Source of book: Borrowed from the library
This was the month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. While often we read books I was not familiar with, this one actually was on my reading list already.
To say I enjoyed this book is to use the wrong term. It is the opposite of enjoyable, despite being well written, thoroughly backed up by evidence, and compelling.
The reason why is that the author is spot on: residential segregation (and thus our ongoing school segregation) didn’t happen by accident, it wasn’t the result of personal preferences, and it wasn’t the result of vague impersonal forces.
Our country was segregated by force of law. By government policies at all levels of government - Federal, State, and local. These actions by government created segregation, destroyed integrated communities, forced families from their homes, charged black people far more for housing, denied them access to jobs, and continue even today to maintain segregation.
For the most part, these actions were overt and explicitly racist. Those that persist today are often couched in “race neutral” terms although they have grossly unequal effects, and in fact are often calculated to maintain current racial and economic segregation.
Even where the law has changed, violators are often given a pass - my wife and I both have come across instances where people were offered better mortgage rates when they switched the racial box from black to white. Others have had their homes appraised hundreds of thousands higher when they carefully eliminated evidence they were black from their homes. It is still happening, and, at best, government agencies that should take action look the other way.
Although I will try to give a bit of a picture, there is no substitute for reading the book. As a lawyer, I found the legal side of things easy to understand and thoroughly fascinating. For non-lawyers, it might take a bit more effort to understand how the laws work - although understanding this will help in future negotiations for mortgages, for example.
I also want to make the point that my home state of California has one problem that bedevils it more than anything else, and is a prime cause of most of our other problems: housing affordability. California’s problems with affordable housing seem intractable, and they stem in large part from decisions made long before I was born that make it extremely difficult to build denser urban areas, and particularly affordable housing projects.
These policies were put in place to create and maintain racial (and later economic) segregation, and now function to enrich those who bought in 40 to 50 years ago at the expense of everyone else.
The book covers a lot of ground, because government action created and preserved segregation by many different means over more than a century. As laws and public opinion shifted, segregators found and created new methods of getting the same result.
Just to give a taste, the book covers racially exclusive zoning, private covenants (recorded on deeds), placement of public housing, FHA loan guarantees, redlining, white flight (and how it was government subsidized), IRS regulators who refused to do their jobs (and still do), local government action, police that refused to arrest those doing violence to black homeowners, income suppression, and more.
The book ends with some potential policies to reverse segregation - to repair the damage caused by government action. These range from idealistic dreams (which he acknowledges are not practical given our current Supreme Court) to more realistic reforms targeted at economic integration.
Let me dive in, then, with some quotes, starting with the introduction, where Rothstein challenges the notion that impersonal forces or simple preference drives our current residential segregation:
[U]ntil the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today’s residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States. The policy was so systematic and forceful that its effects endure to the present time. Without our government’s purposeful imposition of racial segregation, the other causes - private prejudice, white flight, real estate steering, bank redlining, income differences, and self-segregation - still would have existed but with far less opportunity for expression. Segregation by intentional government action is not de facto. Rather, it is what courts call de jure: segregation by law and public policy.
There is another great point in the introduction that I want to mention. Rothstein asserts that government segregation was always unconstitutional, no matter what a particular Supreme Court said about it.
There were many specific government actions that prevented African Americans and whites from living among one another, and I categorize them as “unconstitutional.” In doing so, I reject the widespread view that an action is not unconstitutional until the Supreme Court says so. Few Americans think that racial segregation in schools was constitutional before 1954, when the Supreme Court prohibited it. Rather, segregation was always unconstitutional, although a misguided Supreme Court majority mistakenly failed to recognize this.
I am with Rothstein here. I also believe that many of our recent SCOTUS decisions will likewise be widely understood to be mistaken or even outright malevolent toward the Constitution.
A final thing from the introduction is worth a thought. The author explains his use of various terms. “Negroes” is used a lot - because that was the term in the laws in question for decades. Otherwise, African American is the most common, along with Black (depending on the context and time frame of the discussion.)
Another term stood out as well. Rothstein insists on using “ghetto.” And he is accurate about it. Whenever an ethnic group is forced to live in such a neighborhood, and kept there, it is accurate to describe it as a ghetto. And in this case, our government set up ghettos and erected barriers to keep African Americans in them. The term is as accurate as it was when Jewish people were forced into ghettos in Europe.
From start to finish in this book, it was striking how a thread that keeps showing up is the destruction of integrated neighborhoods. It seems that whenever an integrated neighborhood arose, it was destroyed by government action. I personally grew up in an integrated neighborhood, but it was shocking how few of those there seemed to be in my native Los Angeles. At least in the 1980s, California was no longer actively trying to create segregation (although many of the effects of the past still linger.)
While I already knew quite a bit about restrictive covenants from my own legal practice (you find these deeds all over California, believe it or not: “no Negroes or Chinese may be sold this property now or in the future”), I was surprised by some of the things related to public housing.
