“American Apartheid” by Design
A Review
Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten
History of How Our Government Segregated America. (Liveright/Norton:
2017).
By
Charles Brover
The liberal civil rights movement
focused on tearing down the legal scaffolding of the system of Jim Crow
segregation. The Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown
v. Board of Education decision held out the promise of school integration,
although it took action by brave young black students and their parents to even
begin to translate this into reality. After freedom rides, lunch counter
sit-ins, voter registration drives, marching while drenched by fire hoses and
set upon by sheriffs’ dogs, braving murderous KKK nightriders and church bombers,
the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair
Housing Act of 1968 were passed. Then, suddenly, The Movement stopped.
While Southern racists
(Dixiecrats and Republicans) continued “massive resistance” to the demolition
of de jure segregation – the legal
kind, enforced by government actions – everyone from the U.S. Supreme Court to
Martin Luther King Jr., liberals and conservatives alike, in both parties of
American capitalism agreed that de facto
segregation was off-limits, or at least had to be left for another day. Residential
segregation with its devastating racist consequences was said to be the result
of an accumulation of millions upon millions of private choices by both whites
and African Americans. So today schools are more segregated than ever, North
and South, as the limited protections of the civil rights and voting rights
laws are being systematically gutted.
A legalist understanding of
segregation shaped the limited legislative aims of the liberal civil rights
movement. Richard Rothstein’s Color of Law
(2017) explodes the myth that the extreme, segregated residential landscape
we all live in today developed because people just like to live in
neighborhoods with people who are of the same race. He conclusively proves that
segregation, particularly housing segregation, is in fact de jure – that is, state-sponsored, encouraged, and legally sanctioned.
Rothstein subtitles his book, “a forgotten history of how our government
segregated America.” It is not a hidden
history because the evidence has always been in plain sight. The book could be
subtitled, “a politically-induced case of deliberate historical racial amnesia.”
Rothstein’s objective is to
bring his fellow liberals out of their color-blind coma. In the process he has
done all of us a service by bringing together the evidence in one popularly
written and well-researched eye-opener that challenges the entrenched myth of de facto segregation. The Color of Law is divided into thematic
chapters that tell the story of the American version of apartheid in vivid
detail and documentary history. Even if you think you know that racism in the
U.S. can never be overestimated, the Color
of Law will still surprise and infuriate with its careful narrative of the
racist program to permanently segregate the country. But while laying out key
elements of the structural foundation of black oppression in the U.S., The Color of Law fails to go to their
root in the system of racist American capitalism. Thus Rothstein is unable to offer a real answer to the social
pathology he so powerfully chronicles.
Housing Foundation
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| In the United States in 2016 there were 2.3 million evictions. That's 6,300 a day, four every minute. |
Moreover, wherever
reformers look to make social change, they bump up against residential
segregation. Public policy and academic studies on poverty have mainly focused
on jobs along with welfare, mass incarceration, parenting and education.
Desmond argues that “something fundamental is missing. We have failed to fully
appreciate how deeply housing is implicated in the creation of poverty.” Michael Greenberg documents the failure of
Mayor de Blasio’s housing program in New York City in “Tenants Under Siege” (New York Review of Books, 12 April 2017),
while Ben Austen traces the wretched rise and fall of the Cabrini-Green
projects in Chicago (High Risers [2018]).
Rothstein explains that as
an educational policy columnist for the New
York Times, he came to this subject through his research on education. He
came to understand that the stubborn racial “achievement gap” could not be
closed so long as black school children were forced to grow up in the toxic
conditions of underserved, overcrowded, and often dangerous ghettos. The CSEW
wrestled with the fact of residential segregation in its article, “A
Marxist Program to Fight for Integrated Quality Public Education” (Marxism & Education No. 5, Summer
2018).
It is not a new insight
that the structures of black oppression and racist ideology are rooted in
residential segregation and the compaction of African Americans into ghettos.
In their book, American Apartheid:
Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (1993), Douglass Massey and
Nancy Denton emphasized “the special role that residential segregation plays in
enabling all other forms of racial oppression”:
“Residential segregation is the institutional apparatus that supports other racially discriminatory processes and binds them together into a coherent and uniquely effective system of racial subordination. Until the black ghetto is dismantled as a basic institution of American urban life, progress ameliorating racial inequality in other arenas will be slow, fitful, and incomplete.” (p. 8)
Massey and Denton draw
attention to their title, “American Apartheid,” and note that “Although
America’s apartheid may not be rooted in the legal structures of its South
African relative, it is no less effective in perpetrating racial inequality…. As
in South Africa residential segregation provides a firm basis for a broader
system of racial injustice.” The enforced isolation “ – whether African
townships or American ghettos – forces blacks to live under extraordinary harsh
conditions and to endure a social world where poverty is endemic,
infrastructure is inadequate, education is lacking, families are fragmented,
and crime and violence are rampant.” Ghettoization means that the cops maintain
a militarized occupation of black neighborhoods where cop violence is endemic
and “stop and frisk” policies target particularly black youth.
