I found the caption evocative and it educated me about the study site while also contextualizing the discourses at work. The contextualization was necessary for me as a foreigner to get a clearer sense of the racial politics in the USA, and particularly at this study site. The most powerful ethnographic insight generated for me was how what can at first appear to be a convivial representation can be in fact deeply informed by an historically persistent binary logic of clean/unclean, purity/danger, subject/object, inclusion/exclusion, etc. that underwrites what is a violent white supremacist place-making.
This visualization powerfully draws attention to a process of racial segregation based on the categorization and signification of a population as socially and materially toxic. Given this is an archival image and that such spatial segregation based on the objectification of certain populations as 'toxic' continues today we are reminded of how a racial purity discourse and white supremacist structure continues to violently oppress people, yet such is done in a way as to appear convivial and innocent even though it is anything but.
The image, a newsletter from the 1950s, shows us the detail with which certain spaces propogated specific communities to invest in certain futures. Strinkingly, the newsletter ties up the quality of (social, public) housing with "WHO" lives in it, and there is little room for ambiguity in the depiction that accompanies the text: blond-headed white children. The community called to invest in making Manhattanville a "better place to live in" will first and foremost (as made clear by the size of the font) do so by "bet[ting]" on themselves, by embodying through their very "whiteness" a better[ment]".
This image is a piece of ethnographic evidence in that it exposes what is actually contained in the idea of "better", "blight"-free housing infrastructure: the materiality of the derilict and blighted housing to be transformed, but also and more importantly still, the "undesired" inhabitants that beg for replacement.