Over at Hazlitt, Morgan Jerkins unpacks our collective literary fascination with white suburban boredom, connecting the historical dots between these dry developments and the redlining that created them, while also highlighting the fact that the at root of boredom is stability and prosperity:
According to Martha R. Mahoney of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, when suburban developments came about, white people were able to both finance and sell homes to other white people, creating insular neighborhoods in which wealth and safety were engineered to correspond to racial demographics. This enforcement of whiteness cannot be divorced from how we read about white females’ self-destruction within these neighborhoods that are set up to nurture and perpetuate their presumable racial superiority.