To his credit, Rothstein, a
Distinguished Fellow at the Democratic Party-line Economic Policy Institute
think tank, consciously disdains liberals’ anodyne verbal euphemisms to
describe the savage realities of U.S. racism. He is not embarrassed to say “ghetto”
rather than “inner city.” “Ghetto” is appropriate when the state has
deliberately concentrated a minority and created barriers to escape. He notes
that if and when those same geographical areas become gentrified they are no
longer referred to as “inner cities.” He doesn’t refer to “people of color”
when he writes about how black people have been singled out for oppression. Nor
does he talk of “diversity” when the issue is racial integration. In all of
these choices, Rothstein recognizes the exceptional U.S. history of chattel
slavery and its legacy that has relegated African Americans to a color caste at
the bottom of U.S. society. His task is to explain how conscious racist housing
policy has been one the central mechanisms that maintains this racial caste
system in America. Rothstein writes often in the name of an imagined, classless
collective American “we.” But he is clear that the government is responsible
for the mess:
“We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explicit government policies. Although most of these policies are off the books, they have never been remedied and their effects endure.”
FHA: New Deal’s Racist Deal
Rothstein demonstrates that
the ghetto was purposely designed, and maintained by the state in collusion
with banks, insurance companies, the real estate industry, and of course your
local racist white citizens’ neighborhood improvement association. “Our system
of official segregation was not the result of a single law that consigned
African Americans to designated neighborhoods,” Rothstein declares. “It was a
nationwide project of the federal government in the twentieth century, designed
and implemented by its most liberal leaders.” That The Color of Law indicts “its most liberal leaders” is its most
useful political function. Rothstein punctures the bubble of the sainted Franklin
D. Roosevelt savior myth by carefully delineating the central role of New Deal
liberals in constructing this American apartheid.
During the Depression,
policies designed to foster homeownership were promoted as an alternative to the demand for decent and affordable public
housing. The National Housing Act,
passed in 1934, established racial segregation nationwide as part of the
Roosevelt/Democratic Party’s “New Deal.” The newly created Federal Housing
Administration (FHA) was the driving force of state-sponsored segregation. It
appraised property and approved loans. The FHA and the Home Owners’ Loan
Corporation (HOLC) changed the usual practice for home loans from short-term,
high-interest, high down payment mortgages by providing backing for long-term,
low down payment, fully amortized loans. Its influential Underwriting Manual guided the work. The Manual decreed that the racial and social identities of
neighborhoods be maintained by restricting eligibility for mortgages and rental
availability.
The FHA’s Manual could not have been clearer: “If
a neighborhood is to retain stability it is necessary that properties continue
to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.” As housing policy expert
Charles Abrams famously noted, in terms of racial implications, early editions
of the Agency Underwriting Manual “read like a Chapter of Hitler's Nuremberg
Laws” (quoted by Amanda Tillotson in De Paul Journal for Social Justice,
Summer 2014) The Manual
explained that the appraiser must be alert to protect against “adverse
influences” such as “infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups.”
The FHA discouraged banks
from providing loans in urban areas and gave high ratings to new construction
in suburban areas where highways separated black and white housing. The Housing
Administration was particularly active in promoting school segregation, warning
that if children “attend school where the majority or a considerable number of
the pupils represent a far lower level of society or an incompatible racial
element, the neighborhood under consideration will prove far less stable and
desirable than if this condition did not exist” (68-69). They actually wrote
and distributed this racist junk. It was not hidden.
The Color of Law documents the outsize role that public housing played in the racial
segregation of the country. The FDR administration responded to the WWII
housing shortage with the first public housing for non-war-related civilians.
Far from the association of public housing for the poor prevalent today, this
public housing was meant for those who could afford to pay prevailing rents.
With their rabidly racist Southern, Dixiecrat base, Democrats assured that
segregation determined the design of the program. Public housing either excluded
African Americans entirely or the buildings were strictly segregated. In this
design the FHA followed the well-established racist pattern of other New Deal
projects. In the heart of the Depression, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)
created a village in its Norris headquarters for whites only. Blacks were
housed in shoddy barracks miles away. Similarly, the Civilian Conservation
Corps (CCC) that provided some jobs for unemployed youth was segregated across
the country with black youth sheltered in more distant camps. Even the project
to restore the Gettysburg battlefield housed the young black workers in a
segregated camp 20 miles away.
The Public Works
Administration (PWA) was the chief agency that carried out the New Deal’s
segregationist polices for public housing. Established in 1933, the PWA was
supposed to meet the challenge of the housing crisis and provide construction
jobs. The PWA was managed by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, a noted New Deal
liberal who had been president of the Chicago NAACP. Although it allowed for
African Americans to acquire public housing, the PWA policy established strict
racial segregation. The PWA designated 25 of its 47 projects as whites-only, 16
as blacks-only, and 6 projects were segregated by building. Perhaps most
ruinously and historically consequential, the PWA, while claiming the racist
excuse that they were adhering to the “neighborhood composition rule,” actually
created segregated neighborhoods
where there was no previous pattern of segregation. They would designate
integrated working class and immigrant neighborhoods either black or white and
then institute public housing construction to justify their designation.
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| Sign outside site of Sojourner Truth public housing project in Detroit, 1943. |
Rothstein closely traces
the New Deal destruction of integrated neighborhoods in Cleveland and Atlanta.
In Atlanta the PWA project bulldozed the “Flats” – an integrated neighborhood
that was about one-third African American. They designated the new Techwood
neighborhood as whites-only; black families were evicted and forced to crowd
into existing black neighborhoods. Rothstein concludes that “a result of the
government program, therefore, was the increased population density that turned
African American neighborhoods into slums” (22). He notes that similar PWA
government-sponsored slum creation took place in St. Louis, Indianapolis,
Detroit, Toledo, and New York.
