Richard Rothstein’s 2017 book, The Color of Law, concerns U.S. residential segregation. He says we have a myth that it’s de facto segregation, meaning mainly a result of people’s individual choices and behaviors. Whereas instead the bigger factor is de jure segregation, a product of law and government policy. Not just in the Jim Crow South, but throughout America. And not just on the local level, but federal too, which lasted longer than you might think.
We all know about “redlining,” with banks drawing maps delineating no-go areas for mortgage loans. But this wasn’t just on the banks — their policies were responsive to those of the Federal Housing Authority, making it almost impossible for Blacks to participate in government mortgage insurance programs. Likewise programs aimed at helping veterans after WWII.
Illustrating government action hand-in-hand with individual hostility toward integration, Rothstein relates how in 1954, a Black family, the Wades, sought a home in Louisville, Kentucky. A white friend, Carl Braden, bought one in a white area and sold it to Wade. Klan violence ensued, culminating in the house being bombed. Through it all, the police just looked on, arresting no one — except for Mr. Wade and a friend, for “breach of the peace” in failing to provide notice that the friend would be visiting. Then Braden was charged with “sedition,” and sentenced to 15 years, for selling the house to Wade.
Affordability has of course been an issue for Blacks seeking homes in white middle class neighborhoods. But here too, Rothstein catalogs how government policies have penalized them, when it comes to earning and accumulating wealth. While Blacks do earn, on average, somewhat less than white Americans, their family wealth averages only around a tenth.
It’s actually expensive being poor in America — especially if also Black. One example in the book is how property tax assessments tend to be at higher percentages of market value in Black areas. Rothstein drily notes that higher assessed valuations don’t translate into actually higher home values. Yet he oddly fails to note that the opposite is true — higher property taxes on a house reduce its salability.
And while housing affordability is again an undoubted issue, the book shows that it’s often costlier to live in slums than in nice neighborhoods! Because Blacks can be very unwelcome in the latter, their housing options are effectively limited to African-American communities (ghettoes). Where the housing supply is often constricted, making for greater competition among would-be buyers and renters. In turn enabling property owners to charge more. Yet a further factor handicapping Black wealth accumulation.
Education is another, hardly mentioned in the book. Schools could be a great equalizer to offset all the disadvantages burdening Black kids in poor families in poor neighborhoods. But instead our schools tend to compound that disadvantage, often giving Blacks substandard education. Certainly that too is within the purview of government policy.
Then there’s over-incarceration of Black males. Combined with lesser educational attainment and job prospects — plus some white women marrying Black men — causing a husband shortage for Black women, and resulting prevalence of single motherhood. Which in turn deprives kids of the undoubted benefits of dual parenting, further handicapping their later lives.
And why have government policies been so discriminatory? Rothstein doesn’t really explore this question, with racism taken for granted, as a given. But what in fact explains that? Why do so many whites have this mentality?
Differentness is a starting factor. Humans evolved in tribes where a neighboring tribe was likely to be (or feared as) a potential competitor or enemy. Thus an innate animus toward “The Other.” Yet, especially in advanced countries like America, we’ve gone far toward overcoming that; and many immigrant groups that once were viewed with distaste and hostility have come to be thoroughly assimilated and accepted.
Blacks’ visible differentness, however, is harder to ignore. And that combines with a crucial cultural legacy — of slavery.
Slaveowners could justify it only by convincing themselves Blacks were not fully human — degraded creatures, for whom a degraded existence was appropriate. Even decreed by God. And there was a huge industry striving for scientific proof, with skull measurements and all that. (All bunk.) And of course making Blacks live in degrading conditions served to reinforce the idea of them as degraded by nature.
This idea became powerfully pervasive.
Yet despite that, the post-Civil War amendments gave ex-slaves citizenship, equal protection of the law, and even voting rights. Black service as Union troops helped there. Still, this was a breathtakingly broad-minded humanism, which must have reflected the prevailing viewpoint — in the North at least, where exposure to slavery, with all its nasty social ramifications, was fairly limited.
But that didn’t last. The 20th Century’s “Great Migration” of Southern Blacks northward seeded more racial anxiety there. And a recent article in The Economist discusses a study of white migration out of the South, widely spreading the poison of its political and cultural attitudes. The idea that Black people are fundamentally different and lesser creatures. To be shunned, even reviled, not pitied. Indeed, it’s almost surprising how little pity was actually in the stew of feelings toward Blacks.
I’m old enough to remember how this was a vague but real presence in the cultural background. No one ever actually articulated it to me, yet it somehow seeped into my own youthful brain. There was the notion that Blacks are “dirty” — polluting — so any contact with whites should be avoided. That they were louche, immoral, more crime-prone; coarser, cruder, vulgar. With the dysfunctionality one could expect in poverty-afflicted ghettoes seen as proving they have only themselves to blame for their degradation, with consequent antipathy toward any government efforts to help them at the expense of their (white) “betters.”
But even leaving aside all such particulars — they really didn’t have to stated — there was a basic notion that separation of the races was appropriate — it was the way things ought to be. Maybe even God-decreed.
This explains the blatantly racist policies of even a government agency like the FHA in the FDR administration. The bureaucrats were simply reflecting the ethos of the culture they inhabited. It was a given, taken for granted, proper and appropriate, that Blacks should be kept away from nice white neighborhoods. You didn’t even have to think about it.
As Rothstein argues, the lasting effects are so deeply embedded into societal structures that even after half a century of amelioration efforts, they still plague us. It’s very hard to undo. He observes that whereas discriminatory barriers have been reduced, and Black incomes have risen, the window of opportunity for residential integration has effectively been lost because those Black gains have been more than offset by soaring suburban home prices. And integration is not a simple matter of getting Black families into previously all-white enclaves. When more than just a few do get in, whites get out, and the neighborhood winds up segregated again. Maintaining a stable integrated community is tricky.
Meantime, while many of us had optimistically imagined racism confined just to some dark corners of American life, the last few years have revised that picture, showing us how Southernized the country actually became; how widespread those attitudes are, all over. Yet still, a more enlightened mentality does prevail for a majority of Americans today. And we can expect that majority to expand as the cohort of degraded older whites inexorably dies off. Progress funeral by funeral.