One of those was yet another reminder about what an absolutely horrible piece of shit of a human being Robert Bork was, personally and professionally. In the 1970s, working for Nixon, he argued that public housing shouldn’t be built in white areas of cities, because that would be inflicting a burden on “innocent communities.” Yeah, white people shouldn’t be “punished” by having those dirty brown-skinned people near them. Sure, Robbie, sure. And yes, Bork was the source of that argument – it was his policy recommendation.
Oh, but did you think the 1970s were the last of overt racial discrimination? Think again.
In Miami, African Americans needing housing subsidies were assigned to all-black public housing projects, while white families were given vouchers to live in white suburbs. Guess when that policy was finally ended by the courts?
1998.
Nineteen freaking ninety-eight. I met my wife that year. My first kid would be born only five years later. And there was STILL an openly racist and obviously unconstitutional policy still being enforced in Florida.
Hey, how about a personal connection? Montana used to have a significant African American population - a lot of farm and ranch workers used to be black (including more cowboys than the myth would have you think.) But starting in the 1910s, Montana started explicitly excluding African Americans from the state. The book details all of the churches, civic organizations, and other black institutions that disappeared over time, as the state’s black population was forced out.
The city of Glendive (near where my ancestors farmed back in the day - and where family still lives) was specifically mentioned as a place that ran all of the black people out of town - and bragged about it.
Oh, and how about racial zoning laws? Did you know that in many cities, these remained in place as part of the zoning planning process well into the 1980s?
At some point, this switched to a different means to the same end. And it continues today.
The use of zoning for purposes of racial segregation persisted well into the latter half of the twentieth century. In a 1970 Oklahoma case, the segregated town of Lawton refused to permit a multiunit development in an all-white neighborhood after residents circulated a petition in opposition. They used racial appeals to urge citizens to sign, although the language of the petition itself did not mention race.
Hey, this happened in the last few years here in Bakersfield too. An effort to build student housing adjacent to our local community college (which my kids attend) was met by opposition using the exact same dog whistles that have been used for decades. (By the way, although nobody has officially taken responsibility for the flyers, it isn’t a secret. One of my kids suffered through a class taught by one of these professors in the so-called “Liberty Institute” who claimed that it was justifiable to enslave black people because of the Curse of Ham, and gave the seig heil in class multiple times, just to name a few instances. He’s now suing the college, and asserting his right to violate California anti-discrimination laws. Another one of this group was recently fired for slandering and filing false complaints against other professors.)
The same fears - declining property values (which the author notes was due to government policy as well), crime, and of course miscegenation!!! (your wife and daughters will be at risk!) are still used today to build opposition to every high density or low income housing project that might get built. And so, they end up being built in the ghettos, not in wealthier neighborhoods - where the good jobs are.
Oh, and what about those suburbs? How did we get those and the freeways connecting them?
Kind of an interesting story. That was by design. Move the white people out of the urban core, build freeways so they can drive to their jobs. And then refuse to build public transportation so that black people can do the same from the ghettos they were forced into.
And, according to the 1950s justification, this subsidizing of home ownership (ongoing, by the way) would keep working class white people from becoming communists. You can read the official government publications from the time with explicit racial language, making it clear that the intent was that white workers be able to live free from black neighbors.
I mean, stuff like “not a single foreigner or negro” in the neighborhood. Fascinating history. And horrifying too.
It is important to never underestimate the role of government in all this. By 1948, most housing nationwide was being built with government financing, mostly the FHA and the VA. This is still mostly the case now - pretty much everyone who wasn’t born with money starts out with an FHA guaranteed loan. (Something most people don’t even realize.)
Another fascinating chapter was the one on the IRS and regulators. As we know, the law changed with the Civil Rights Act. But….
It was shocking how the IRS and other agencies have looked the other way when it comes to regulation. Perhaps I realized this the most when it came to the Subprime Mortgage disaster. There was systemic discrimination against black borrowers, who were steered into more expensive loans when they qualified for cheaper ones.
What SHOULD have happened is that ALL of those loans should have been voided, and any that had been foreclosed on reimbursed to the borrower with significant damages. Instead, just a fine - a slap on the wrist - and NO compensation to those harmed. It drives me crazy.
And that brings us to the Bob Jones saga. Remember, the issue that the Religious Right was founded on wasn’t abortion, but segregation. Specifically, the right of Bob Jones University to racially segregate. The IRS finally did the right thing in the 1970s and revoked the school’s tax exempt status.
Remember: tax exemption is a government subsidy.
Sadly, throughout this book, religious organizations rarely come off well. Yes, there are exceptions - a number of them fought segregation at various times. But they were in the minority. More commonly churches and other religious organizations fought to establish and preserve segregation, commonly funding lawsuits against African American homeowners seeking to remove them.
I say “religious organizations” because it wasn’t limited to churches, to any one denomination, or to a single religion. Synagogues too supported segregation….at least in those communities where Jews were considered “white enough.” Oh yeah, and also the Moody Bible Institute. How nice.