The PWA was replaced in
1937 by the U.S. Housing Authority (USHA) tasked with subsidizing local
agencies to build housing. The USHA continued the PWA practice of claiming to “respect”
the racial makeup of existing neighborhoods while plowing under integrated
neighborhoods to create segregated ones. The manual of the USHA stated that “The
aim of the [local housing] authority should be the preservation … of community
social structures.” Of course, segregated neighborhoods existed before the New
Deal racist housing policies and projects went into effect, but as Rothstein
concludes, “the federal government’s housing rules pushed these cities into a
more rigid segregation than otherwise would have existed” (p. 24).
Redlining, Zoning, and Race
Terror
A city street map
illustrates the cover of The Color of Law
that shows certain residential areas outlined in various colors. This is, of
course, an example of one of the infamous maps developed by the FHA in
conjunction with the government’s HOLC and local real estate boards whose
national “code of ethics” prohibited sales to black families in white neighborhoods.
The FHA set the strict underwriting standards for loans, and HOLC created the
color-coded maps for every metropolitan area in the country. The maps
designated four areas in terms of supposed credit worthiness. The maps colored
in green neighborhoods populated by well-off Protestants as the highest grade
and were deemed safest for loans and rental payment; at the bottom of the
scale, black neighborhoods were deemed most risky and colored red. Hence “redlining”
(p. 64). Banks used the redlining maps to deny loans to African Americans, and
local real estate agents used the maps to steer clients to the “right”
neighborhoods.
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| Official segregation by order of the U.S. government. Home Owners' Loan Corporation map of Los Angeles, 1939. Residential areas in red had significant African American, Latino and Asian populations were deemed least desirable (hence "redlining"), making it extremely difficult if not impossible to obtain mortgage loans. Central L.A. dismayed the appraisers because of its "heterogeneous" population and "sprinkling of subversive racial elements." The Watts neighborhood (D61), then populated by a mixture of various European immigrants, blacks and Japanese became entirely black. The largely Mexican American San Gabriel Valley Wash was described as populated by "goats, rabbits, and dark skinned babies," with many "peon Mexicans" who "constitute[ed] a distinctly subversive racial influence" (KCET, "Segregation in the City of Angeles," [14 November 2017]). |
Much of Rothstein’s book
tracks the history of the invidious collusion among government, real estate
industry, insurance companies, banks, local homeowners associations, and the
IRS to maintain and expand segregation. The
Color of Law indicts the use of local zoning laws that excluded apartment
buildings that could have offered affordable housing. FHA and local governments
promoted restrictive covenants on deeded property that explicitly banned African
Americans. Excluded from government-subsidized home ownership, many blacks
resorted to “on contract” sales schemes that set up purchasers to lose their
homes if they missed even one payment. Rothstein also includes harrowing
examples of the block-busting racist real estate hustlers who scared white
homeowners into selling cheap with stories of black invasions followed by
precipitous drop in home values.
Race terrorists threatened
and attacked black families that dared to move to a white neighborhood.
Rothstein describes an incident in 1957 at a home in Levittown, Long Island
where a mob of hundreds pelted the home of a black family with rocks. The
family under siege asked for police protection. The rock throwing continued for
months and the Confederate flag of racism flew next door along with scrawled
KKK symbols. The cops stood by and watched. Rothstein asks: “Does the failure
of police to protect [black families under assault] constitute government-sponsored
de jure segregation? … Were the
African American families’ constitutional rights violated…? (p. 142). Of course
their rights were violated. That is standard operating procedure. Seeing this
situation through Rothstein’s limited and legalist lens distorts the structural
role of the cops in capitalist society and the mission of the state – its
courts, cops, prisons, and military – to maintain the racist status quo.
In response to the civil
rights movement, and particularly to the widespread ghetto eruptions in the
1960’s, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in 1968, but by then the damage
was done. The pattern of racial segregation was entrenched and
self-perpetuating in nearly every metropolitan area in the country: white
suburbs ringed black ghettos. Now middle class professionals are moving back to
cities in a process of gentrification; they are inflating real estate prices
and forcing black and less well-off residents into more deeply segregated and
run-down neighborhoods and deepening the crisis of homelessness.
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| White mob protested outside home of first black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, August 1957. (Sam Myers/Associated Press) |
Racist real estate
practices did not end with the passing of civil rights and fair housing
legislation. The racist real estate grifter now occupying the White House is a
good example. Along with his father who was arrested as part of a 1927 Klan
march in Queens, son Donald ran the Trump real estate business that was well
known in Brooklyn and Queens for promoting white-only developments. One such
1800-unit Beach Haven complex in South Brooklyn, opposite Coney Island, housed legendary
folk singer, Woody Guthrie, who composed a song titled, Old Man Trump, that begins:
“I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate he stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts when he drawed that color line here at his Beach Haven family project.”
“Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower / Where no black folks come to roam.”
