Fair Play

In my area, when houses go up for sale, there are those neighbors who are pretty honest about wanting whites to move in. And there are those who say skin color doesn’t matter, so long as they keep up the lawn. But, “keeping up the lawn” is just another way of saying, “we’ve seen the blighted, inner-city, and we don’t want that or the people who represent it in our neighborhood”. This is the racism that is so much a part of our suburbanite composition that we don’t notice it for what it is—institutionalized, through decades of zoning codes, codes of ethics, racial covenants, redlining and later, after the Fair Housing Act of 1968, through the cowardice of people in power and the machine of bureaucracy (Hannah-Jones).

These racist attitudes are not unique. Across the country, decades of institutionalized racism have perpetuated the myth of the white bastion. In her article “Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law”, Nikole Hannah-Jones asserts that the Fair Housing Act was supposed to roll back the instruments of institutionalization and “affirmatively further” housing integration, but, as anyone anywhere in the country can see, this did not happen. Cities are geographically divided along racial/ethnic and income lines. And in many white neighborhoods, a battle exists in the hearts and minds of residents who want to keep their neighborhoods white at the expense of insuring equal opportunities for the Other.

In a related article, “Soft on Segregation: How the Feds Failed to Integrate Westchester County”, Hannah-Jones analyzes the case and history of Westchester County, NY where this battle is playing out in the legal system. Sued in 2006 for falsely claiming on their HUD funding applications that they had complied with the Fair Housing Act, the county fought back and lost. According to the provisions of the 2009 settlement, the county is required, over seven years, to build 750 affordable housing units in its “whitest jurisdictions” and to market that housing to blacks and Latinos. So unpopular was this settlement that the County Executive who agreed to it lost his re-election bid to his competitor, Rob Astorino, whose campaign rested primarily on residents’ anger over the settlement. Nearly four years after the settlement, Westchester remains non-compliant with its provisions.

Astorino argued that “the issue is about class, not race. ‘I would love to live in Chappaqua next to the Clintons or Governor Cuomo, but I don’t have the economic means to do it’” (Hannah-Jones, “Soft on Segregation”). While his county remains in violation of the Fair Housing Act, Astorino cannot admit that its housing development strategies are racist. However, his assertion that classism is more defensible than racism is ludicrous. As Hannah-Jones notes, “the connection between race and class can be nearly inextricable, particularly when certain zoning requirements—called ‘exclusionary zoning’ by fair-housing advocates—are present.”

Over the years, the white, homogenous-leaning suburbanites I have spoken with think that success is a matter of perseverance. They think that, were they themselves born into similar circumstances as those in poor, black neighborhoods, they would work hard and climb out of poverty to the position they are in today. They want to continue reaping the benefits of institutionalized racism, but they don’t want to admit that it is what has allowed them to live in the safe and well-tended neighborhoods they don’t want to share with the Other: “More than 20 years of research has implicated residential segregation in virtually every aspect of racial inequality, from higher unemployment rates for African Americans, to poorer health care, to elevated infant mortality rates and, most of all, to inferior schools” (Hannah-Jones, "Living Apart").

Westchester and my own neighborhood, these are the norm, but there is always an exception: Montgomery County, Maryland. In 1974, against much resistance and after years of hurdles, Montgomery initiated its own affirmative housing integration plan. Today, “it remains one of the nation’s richest counties, yet segregation has fallen well below the national average” (Hannah-Jones, “Living Apart”). Why did they do this when no other county would? Joyce Siegel, the county housing commissioner at that time, said, “’We saw the segregation. It was a fairness issue—that one part of the county wasn’t going to have more affordable housing than another. We had to be fair’” (Hannah-Jones, “Living Apart”).

Fair. It’s the rule we learn from the time we’re old enough to grab the other kid’s toy. Don’t cheat. Everybody gets a turn, then we all win.

Sources

Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law.” ProPublica. ProPublica, 29 Oct. 2012. Web. 3 Nov. 2012. http://www.propublica.org/article/living-apart-how-the-government-betrayed-a-landmark-civil-rights-law

Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “Soft on Segregation: How the Feds Failed to Integrate Westchester County.” ProPublica. ProPublica, 2 Nov. 2012. Web. 3 Nov. 2012. http://www.propublica.org/article/soft-on-segregation-how-the-feds-failed-to-integrate-westchester-county

Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996. Print.