Many whites who oppose open housing would deny that they are racists. They turn to sociological arguments—the crime rate in the Negro community, the lagging cultural standards, the fear that their schools will become academically inferior, the fear that property values will depreciate—in order to find excuses for their opposition. They never stop to realize that criminal responses are environmental, not racial. To hem a people up in the prison walls of overcrowded ghettos and to confine them in rat-infested slums is to breed crime, whatever the racial group may be. It is a strange and twisted
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