An investigation by the
city’s Human Rights Commission testers found that Trump real estate offered
rental housing immediately to white applicants and told black applicants that
nothing was available. Trump employees said that they had been instructed to
mark applications from blacks with the letter “C” for “colored.” The city shut
down rentals at the Trump complex, and the Justice Department filed suit for housing
discrimination against father and son in 1973. The son, then 27, guided by his
mentor, anti-Communist witch hunter, Roy Cohn, fought the charge for years in
court, eventually reaching a settlement to buy ads in local newspapers
promising that his company would not discriminate. (Washington Post, 5 August 2017
Suburbs So White
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| The Donald and father Fred Trump on the roof of one of the Brooklyn apartment houses they own, 1973. (Photo: Barton Silverman/New York Times) |
The definitive suburbanization of America after World War II changed the residential landscape of the country. At the end of the war Americans lived mainly in cities and a majority rented rather than owning homes. At the start of WWII only 13% of the population lived in suburbs. Geographers Richard Harris and Robert Lewis conclude that, “prewar suburbs were as socially diverse as the cities they surrounded” (Oxford Research Encyclopedia). By 1960, more than a third of the population lived in overwhelmingly white suburbs, and by the 1990s more than half. The massive wave of government-sponsored segregated suburbanization created the tapestry of white suburbs, inner-city black ghettos and Latino barrios, plus the heavily black, inner-ring suburbs we see today. The government in collusion with the banks and real estate lobby made housing more available to white middle-class and working-class homebuyers, but purposely denied such opportunity to African Americans.
The government
homeownership campaign was in part a response to the severe housing shortage
for returning veterans; however, politically it was a strategic offensive in
the anti-Soviet Cold War meant to encourage anti-communism in the working
class. The housing campaign looked back to the period around World War I and
the Federal Home Loan Bank Act. Then capitalists were concerned about the
popularity of the Bolshevik Revolution and growing radicalism among workers.
They feared that limited access to home ownership might mean that a majority
would have little attachment to the institution of private property. They
sought to develop a bricks-and-mortar interest in capitalism. At the end of WWII
they were able to implement that agenda on a national scale.
If the capitalist class was
worried about radical unionism during after the first imperialist war, they
faced an even greater explosion of worker militancy after the second imperialist
war represented by the post-war strike wave. During the war, rank-and-file
union workers were frustrated by the “no-strike” deals made by their official
leaders in the name of war-time patriotism. “No-strike” labor discipline was
most severe in unions led by the Communist Party as part its Stalinist-directed,
patriotic class collaboration. Although many workers defied these deals with “quickie”
strikes and impressive wildcats strikes to fight for their own interests, they
harbored a reservoir of pent-up demands. So with the end of WWII, rank and file
pressure fueled the greatest union-led strike wave in U.S. history.
In September 1945 the
number of days lost to strikes doubled, then doubled again in October. Two
hundred thousand coal miners went out, 70,000 Midwest truckers, 40,000
machinists in the Bay Area. Detroit was the center of war production and became
a center of worker militancy. Before the ink was dry on Japanese surrender
documents, the United Auto Workers demanded a 30 percent wage increase. By November,
225,000 auto workers were on strike. And that was just the beginning of the
great strike wave. On 15 January 1946, 174,000
electrical workers struck. The next day, 93,000 meatpackers walked out. On
January 21, 750,000 steel workers struck, the largest strike in United States
history (Jeremy Brecher, “The War and
Post-War Strike Wave,” Chapter Six of Strike!
(rev. ed., 2014]).
By the time the strike wave
had finally rolled over the country in 1946, nearly five million workers were
involved: steel, auto, mines, rail, coal, maritime, tobacco, oil, meatpacking,
electrical, and many other labor sectors as well as non-industrial workers
including teachers, municipal and utilities workers. The coal and electrical
workers caused a nation-wide brownout and a national rail strike brought
commerce to a near collapse. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics called the
first six months of 1946, “the most concentrated
period of labor-management strife in the country's history.” But despite the
enormous power exercised by labor, absent revolutionary leadership, the unions
did not combine to struggle for a nationwide general strike. So they were open
to counter-attack.
President
Truman and Congress took up arms against the roiling sea of labor mobilization.
Truman was furious. He drafted a message
to Congress in 1946 that actually called for hanging union leaders:
“Every single one of the strikers and their demagogue leaders have been living in luxury. Now I want you who are my comrades in arms to come with me and eliminate the [John L.] Lewises [Mine Workers], the [Alexander] Whitneys [rail workers], the [Alvanley] Johnstons [locomotive engineers], the Communist [Harry] Bridges [ILWU] and the Russian Senators and Representatives. Let's put transportation and production back to work, hang a few traitors and make our own country safe for democracy.”
They called out
the Navy to break the oil workers strike, the Army to break the rail strike and
the miners strike, but the miners stayed out. In 1947 Congress passed the
Taft-Hartley Act sharply
restricting labor power and independence.
Along with intensified
anti-labor repression, the government subsidy for white, suburban homeownership
was not only a strategy to head off demands for publicly funded housing but
also a concession meant to derail labor militancy. Having all your equity tied
up in a 30-year mortgage that you likely won’t pay off until retirement is a
powerful incentive not to go on strike, as you could risk all by missing
payments. By 1948 most housing in the U.S. was being constructed with Federal
Housing Administration financing. FHA financing was essential in the
construction of the gigantic Levittown project, for instance. Without FHA approval
of plans, developers such as William Levitt would not be able to raise capital
for their projects. The FHA would not approve any plans that did not include a
commitment to refuse to sell to African Americans. The deed would also contain
a restriction to prohibit resale to blacks or even renting to black families.
