Racism was and remains a fundamental part of U.S. society. Beginning with the country’s institutionalization of slavery, institutions such as the law, housing, and education have reinforced the concept of Whiteness while maintaining systemic racial barriers (Leonardo & Harris, 2013; Mills, 1997). Michigan’s laws and policies reinforce racism, discrimination, and K-12 public school segregation for Michigan’s Black students. Urban areas such as Detroit are home to disproportionately large numbers of low-income and minority populations often confined to the poorest neighborhoods (Orfield et al., 1997). Concentrated poverty is a significant barrier to educational progress and has links to poor emotional and physical health, low academic achievement, and few prospects for future employment (U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 2019). Enforced racial segregation is the most obvious manifestation of the subordination. This research focuses on public school funding inequities in Michigan (Cullen & Loeb, 2004), resulting from Michigan’s race-neutral public school funding language and continued reliance on local property taxation for education funding and provides a unique perspective of how property wealth inequalities in Michigan fall especially hard on districts that primarily serve Black students who receive free and reduced lunch (FRL).

Racism is not a series of isolated acts, but it is endemic in American life, deeply ingrained legally, culturally, and even psychologically; and traditional claims of legal neutrality, objectivity, color-blindness, and meritocracy camouflage the self-interest of dominant groups in American society (Delgado-Gaitan, 2001). Applied to Michigan, it is noted that the connections between school funding for Black students, the higher average poverty of Black families, and lower average Black property wealth have racially based policies that created residential and school segregation (Jankov & Caref, 2017; R. Rothstein, 2017). Michigan’s largest concentration of poverty is in Detroit. There, 60 percent of children live in poverty (Guevara Warren, 2019), and many of these students are Black or Black descendants of captive and enslaved Africans in America. 

Housing policies and discrimination have produced wealth inequities and segregation due to the dependence of school funding on local property taxation. Historically, the National Housing Act of 1934 and subsequent restrictive covenants excluded African Americans from participation in the federal government’s mortgage system and, in later decades, enabled Whites to tap federal subsidies that Blacks could not access (Gotham, 2000). At the same time, Federal Housing Administration practices enforced and legitimized racial discrimination in the housing market (Gotham, 2000). Blacks were not offered equal or fair access to mortgage credit and homeownership, in part, by federal regulators who reinforced the negative impacts of decades of discrimination through inadequate enforcement of anti-discrimination laws and inadequate oversight of lending practices. Yet, despite equal housing policy, federal responses informed as race-neutral, and the eliminating poverty agenda, unfair practices persist (Bonilla-Silva, 1997; Seicshnaydre, 2015).