There is so much more to discuss, but I want to move on to the question of lingering damage from government-enforced segregation and the “wicked problem” of how to fix it.
From 1957 to 1968, Congress adopted civil rights laws prohibiting second-class citizenship for African Americans in public accommodations and transportation, voting, and employment. Although not without challenges, these laws were effective. Ending segregation in housing, however, is much more complicated. Prohibiting discrimination in voting and restaurants mostly requires modifying future behavior. But ending de jure segregation of housing requires undoing past actions that may seem irreversible.
The thing is, even though it is a difficult problem, there is a pressing need to do so. Residential segregation is at the root of a great many other difficult problems, and without solving the residential problem, other problems become increasingly impossible to solve.
As a nation, we have paid an enormous price for avoiding an obligation to remedy the unconstitutional segregation we have allowed to fester.
African Americans, of course, suffer from our evasion. But so, too, does the nation as a whole, as do whites in particular. Many of our serious national problems either originate with residential segregation, or have become intractable because of it. We have greater political and social conflict because we must add unfamiliarity with fellow citizens of different racial backgrounds to the challenges we confront in resolving legitimate disagreements about public issues. Racial polarization stemming from our separateness has corrupted our politics, permitting leaders who ignore the interests of white working-class voters to mobilize them with racial appeals. 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. Interracial political alliances become more difficult to organize when whites develop overly intolerant judgments of the unfortunate - from a need to justify their own acceptance of segregation that so obviously conflicts with both their civic ideals and their religious ones.
That’s a mic drop right there. This book doesn’t mention Trump (it was written before the election, and published soon thereafter) but it certainly describes the Trump appeal.
And it also explains how so many people like my parents and other extended family can betray their supposed civic and religious ideals - the values they taught me! - because of that need to justify their unacknowledged intolerance of non-white people.
We as a nation are polarized far more than we need to be. As Jonathan Metzl noted, we can actually agree on a lot more things than we think….but we don’t because of whiteness and the perceived need to preserve segregation.
Rothstein acknowledges the fact that we face political obstacles to fixing the problem. Here is how he explains the dilemma:
I hesitate to offer suggestions about desegregation policies and remedies because, imprecise and incomplete though they may be, remedies are inconceivable as long as citizens, whatever their political views, continue to accept the myth of de facto segregation. If segregation was created by accident or by undefined private prejudices, it is too easy to believe that it can only be reversed by accident or, in some mysterious way, by changes in people’s hearts. But if we - the public and policy makers - acknowledge that the federal, state, and local governments segregated our metropolitan areas, we may open our minds to considering how those same federal, state, and local governments might adopt equally aggressive policies to desegregate.
He does, at least, offer some ideas. Some of these are fairly easy by comparison. For example, he calls out major textbook publishing companies for using passive verbs to describe segregation, as if it “just happened.” Instead, they should use active language, and state outright that government did specific things to cause segregation.
Others are a bit more difficult, as they would require racially targeted remedies - to right racially targeted wrongs. (Something our current SCOTUS clearly will not tolerate - for them, discrimination is only okay if it helps rich people…)
One thing that our club agreed was good about the book was that Rothstein doesn’t pretend that there will be no costs involved. Any remedy will cost money, and it will involve a loss of privilege for middle-class white people. You know, the ones who have benefited from segregation for over a century and a half. And that includes me.
While economies are not zero-sum games, they are not unlimited sum, and doing right by our poorer members will require the wealthier ones to give up something. And likewise, people who have been subjected to crushing poverty won’t suddenly lose all of the effects of their trauma and oppression. It isn’t magic. But in the long term, it will benefit all of us.
The question and answer section at the end of the book is particularly good, so if you read it, don’t forget to finish the whole thing, including that section.
One that I wanted to mention is this one:
“I wasn’t even born when all this happened.”
I have heard this since I was a child. It applies in my family’s case - and I mean that for both good and bad.
My ancestors came to the United States decades after the Civil War. We started out poor, and never had slaves. So why is this our fault?
Well, it may not be our fault, but we have benefited from segregationist policies. We rose from poverty due to the Homestead Act, which in practice, wasn’t available to African Americans. We lived in neighborhoods that had better infrastructure as a result. Jobs were available to my ancestors that were not available to black people. The list goes on.
But Rothstein cuts the knot more completely:
When we become Americans, we accept not only citizenship’s privileges that we did not earn but also its responsibilities to correct wrongs that we did not commit. It was our government that segregated American neighborhoods, whether we or our ancestors bore witness to it, and it is our government that now must craft remedies.
Man, I wish I could discuss so much more of this book, but there is insufficient time and space. Plus, Rothstein does it so much better than I could.
I strongly encourage every American to read this book, and to read it with the understanding that none of us picked our skin color. Our nation has done a grave wrong, committed a horrible injustice, and we need to make it right.