The FHA would not even approve plans for developments where black families
lived nearby because of fear it could
lead to integration. The result was that all-white Levittown-type developments
sprung up all over the U.S. as part of the racist suburbanization of America.
Truman proposed new public
housing in 1949 to try to ameliorate the continuing post-WWII housing shortage.
The Republicans in Congress responded with a legislative strategy to lop off
support for the bill from the Southern Dixiecrats. They proposed a “poison pill”
amendment to the housing bill that would require new housing projects not be
segregated. So in 1949 Democrats
campaigned nationwide for segregated public housing. Led by liberal “lions”
Hubert Humphrey and Paul Douglass of Illinois they roared their support for
segregated housing to get their bill passed with segregationist support. Many
African Americans, and the NAACP supported the Republican amendment because they
foresaw the dangers of a new round of expanded segregated housing and what it
would mean for the future. So on the Senate floor Douglass addressed “my Negro
friends,” saying that “I am ready to appeal to history and to time that it is
in the best interests of the Negro race that we carry through the housing as
planned rather than put in the bill an amendment which will inevitably defeat
it” (p. 31).
The verdict of history is
in and has declared liberal segregation guilty as charged. As a result of the 1949
legislation African Americans were driven into high-rise ghetto projects
isolated from employment opportunities and social services and plagued by
racist cops. Funds from the 1949 housing act were used to build Cabrini Green
and Robert Taylor projects in Chicago, the Rosen Homes in Philadelphia, the Van
Dyke Houses in New York, and many more. Public housing rapidly became housing
for African Americans with all the disastrous social and economic consequences
for future generations. The New Dealers saw this strategy of appeasing their
segregationist base as an easy way to get the votes for increased public
housing. But it also represents the conscious design that permitted capitalism
to maintain blacks as a color caste far into the future.
The historical amnesia and
deception practiced by New Deal segregationists extends to the current batch of
self-proclaimed Democratic Socialists. When these Democratic Party politicians
are queried about what they mean by socialism, they invariably claim the mantle
of the New Deal. “That’s all we mean. Honest.” While glorifying New Deal public
initiatives, they never mention the damage done to African Americans by the
segregationist policies of the New Deal. Along with the closely linked mass
incarceration, those policies that led to ghettoization have done the most
racial harm since slavery and Jim Crow. One of the results of state-designed
American apartheid is the near complete social separation of black and white
Americans. Integrated working-class neighborhoods would have encouraged
integrated struggle for better public schools, recreation, transportation and
other services. Racist propaganda has a more difficult time taking hold when
people actually know each other and struggle together. Racism and segregation cripple
the united working-class struggle that alone can break the back of the
structure of racism.
Making New Ghettos
One of the recurring themes
of Color of Law is the account of how
the government created segregated neighborhoods where they didn’t previously
exist. Rothstein begins his book in the San Francisco area because there were
so few African Americans there when WWII industries started up, and therefore
there was no pre-existing pattern of racial segregation to follow. As war
workers flooded into Richmond, to find jobs in the Bay Area’s shipbuilding
yards and Ford assembly lines, its population quadrupled between 1940 and 1945.
Richmond’s black population went from 270 to more than 14,000.
Faced with the acute
housing shortage for war workers, the federal government built housing that was
explicitly and officially segregated – housing for black workers shoddily
constructed along the railroad lines and meant to be temporary; permanent
housing for whites constructed inland. The cops and housing authority enforced
strict social separation including for recreational activities, movie
screenings, USO activities, Travelers Aid services, and even children’s Scout
troops. The housing authorities explained the purpose of the policy of segregation
as “keeping social harmony or balance in the whole community,” – and, of
course, that “Negroes from the South would rather be by themselves” (p. 6).
 |
| Black workers at Ford assembly plant in Richmond, California, in 1948 worked together with white workers, but were barred from living in white neighborhoods. (From The Color of Law) |
Ford had set up its Richmond plant in 1931. In 1953, Ford closed its Richmond plant and moved 50 miles south to rural Milpitas outside of San Jose. Although the UAW had struck a deal with Ford that included guaranteed transfer for its 250 black workers, only the white workers were able to secure government-backed loans for home construction in the area of the new plant. So although the black and white workers were generally in identical economic circumstances, the black workers were stuck in Richmond when Ford moved to the suburbs. Black auto workers had to choose between giving up relatively good industrial jobs, moving to the segregated neighborhoods of San Jose, or enduring a long, onerous commute.
As industrial jobs moved to
the suburbs, the government made available low interest, low down payment loans
to remodel and subdivide, but only to white prospective homeowners. The federal
government arranged for bank loans to construct a new suburb, Rollingswood, with
the requirement that none of the homes would be sold to African Americans.
Black workers were left in the dilapidated housing at the Richmond rail yards
while white workers moved to government subsidized suburbs like Rollingswood
and later Milpitas. White veterans could obtain low-interest, no-down-payment
mortgages backed by the FHA and Veterans Administration (VA), but the
government demanded that mortgage insurance include an openly stated
prohibition against sales to African Americans. As white families moved to the
suburbs, Richmond became a predominantly black city.
