar economic status, and where the laws inhibited change in the status quo.

[adingus]

Are you implying that living in the suburbs is racist?

[stvltvs]

There's the term "white flight" for a reason.

[nunez]

The existence of suburbs was heavily driven by racism, and some suburbs are still.

[eesmith]

I'm specifically saying that some of the people moved to the suburbs for racist reasons. See for example "blockbusting", as a way to profit off from fearmongering to white homeowners, and encouraging movement to the suburbs.

These racist reasons included ones the new suburbia dwellers would have described as "wanted peace", making that quoted phrase one which requires additional scrutiny.

It is a classical logical fallacy to go from the reality that millions of people moved to Levitown-like suburbs for the perceived peace of its racially restrictive covenants to infer that all people moved to the suburbs for that reason.

[db48x]

No, they literally wanted peace after coming home from a horrifying world war. Or from a horrifying non—world war.

[eesmith]

That's hardly a fair characterization of the many reasons people - mostly white - moved to the suburbs over a period of decades.

https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/display/10.1093/acrefor... for example characterizes the period 1945–1970 as when "suburbia witnessed the expansion of segregated white privilege, bolstered by government policies, exclusionary practices, and reinforced by grassroots political movements".

Levittown famously deed-restricted non-whites from buying a house in that suburb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levittown says:

> The first black family to buy one of the houses, the Myers, who bought a second-hand house in Pennsylvania's Levittown in 1957, experienced attacks on their house, and up to 500 people gathering outside.

If those hundreds of people solely "wanted peace", why were they attacking others?

Even in the 1980s, one of my father's coworkers - both born post-war - asked why he didn't move out from our immediate post-war suburb housing, which was increasingly non-white, to the newer suburbs where things were more "peaceful".

My father laughed about that a few months later when a house a few blocks from his coworker caught fire. It has been used to process cocaine.