Do white and black Americans live
apart for reasons of personal preference or because of the actions of the
government? This important question is the point in dispute between Chief Justice
John Roberts, who argues the first and author Richard Rothstein, who argues the
latter. Rothstein convincingly shows how the government has intervened time and
time again in favor of segregation, which implies that to right this wrong, the
government should intervene in favor of integration now, something the Chief
Justice has argued is unnecessary because the government was not responsible for
housing segregation in the first place.
A major source of federal support
for segregation was the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The FHA offered
cheap loans to Americans that made it possible for all to own a home… except
for black Americans, who were not served by the FHA. This locked black people
in America out of one of the biggest wealth-building policies in American
history, setting the entire race back by generations. Those homes gathered
massive passive income and wealth for the families who had them and many are
still in the same families as the original owners. The FHA even judges it too risky
to insure racially mixed neighborhoods, forcing whites away from blacks. The US
Commission on Civil Rights concluded in 1973 that the, “housing industry, aided
and abetted by Government, must bear the primary responsibility for the legacy
of segregated housing… Government and private industry came together to create a
system of residential segregation.”
In the last 50 years, it has not
been possible for most places to discriminate explicitly based on race, yet the
standard necessary to prove that someone is doing so is extremely high and
difficult to meet. Lawyers are usually unable to prove discrimination unless
they can more or less record the defendant saying that they discriminated based
on race. Rothstein illustrates this though a story of two communities, one
black and one white, in the 1990s. When Warren County attempted to build a
waste disposal facility in a white area, the residents protested and kept it
out. But when they tried to build in a black area that already had three waste
disposal facilities, they overruled protests by black residents. A federal
judge ruled this legal because there was no explicit discrimination.
Chapter nine of this book is particularly
atrocious in the behavior of whites described. It talks about the mobs that
formed to eject black people from white neighborhoods they moved into, and
those mobs were violent. They used dynamite, cross burnings, and drive-by
shootings to terrorize their black neighbors. Worse, the police who arrived at
these horrible scenes did not stop them or do anything to inhibit the violence
present, instead organizing the mobs and otherwise protecting the violent
whites, not the poor black families who just wanted to live.
I just want to quote a few pages
from the epilogue of the book here, since they’re excellent in summarizing the
point of the book:
“If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs.
If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee.
If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits.
If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so.
If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity.
If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother.
If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods.
If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children.
If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location.
If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere.
If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished.
If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities.”
- Miscellaneous Facts:
- Housing discrimination on the explicit basis of race was illegal starting in 1866 though it was without any method of enforcement and continued unabated until 1968.
- Until the New Deal, home ownership often required 50% down and full repayment after 5-7 years.
- In 1976, the IRS denied the tax exemption of Bob Jones University because the university prohibited interracial dating. The case went before the Supreme Court and Reagan’s administration REFUSED TO EVEN PRESENT THE CASE! The Supreme Court had to APPOINT AN OUSTIDE LAWYER to present the case, and that lawyer won. Incredibly fucked up.
- In 2015, NYC’s sheet metal workers union paid out 13 million dollars for racial discrimination in job assignments.
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