The government was a
roadblock even to attempts to create new integrated developments. Rothstein
tells the story of the failed attempt to construct an integrated cooperative
housing development at the end of WWII. The group included author Wallace
Stegner, then a teacher at Stanford University in Palo Alto. Of the 150 co-op members,
three were black. The co-op purchased land but was unable to secure financing
or obtain construction mortgages without government approval, and the FHA would
not insure any cooperative that included black families. The board of the
cooperative tried to appease government officials by instituting a racial
quota. The government rejected even this racist capitulation, and the coop
board resigned. In 1950 the cooperative-owned land was sold to a developer
whose FHA agreement specified that no properties be sold to African Americans.
The all-white development was called, “Ladera,” and still adjoins the Stanford
campus (p. 12).
Rothstein poses the
proposition: If this rigid racial segregation took hold in the liberal San
Francisco area where firm patterns of segregation had yet not taken root, it
could happen anywhere in the U.S. Indeed it has, whether following the
segregation patterns established during the Great Migration in places like
Cleveland and Chicago or by creating new ghettoes. One of the important themes
in Color of Law, is the lengths to
which the government has gone to destroy existing racially integrated working-class
neighborhoods to create segregated ones. There were once many integrated lower-income
residential areas in inner cities because workers needed to be in walking
distance to the factories and workplaces. Government planners destroyed such
neighborhoods in Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland and elsewhere to build segregated
housing. In the 60s some of these projects of “slum clearance” were dubbed “urban
renewal,” and so the saying developed among residents that “urban renewal means
Negro removal.”
As industries left the
cities for the suburbs, the government subsidized and embraced suburbanization
of whites that left blacks compacted in ghettos. In the post-WWII era,
politicians and the real estate lobby combined to supercharge the idea of
homeownership to head off demands for more affordable and public housing. The
policies they enacted made homeownership more available for midle- and upper-income
white homebuyers, but left out minorities and lower-income working people.
These policies continue to have profound effects on inequality. If this was the
American Dream of homeownership, it was a dream purposefully put out of reach
of African Americans. This was the process that shaped what nearly every
metropolitan area of U.S. now looks like: Black ghettos and their inner-ring
satellites surrounded by white suburbs.
Suburbs for African
Americans?
By the time blacks were
allowed to move into the suburbs, the patterns of segregated housing were well
set. Rothstein notes that the process of ghettoization continues to this day.
Exploding rents in cities, and a continuing process of gentrification continues
to drive black families from their homes. Displaced families seek housing in
less-expensive and often less-stable and more densely concentrated
neighborhoods nearby; those who have amassed some savings move to the inner-ring
of mainly black neighborhoods nearest the city; the most desperate are driven
into homelessness. All of this had led to increased segregation and
homelessness.
Despite all the obstacles to homeownership, growing
numbers of minority families gained a toehold in postwar suburbia, but this did
not fundamentally change the character of racial segregation in America.
Between 1940 and 1960, the number of black suburbanites increased by 1 million,
amounting to 2.5 million by 1960 – approximately 5% of the total suburban
population. In addition, over nine million
African Americans moved to the suburbs between 1960 and 2000 – more than the
numbers who moved north in the Great Migration around World War I. Existing
white suburbs fiercely resisted integration. Most of these new African American
suburbanites settled near existing minority communities forming contiguous
urban/suburban majority black areas, such as Prince Georges County in Maryland
bordering Southeast Washington, D.C. Or the belt of African American/Latino
villages in southwestern Nassau County on Long Island (New York).
The movement of blacks into segregated suburbs
reflected regional variations. In the South, where African Americans had lived
on the metropolitan fringes for decades, developers erected “Negro expansion
areas” that did not disrupt existing patterns of segregation. Developments such
as Collier Heights in west Atlanta, Washington Shores near Orlando, for
instance, became suburbs for a growing black middle class. Outside the South
new suburban municipalities limited construction for minority families, so
African Americans tried to find housing in older, mainly black city and suburban
neighborhoods such as Evanston, Illinois, Pasadena, California, and Mount
Vernon, New York. And they sought housing on the suburban borders of black city
neighborhoods.
Irvington, New Jersey is
typical of the pattern of majority black suburbs surrounding Northern cities. A
little over three square miles in area and originally a farming community named,
Camptown, as in Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races,” the renamed, Irvington,
became one of the most densely populated towns in the state. By the time the building
boom ended in the 1930s it had consumed every farm and field. Wave after wave
of European immigrants moved in during the first half of the 20th Century.
Until 1965 Irvington was almost exclusively white. The Newark riots of July
1967 and the racist ideology of “white flight” hastened an exodus of white
families from Irvington and looser federal housing restrictions brought black
families to the suburb, many of them moving just a few blocks from Newark to
Irvington. By 1980 the town was nearly 40% black, by 1990 it was 70% black.
Although the civil rights
movement had overcome many of the de jure
Jim Crow housing restrictions, the middle-class black beneficiaries of the
movement nevertheless were pushed into segregated suburban neighborhoods. In
these suburbs as well as in the cities, residents faced school segregation,
redlining, racist zoning, and inadequate services. Despite the mass
mobilizations and limited legal victories of the civil rights movement
metropolitan America remained geographically separate and unequal.
Subprime Suburbs
In the post-WWII United
States, both Republicans and Democrats rejected public housing in favor of the
capitalist fantasy of homeownership as a solution to poverty. In that project,
the partner parties of American capitalism followed the well-established
ideology of the powerful “real estate lobby” –
developers, landlords and banks – that had always denounced public housing as
un-American. They succeeded in razing public
housing ambitions and limiting its access to only the very poor. In the
1990s, and 2000s they dismantled the existing regulatory regime, as deficient as
it was, and opened up a banking free-fire zone for exploitation of prospective
homebuyers. The consequences were catastrophic. Lenders aggressively targeted
low-income minority home seekers with predatory “financial products” that
extracted what little wealth they held. The tepid regulatory changes enacted in
the wake of the 2008 crash were too little, too late.
