In Monopoly, everyone starts out with the same amount of money. “As we played, I was struck by how unrealistic it was. “In the 1970s … I had three kids and we used to play board games, the most popular being Monopoly,” wrote Sommer, who passed away in February 2021, in the revamped edition’s foreword, written while it was still being developed. Markos and Feiman said they hoped to carry on this tradition. The original version was popular as an educational tool to teach people about privilege from a young age. The game was spearheaded by the late Robert Sommer, an internationally renowned professor at UC Davis and a pioneer of environmental psychology, the study of how human behavior is affected by the design of the world around us, in collaboration with Psychology Today. Only on a few occasions has a copy surfaced to be auctioned off. The first edition of Blacks & Whites was released more than 50 years ago, in 1970, but has since disappeared. For the first many rounds of the game, Black characters are only allowed to buy property in two of the four property zones (the Ungentrified Zone and Integrated Zone) while white characters can also buy in the remaining two (the Suburban Zone and 1% Zone) from the start-not that I could afford it anyway. But card stacks are segregated, and the stack reserved for Blacks contains more bumps in the road than the one for whites.
Players can land on opportunity spaces, draw a card and get an advantage or disadvantage. Had I been white, I could have posted $20,000 in bail, rolled again, and pretended it had never happened.įrom then on, things only got harder. In my first turn, playing as a Black character called Rico, I rolled a 10 and landed myself a round detained at the police station. Black characters, encouraged to pool together their assets in a form of collective action, are given just $10,000 (that’s 40 grand short of the cheapest two properties). The privilege is clear from the get-go, when white characters are granted a sum of $1,000,000 to go and purchase property with. “The government begins an ‘urban renewal project!’ Lose all property in the Ungentrified Zone,” reads one coined only for Black characters.īlacks & Whites is similar to Monopoly, but with a twist: The character’s race is crucial to the player’s success in the game. Collect $50,000,” reads an opportunity card reserved for players of white characters in Blacks & Whites: 50th Anniversary Edition, a “socially conscious” tabletop game about privilege and inequity in real estate and American society. “You’re listening and learning and your DMs are open.
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