Levitt & Sons, Levittown, PA (1952)

In this podcast, Fiona Pravida and Olivia Brand examine the long history of Levittown, Pennsylvania to examine the ways that the racial restrictions of settler colonialism evolved into new legalized patterns of racial exclusion in the postwar period. In comparing the language of the Walking Purchase treaty of 1737 with the restrictive covenants recorded in Levittown deeds of the 1960s, Pravida and Brand find these two documents share a common racialized conception of land ownership, which "turn(s) words into boundaries." Since settler colonial ideas continue to evolve in the present, we must pay attention to what other patterns persist in subversively maintaining age-old standards of white supremacy in the American landscape.