Black families who had
gained a tenuous foothold in homeownership in the inner-ring suburbs after the
passing of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, had their financial legs knocked out
from under them by the foreclosure epidemic after the capitalist banking crisis
of 2008. “Reverse redlining” had targeted black borrowers for the sub-prime
mortgage scam run by banks and abetted by federal “regulators.” Federally “regulated”
banks appealed to African Americans with “teaser mortgage rates” in what Wells
Fargo called “ghetto loans.” Of course, the Federal Reserve could have banned
this practice of predatory loans. Predatory lenders pushed African Americans and
working people into mortgages that were easy to get into, but nearly impossible
to repay, often in distressed neighborhoods where there was little chance for
equity gain. The inevitable bust of
this manufactured bubble wiped out hopes of wealth accumulation through home
equity for many African Americans. Rothstein points out that racism was often
the determining factor in the subprime swindle:
“Among homeowners who had refinanced in 2000 as the subprime bubble was expanding, lower-income African Americans were more than twice as likely as lower income whites to have subprime loans, and higher income African Americans were about three times as likely as higher income whites to have subprime loans.” (pp. 110-111)
By 2006 African Americans
took out subprime mortgages at three times the rate of white borrowers, and
higher-income blacks at four times that rate.
Even the U.S. Justice Department in 2010 admitted that the “more segregated
a community of color is, the more likely it is that homeownership will face foreclosure
because the lenders who peddled the most toxic loans targeted those communities”
(quoted by Rothstein on pp. 111-112). Foreclosures were sudden and devastating
in traditional and newly established black neighborhoods. In the settlement with
Countrywide (later a subsidiary of Bank of America), HUD Secretary Donovan
remarked that from “Jamaica, Queens, New York to Oakland, California, strong
middle class African American neighborhoods saw nearly two decades of gains
reversed in a matter of not years – but months” (p. 112).
Increased segregation in
the aftermath of the foreclosure scourge continues to this day. African
American homeownership rates fell precipitously, as they no longer qualified
for conventional mortgages. The “on-contract” loan system of the 1960s has returned
with its high interest rates and onerous conditions that can cause eviction
with a single missed payment.
Engels on The Housing Question
The Marxist tradition on
housing was elaborated by Engels in 1872-3 in a polemical debate against the
influence in Germany of French utopian libertarian and anarchist, Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon. Although a critic of the idea of private property (“property is theft”),
Proudhon advocated that workers should own their own homes. He saw this as a
solution to the housing crisis that developed with the expansion of industry as
workers flooded into the cities. In his booklet, The Housing Question, the 1877 republication of his earlier
articles in the German social democrats’ magazine Der Volksstaat, Engels
declared that “The essence of both the big bourgeois and petty-bourgeois
solutions of the ‘housing question’ is that the worker should own his own
dwelling.” Engels goes on to show that this idea is not merely utopian, but
reactionary as it looks back to the pre-industrial domestic-based hand loom
economy.
Proudhon argued that the
landlord stood in relation to the proletariat as the capitalist to the worker.
Engels disagreed, explaining that the landlord was not exploiting the workers
in the way that the factory owner profited from the worker’s unpaid labor.
Whereas the worker confronted the owner of the means of production as a seller
of labor power, the worker confronted the landlord as a buyer. In this sense
the landlord was much like a shopkeeper rather than the factory owner. In
short, the program of home ownership is not a working-class social policy, it
is a bourgeois policy designed to trap working people in the machinations of
the private property system under conditions where without sufficient capital
they stand to lose all, as happened to millions in the 2007-08 economic crisis.
But in the U.S., the systematic state-designed denial of home ownership to African Americans is decisive in the
creation of the ghetto and the U.S. racial caste system. It has isolated black
workers from their class brothers and sisters. American apartheid fosters
racism within the working class, thus weakening the united struggle of all
workers against capital. ■
And Now What?
The Color of Law is sharp in its
condemnation of the government’s role in designing this “American apartheid.”
The book is strong in its presentation of the shameful history of Democratic
Party liberals and the racist consequences of its policies that endure to this
day. It is an important and sometimes stirring book … until we come to the
what-is-to-be-done part. Discussing fixes to residential segregation Rothstein
goes all limp and watery. He tinkers around the edges of the problem. In this
failure to offer viable solutions to urgent social problems his book is like
others written recently by liberal authors: Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow on racist mass
incarceration and Diane Ravitch’s books that skewer the corporate “reform”
movement in education (See “Three “R’s”: Ravitch, Research and Revolution,” CSEW
Newsletter No. 4). The problems
they lay out are so deeply rooted in the development of U.S. capitalism that an
honest reader cannot imagine solid resolutions of the problems this side of a
thoroughgoing social revolution. But these liberal reformers are committed to Democratic
Party politics, so they cannot implicate the capitalist system as the economic
source of the problems they describe.
