While it is easy to see how de jure (legally-mandated) residential segregation reflects an underlying, systemic racism in American government and society, this does not explain why any individual—a white congressperson, real estate agent, government regulator, homebuyer, or police officer—would defend and perpetuate racist policies. Though not everyone historically responsible for these policies has necessarily been motivated by personal racist beliefs, all of these people’s actions are undeniably racist, because they contribute to systematic discrimination against black people. Rothstein shows how both individuals and organizations, in private and official capacities alike, advance racist discrimination when they eschew concerns of morality and equality for the sake of personal profit or political power. This quest for power and profit creates a gulf between people’s attitudes toward others and their actions’ effects on others, and this process illustrates how many Americans are responsible for perpetuating unjust and unjustifiable structural racism, even when they may not actually hold racist beliefs of their own.
In the 20th century, numerous people, private organizations, and government agencies promoted segregation because of straightforward racism. Presidents Wilson and Hoover were outspoken racists and actively promoted white homeownership so that white people could separate themselves from African Americans, whom Hoover said had “ignorant racial habit[s]” from which white people needed “protection.” Similarly, violent white mobs that attacked integrating middle-class African American families—as well as the police officers who defended and joined these mobs—were clearly motivated by hatred toward black people. Even churches frequently appealed to racist stereotypes and “‘master race’ theory” to justify opposing integration. In all these cases, white supremacist beliefs and racist hatred were white people’s primary motivation for pursuing racist housing policies that specifically discriminated against African Americans.
In addition to those who were outwardly racist, however, many people and companies furthered residential segregation because it was in their economic interests to do so—not because they necessarily cared about who lived where. For decades, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) refused to insure mortgages for black homebuyers, which essentially blocked African Americans from obtaining the financing necessary to buy single-family homes in suburban areas. But the FHA’s justification was not explicitly racist: it was economic. The FHA believed that African American neighbors would lower the value of white people’s houses and painted its refusal to extend credit to black people as part of an attempt to protect white homebuyers’ investments. While real estate agents might not have been personally prejudiced against African Americans (although many certainly were), virtually all of them went along with the FHA’s requirements because it was in their best interests: an agent who sold to African Americans would have their career destroyed. Similarly, construction companies were happy to make money by constructing new suburbs—regardless of whether those suburbs had to be segregated.
The common practice of “blockbusting” shows even more clearly how the real estate industry’s racism was driven by profit. “Blockbusters” profited by convincing white families that African Americans were moving into their neighborhoods, then buying those families’ homes for cheap and selling them to African Americans for above-market rates. Clearly, blockbusters were happy to do business with both white and black people, and did not particularly care about a neighborhood’s racial composition. Rather, they supported the FHA’s segregationist rules precisely because this injustice was what allowed them to profit extravagantly. Ironically, the FHA’s belief that black neighbors reduced the cost of white people’s houses was only true because blockbusters bought up white people’s homes for less than they were worth. The FHA’s logic was circular: because white people feared that their property prices would drop, they sold for cheap to blockbusters, and these sales are what actually made their property prices drop—until middle-class black residents moved in and made home prices skyrocket. In short, while the FHA used economic reasoning to justify its racist policy, in fact racist policy caused the economic effects it observed. By disguising racist discrimination as smart economics, the FHA made it seem legally and morally acceptable. And by giving the real estate industry clear financial incentives to discriminate, the FHA essentially institutionalized segregation and racism in American housing.
Despite knowing that it was wrong and illegal, people acting in official capacities also frequently endorsed segregation, usually because fighting it would have hurt their political careers. For instance, the benefits of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal were almost exclusively reserved for white people because Roosevelt needed the support of racist Southern Democrats to get them passed in Congress. Throughout his career, in fact, Roosevelt sacrificed protections for African Americans in order to secure them for white people, because he perceived the cost of securing racial equality as too high. Similarly, even today, government agencies almost always construct industrial plants and public housing projects in primarily poor and black neighborhoods, not because they want to further disadvantage those populations, but simply because white suburban neighborhoods would veto such construction, while urban black neighborhoods lack the political power to do so. Again, these government agents’ refusal to take a politically costly stand for equality ultimately contributes to segregation, regardless of their underlying motivations.
Ultimately, Rothstein’s book demonstrates how self-interested individual actions with no clear racial motive can still add up to a racist system. Many people involved in perpetuating segregation—from white homeowners who believe discriminating against African Americans is in their family’s best economic interest, to policymakers willing to sacrifice racial equality to get important legislation passed—may disagree with the system in theory, but eagerly perpetuate it in practice. In fact, this is why Rothstein prefers to use “liberal and inclusive” enclaves like the San Francisco Bay Area or Cambridge, Massachusetts as his examples of segregation: these places show not only the pervasiveness of de jure segregation, but also the way that well-meaning liberals who may not consider themselves racists end up perpetuating discrimination when their self-interest differs from the demands of racial equality. The implication, then, is clear: because racism is systemic in the United States, inaction is equivalent to complicity.
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Racism, Profit, and Political Gain Quotes in The Color of Law
De facto segregation, we tell ourselves, has various causes. When African Americans moved into a neighborhood like Ferguson, a few racially prejudiced white families decided to leave, and then as the number of black families grew, the neighborhood deteriorated, and “white flight” followed. Real estate agents steered whites away from black neighborhoods, and blacks away from white ones. Banks discriminated with “redlining,” refusing to give mortgages to African Americans or extracting unusually severe terms from them with subprime loans. African Americans haven’t generally gotten the educations that would enable them to earn sufficient incomes to live in white suburbs, and, as a result, many remain concentrated in urban neighborhoods. Besides, black families prefer to live with one another.
