Nancy Updike And Hannah-Jones: An Analysis

In their investigation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 on This American Life entitled “House Rules” from November of 2013, Nancy Updike and Nikole Hannah-Jones outline the history of racial segregation in American communities. Employing stories from undercover inspections conducted by the Fair Housing Justice Center in New York City as the primary anecdote, a storytelling device Executive Producer of This American Life Ira Glass describes as a sequence of actions and questions designed to keep the listener engaged, Updike and Hannah-Jones explore the process in which the American government enforced racial housing discrimination and crippled the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to a “sort of housing couples therapist” (Updike, This American Life). Updike spends Act I of the program outlining the infamous redlining process in which the government devalued black and integrated neighborhoods by excluding such homes from subsidized mortgages. This process promoted extreme white flight from cities and established racial segregation as the norm in American society. Sunrise Hills, the community depicted and critiqued in No Down Payment directed by Martin Ritt, exemplifies the segregated communities which resulted from redlining. Hannah-Jones, who investigated the Fair Housing Act for ProPublica before collaborating with Updike on This …show more content…
However, in practice with Ira Glass’ iconic form of storytelling, This American Life does not define terms. As the primary reporters, Updike and Hannah-Jones find and tell relevant stories: modern examples of housing discrimination from the Fair Housing Justice Center, the impact of redlining from the 1930s to the 1960s, and the ousting of the one man brave enough to attack the problem. But the pivotal term “we” remains undefined throughout the broadcast. “Where are