A ’70s Board Game Designed to Teach Players About Race, Housing, and Privilege

[demmiblue]

Source: Slate

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This 1970 board game, Blacks & Whites, created by the magazine Psychology Today, anticipated Scalzi's argument, designing game play to teach adult players about racial privilege and housing. (This particular copy of Blacks & Whites sold at auction in New York yesterday.)

The game, a sideways adaptation of Monopoly, allows players to choose white or black identities."Black" players start the game with $10,000; "white" players with $1,000,000. Rules for each of the game's four housing zones—in "Estate Zone," players playing as black could buy "only when they have one million dollars in assets"—are calibrated to make it hard for the "black" players to climb out of their initial cash deficits. "The goal of the game is to achieve economic equality," writes Swann Auction Galleries' Wyatt H. Day, "yet the game is strategically designed to make a black win impossible."

Read more: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2016/04/01/the_game_blacks_and_whites_from_1970_taught_about_race_housing_and_privilege.html

[Heidi]

1. Kick, kick, kick!