There’s a direct linkage between those practices in the late 19th and early 20th century and today’s modern zoning plans.
Additionally, Conflict Theory explains how resistance and policy changes, such as affirmative action and zoning reforms, emerge when marginalized groups challenge these power structures. However, because those in power benefit from maintaining inequality, change is often slow and met with resistance.
By 1940, as covenants spread, black residents had become concentrated in three small neighborhoods, including Near North.
A Conflict Theory perspective best helps us understand this issue. In this case, racial covenants and redlining were tools used by the dominant racial group to control access to housing and wealth accumulation. By preventing minorities from owning homes in important areas, the system maintained racial and economic inequalities that persist today. This reflects institutional discrimination, where racial exclusion was put in legal, financial, and urban planning structures rather than relying solely on individual prejudice.
It’s very powerful to show these deed restrictions creeping out across the landscape of Minneapolis, like an organism or disease,”
This can be analyzed through conflict theory, which argues that racial segregation benefited the dominant group (white homeowners) at the expense of minorities. Restrictive covenants ensured that wealth and resources were concentrated in white communities while minorities were systematically excluded.
Minnesota and Washington enacted laws earlier this year that allow homeowners to renounce restrictive covenants in their deeds.
Symbolic ethnicity, where individuals acknowledge their historical identity without it deeply affecting their daily lives, is a good idea for reduction of racism. While removing these covenants is a step toward acknowledging the past, it does not directly address the structural barriers still in place, which is why covenants make it difficult.
More significantly, Minneapolis city leaders are currently undertaking a major reform to the local zoning code in order to directly address the city’s historic segregation.
Affirmative action is one way we can attempt to reduce racism. It's attempt to correct social injustice by expanding access through housing will be helpful and uplifting. However, past segregationist policies created disparities in economic and educational opportunities that cannot be undone simply by changing zoning laws today.
Federal housing maps created between 1935 and 1940, ostensibly to help mortgage lenders avoid risky loans, served to deepen the segregation process that housing covenants began.
We understand the difference between individual racism and institutional/structural racism through modern racism here, which operates in ways that appear beautiful and but in actuality harm racial minorities. By labeling these neighborhoods as risk, the government weaves segregation into financial policy.
In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such racial covenants were unenforceable. But the mark they made on America’s neighborhoods lived on:
One from sociology that would help us understand the difference between individual racism and institutional or structural racism is institutional racism. While the individual racism of homeowners or real estate agents could have been attacked by the court ruling, the structural racism created by racial covenants and redlining has persisted. This points to how laws and systems can develop racial inequality even without individual discriminatory intent, sociologically.
Despite its reputation for prosperity and progressive politics, Minneapolis now has the lowest rate of homeownership among African American households of any U.S. city.
The historical exclusion of minorities from homeownership opportunities through covenants and redlining policies has long-lasting effects. The concept of race/ethnicity and life chances shows how these past practices meant that African Americans were unable to build wealth through homeownership, creating a generational cycle of economic disadvantage. This influences race relations today, developing these socioeconomic issues.
Before it was torn apart by freeway construction in the middle of the 20th century, the Near North neighborhood in Minneapolis was home to the city’s largest concentration of African American families. That wasn’t by accident:
We can use institutional racism to represent why racial covenants of years ago have an impact on race relations. Housing policies, such as the restrictive covenants, intentionally segregated neighborhoods and concentrated African American families in certain areas. Here, sociology explains how these structural practices set the stage for deep-rooted racial inequality that persists today. The covenant-based segregation shaped not only where people lived but also their life chances, such as access to quality education, healthcare, and economic opportunities. These patterns of inequality are visible in Minneapolis.