All this has some truth, but it remains a small part of the truth, submerged by a far more important one: until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. […] Segregation by intentional government action is not de facto. Rather, it is what courts call de jure: segregation by law and public policy.
Half a century ago, the truth of de jure segregation was well known, but since then we have suppressed our historical memory and soothed ourselves into believing that it all happened by accident or by misguided private prejudice. Popularized by Supreme Court majorities from the 1970s to the present, the de facto segregation myth has now been adopted by conventional opinion, liberal and conservative alike.
Over the past few decades, we have developed euphemisms to help us forget how we, as a nation, have segregated African American citizens. We have become embarrassed about saying ghetto, a word that accurately describes a neighborhood where government has not only concentrated a minority but established barriers to its exit. We don’t hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in Eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean. (When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don’t characterize those whites as inner city families.)
Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state housing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto.
The director of the Federal Housing Administration supported Tenerowicz, stating that the presence of African Americans in the area would threaten property values of nearby residents. Foreman was forced to resign. The Federal Works Agency then proposed a different project for African Americans on a plot that the Detroit Housing Commission recommended, in an industrial area deemed unsuitable for whites. It soon became apparent that this site, too, would provoke protests because it was not far enough away from a white neighborhood. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt protested to the president. The FWA again reversed course and assigned African Americans to the Sojourner Truth project. Whites in the neighborhood rioted, leading to one hundred arrests (all but three were African Americans) and thirty-eight hospitalizations (all but five were African Americans).
The waffling of San Francisco’s elected leaders and housing administrators about whether to segregate public projects, like similar waffling in Boston and elsewhere, makes sense only if these officials knew that the segregation they imposed was wrong, if not unconstitutional.
In the wake of the 1917 Buchanan decision, the enthusiasm of federal officials for economic zoning that could also accomplish racial segregation grew rapidly.
The frequent existence of polluting industry and toxic waste plants in African American communities, along with subdivided homes and rooming houses, contributed to giving African Americans the image of slum dwellers in the eyes of whites who lived in neighborhoods where integration might be a possibility. This, in turn, contributed to white flight when African Americans attempted to move to suburbs.
Zoning thus had two faces. One face, developed in part to evade a prohibition on racially explicit zoning, attempted to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods by making it difficult for lower-income families, large numbers of whom were African Americans, to live in expensive white neighborhoods. The other attempted to protect white neighborhoods from deterioration by ensuring that few industrial or environmentally unsafe businesses could locate in them. Prohibited in this fashion, polluting industry had no option but to locate near African American residences. The first contributed to creation of exclusive white suburbs, the second to creation of urban African American slums.
The full cycle went like this: when a neighborhood first integrated, property values increased because of African Americans’ need to pay higher prices for homes than whites. But then property values fell once speculators had panicked enough white homeowners into selling at deep discounts.
Falling sale prices in neighborhoods where blockbusters created white panic was deemed as proof by the FHA that property values would decline if African Americans moved in. But if the agency had not adopted a discriminatory and unconstitutional racial policy, African Americans would have been able, like whites, to locate throughout metropolitan areas rather than attempting to establish presence in only a few blockbusted communities, and speculators would not have been able to prey on white fears that their neighborhoods would soon turn from all white to all black.
The consequences of racially targeted subprime lending continue to accumulate. As the housing bubble collapsed, African American homeownership rates fell much more than white rates. Families no longer qualify for conventional mortgages if they previously defaulted when they were unable to make exorbitant loan payments; for these families, the contract buying system of the 1960s is now making its return. Some of the same firms that exploited African Americans in the subprime crisis are now reselling foreclosed properties to low- and moderate-income households at high interest rates, with high down payments, with no equity accumulated until the contract period has ended, and with eviction possible after a single missed payment.
The Milpitas story illustrates the extraordinary creativity that government officials at all levels displayed when they were motivated to prevent the movement of African Americans into white neighborhoods. It wasn’t only the large-scale federal programs of public housing and mortgage finance that created de jure segregation. Hundreds, if not thousands of smaller acts of government contributed. They included petty actions like denial of access to public utilities; determining, once African Americans wanted to build, that their property was, after all, needed for parkland; or discovering that a road leading to African American homes was “private.” They included routing interstate highways to create racial boundaries or to shift the residential placement of African American families. And they included choosing school sites to force families to move to segregated neighborhoods if they wanted education for their children.
Taken in isolation, we can easily dismiss such devices as aberrations. But when we consider them as a whole, we can see that they were part of a national system by which state and local government supplemented federal efforts to maintain the status of African Americans as a lower caste, with housing segregation preserving the badges and incidents of slavery.
“N_____ have moved into Levittown!”
State-sponsored violence was a means, along with many others, by which all levels of government maintained segregation in Louisville and elsewhere. The Wades and Marshalls were only two middle-class families confronted with hostile state power when they tried to cross the residential color line. How many other middle-class African Americans in Louisville were intimidated from attempting to live in neighborhoods of their own choosing after hearing of the Wade and Marshall experiences? Did the next generation imbibe a fear of integration from their parents? How long do the memories of such events last? How long do they continue to intimidate?
It is certainly true that one cause of segregation today is the inability of many African Americans to afford to live in middle-class communities. But segregation itself has had a high cost for African Americans, exacerbating their inability to save to purchase suburban homes. Income differences are only a superficial way to understand why we remain segregated. Racial policy in which government was inextricably involved created income disparities that ensure residential segregation, continuing to this day.
