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De facto segregation,
“redlining,”
subprime loans.
Segregation by intentional government action is not de facto.
Rather, it is what courts call de jure: segregation by law and public policy.
relics.
housing discrimination was a residue of slave status that the Thirteenth Amendment empowered Congress to eliminate.
The Color of Law is concerned with consistent government policy that was employed in the mid-twentieth century to enforce residential racial segregation.
Stewart explained that black students were concentrated in the city, not spread throughout Detroit’s suburbs, because of “unknown and perhaps unknowable factors such as in-migration, birth rates, economic changes, or cumulative acts of private racial fears.”
“[V]estiges
that wrongs committed by the state have little causal link to the residential segregation we see around us.
The core argument of this book is that African Americans were unconstitutionally denied the means and the right to integration in middle-class neighborhoods, and because this denial was state-sponsored, the nation is obligated to remedy it.
there is a constitutional obligation to remedy the effects of government-sponsored segregation, though not of private discrimination.
Most segregation does fall into the category of open and explicit government-sponsored segregation.
euphemisms
succinctly
walk. In rural Louisiana in the early 1930s, the school year for African Americans was much shorter than for whites, because children like Frank were expected to hire out when planting or harvesting was to be done.
White school would be continued, but they would turn the black school out because they wanted the kids to go to work on the farm. . .
As in Rollingwood ten years earlier, one of the federal government’s specifications for mortgages insured in Milpitas was an openly stated prohibition on sales to African Americans.
Public housing’s original purpose was to give shelter not to those too poor to afford it but to those who could afford decent housing but couldn’t find it because none was available.
A result of the government program, therefore, was the increased population density that turned the African American neighborhoods into slums.
The San Francisco Housing Authority attempted to recruit white tenants by placing advertisements in light-rail commuter cars, despite the long waiting lists of African Americans for apartments. This combination of vacant white units and waiting lists for black units increasingly characterized public housing nationwide.
“you have no right to use housing against civil rights. . . . Housing is advanced in the interest of the general welfare and in the interest of strength[en]ing democracy. When you separate civil rights from housing you weaken that general welfare.”
In defending HUD before the Supreme Court, President Gerald Ford’s solicitor general, Robert Bork, expressed the government’s opposition to placing public housing in white areas: “There will be an enormous practical impact on innocent communities who have to bear the burden of the housing, who will have to house a plaintiff class from Chicago, which they wronged in no way.”
Thus the federal government described nondiscriminatory housing policy as punishment visited on the innocent.
The federal government had required public housing to be made available only to families who needed substantial subsidies, while the same government declined to provide sufficient subsidies to make public housing a decent place to live.
Ordinarily, the negro loves to gather to himself, for he is very gregarious and sociable in his nature. But those who have risen somewhat above their fellows appear to have an intense desire to leave them behind, to disown them, as it were, and get as close to the company of white people as circumstances will permit them.
Not only were these neighborhoods zoned to permit industry, even polluting industry, but the plan commission permitted taverns, liquor stores, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution to open in African American neighborhoods but prohibited these as zoning violations in neighborhoods where whites lived.
For the most part, courts have refused to reject toxic siting decisions without proof of explicit, stated intent to harm African Americans because of their race.
In the many hundreds of such cases, judges endorsed the view that restrictive covenants did not violate the Constitution because they were private agreements.
Racial covenants’ power depended upon the collaboration of the judicial system and as such violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits state governments from participating in segregation.
Only in 1962, when President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order prohibiting the use of federal funds to support racial discrimination in housing, did the FHA cease financing subdivision developments whose builders openly refused to sell to black buyers.
finding that Shelley did not preclude neighbors from suing both seller and purchaser for engaging in a conspiracy to diminish a community’s property values.
It took another nineteen years before a federal appeals court ruled that the covenants themselves violated the Fair Housing Act and that recording deeds with such clauses would constitute state action in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
African Americans were willing to pay more than whites for similar housing, property values in neighborhoods where African Americans could purchase increased more often than they declined.
Blockbusters’ tactics included hiring African American women to push carriages with their babies through white neighborhoods, hiring African American men to drive cars with radios blasting through white neighborhoods, paying African American men to accompany agents knocking on doors to see if homes were for sale, or making random telephone calls to residents of white neighborhoods and asking to speak to someone with a stereotypically African American name like “Johnnie Mae.”
Speculators also took out real estate advertisements in African American newspapers, even if the featured properties were not for sale. The ads’ purpose was to attract potential African American buyers to walk around white areas that were targeted for blockbusting. In a 1962 Saturday Evening Post article, an agent (using the pseudonym “Norris Vitchek”) claimed to have arranged house burglaries in white communities to scare neighbors into believing that their communities were becoming unsafe.
Blockbusting could work only because the FHA made certain that African Americans had few alternative neighborhoods where they could purchase homes at fair market values.
“Justice delayed is justice denied”
Some policemen, assigned to protect the African American family, stood with the mob, joking and encouraging its participants. One sergeant was demoted to patrolman because he objected to orders he had been given not to interfere with the rioters.
When a police officer has killed or beaten an African American man with apparent racial motivation, we now expect that the officer’s superiors will fire him (or her) or, if there is doubt about whether a citizen’s civil rights were violated, will suspend the officer, pending an investigation. If superiors fail to take such measures, we expect still higher authorities to intervene. If they do not, we can reasonably assume that the police officer’s approach fit within the bounds of what his or her superiors consider appropriate response and reflect governmental policy.
In some cases, local benefit administrators refused to process applications to four-year colleges for African Americans, directing them to vocational schools instead.
African Americans have even less mobility. For those born to parents in the bottom income quintile, over half (53 percent) remain there as adults, and only a quarter (26 percent) make it to the middle quintile
ONE REASON low-income African Americans are less upwardly mobile than low-income whites is that low-income African Americans are more likely to be stuck for multiple generations in poor neighborhoods.
Forty-eight percent of African American families, at all income levels, have lived in poor neighborhoods over at least two generations, compared to 7 percent of white families.
Certainly some children overcome these difficulties. But the average child living in a poor household is less likely to escape poverty as an adult, and the average child living in a poor household in a poor neighborhood is even less likely to do so. The cycle can be broken only by a policy as aggressive as that which created ghettos of concentrated poverty in the first place.
Whites may support political candidates who pander to their sense of racial entitlement while advocating policies that perpetuate the inferior economic opportunities that some whites may face.
Whites can develop a dysfunctional cynicism from living in a society that proclaims values of justice while maintaining racial inequalities that belie those values.
Social psychologists have found that segregation can give whites an unrealistic belief in their own superiority, leading to poorer performance if they feel less need to challenge themselves. Experiments show that when we are in teams with others from similar backgrounds, we tend to go along with the popular view rather than think for ourselves, resulting in less creative groups more prone to make errors.
de facto segregation, or segregation by unwritten custom or tradition,