After a recent (September
6) lecture on the subject of his book to a packed auditorium at John Jay
College, Rothstein was peppered with questions from students and teachers about
what they should do about residential segregation. Rothstein mentioned reforming
zoning laws, the mortgage tax deduction and limitations gentrification while
allowing that “Section Eight” vouchers and tax credit schemes have actually
deepened racial segregation. Finally, Rothstein called for “a new civil rights movement.” But The Color of Law underscores one of the
signal failures of the old civil
rights movement – its limited fight against only legal segregation and its
failure to address the structural racism at the core of the oppression of African
Americans.
It is exactly the legalism
at the center of Rothstein’s argument that represents a fruitless course of
action. The failure to address capitalism’s relentless system of profit-seeking
and inherent racism is inherent in the liberal worldview. It means that even
the most well-meaning “progressive” policy analysts and brutally honest
muckrakers can “speak truth to power” all they want, and it will change nothing
fundamental, for it is the power of capital that is at the core of racial
oppression in this country founded on chattel slavery, whose heritage continues
to this day.
Consistent with the
strategy of the liberal civil rights movement, Rothstein looks at the history
of residential segregation through a legal lens. He shows that the government
engaged in unconstitutional behavior in the creation of the racialized residential
landscape. He demonstrates that government sponsorship of racial segregation
constitutes a violation of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments that
abolished slavery at the end of the Civil War and supposedly guaranteed equal
treatment under the law for all citizens. Therefore, he contends that the
government can be held legally responsible to remedy the effects of its
unconstitutional behavior. Under the Republican redliner Donald Trump? Or the
likes of the Clintons, whose policies slashed public housing and gave rise to the
subprime mortgages? But Rothstein’s own presentation of history undermines his
legalistic premise.
Residential segregation is
so deeply rooted in the American economy and social life that the courts would
never mandate effective remedies. And even if such a case did make it to the
highest court, the justices would hardly indict the entire racist system of
capitalism reflected in segregated housing patterns. Think about how the
Supreme Court responded when it was presented with the incontrovertible
evidence that the death penalty was racist in its implementation if not intent.
The justices said that they couldn’t take such evidence into account without
condemning the entire criminal justice system as racist and illegitimate. Yes,
indeed. Although every metropolitan area has been segregated as a result of
government policy, the Supreme Court has refused to recognize that the
supposedly de facto segregation is not
accidental. Rothstein cites the consequential case in 1974 that was brought to
integrate schools in Detroit by including nearby suburbs. The court decreed that
residential segregation was “not caused by government activity,” and nixed the
plan.
Historically the U.S.
Supreme Court is a profoundly conservative institution, as is becoming clear in
the Trump era to even the most starry-eyed liberals. The liberal civil rights
movement saw the Supreme Court as a useful partner in the struggle for racial
equality. Partial and temporary victories in the courts were possible because
the U.S. ruling class did not want to carry the burden of official legal segregation on its books in its
face-off with the Soviet Union, particularly in Africa. So liberals got the
idea that the Supreme Court was an engine for racial justice. But even many of
the partial victories of that movement like the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision have been rendered largely
moot by the re-segregation of schools. Embedded in the capitalist development
of U.S. society, the patterns of residential racial segregation cannot be
dismantled like segregated drinking fountains.
When the civil rights
movement came north to protest for fair housing in 1966 they brought with them
their illusions in the capitalist courts. There protesters were confronted with
the actual economic and social realities of capitalist society. Although Martin
Luther King has been often credited with leading the 1966 march for fair
housing in Cicero, one of the white enclaves just west of Chicago, he actually
made a deal with Chicago mayor Daley to call off the march. The Cicero march
was led by activists from CORE and others. King’s deal spelled the end of the
liberal civil rights movement as it was beaten back by brick-throwing racist
mobs. King himself was struck by a brick in an earlier protest that year in
Marquette Park.
Without the mobilized power
of the organized workers movement in a labor/civil rights struggle for
affordable housing, the legalist strategy constrained by Democratic Party
politics reached a dead end on the streets of Marquette Park and Cicero, where
white racist mobs did the dirty work of the capitalists. It was a devastating
defeat and defined the limitation of the liberal movement and its reliance on
the courts. Rothstein’s proposal for a “new civil rights movement” bound by
legalist strategies and liberal politics cannot succeed, particularly in this
period of capitalist decline and economic crisis.
The civil rights movement,
constrained as it was by Democratic Party politics could not have gone beyond a
contest against de jure segregation. It would have taken more powerful social
forces to confront and dismantle the structural racism that is woven tightly
into the history of U.S. capitalism. The small propaganda group, the Spartacist
League, revolutionary Trotskyists at the time, called for revolutionary integration and a labor-civil rights axis to put the
struggle for black equality on a class-struggle basis. (See “Black and Red:
Class-Struggle Road to Negro Freedom,” Spartacist
special supplement, May-June 1967, reprinted in the Internationalist Group
Class Readings, What Strategy for Black
Liberation? Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism). This heritage is carried
forward today by the Internationalist Group and is part of the theoretical underpinning
of Class Struggle Education Workers).
In fact, the labor movement
was instrumental in achieving the legal victories of the liberal civil rights movement.
But when the struggle for black equality reached the point that required a
movement that could go beyond the the segregation laws, the Democratic
Party-loyal labor bureaucrats stopped cold. They were not going to confront the
racist capitalist system. To begin to meet the racist oppression of African
Americans, for instance, a class-struggle leadership of the unions would have
led a powerful integrated organizing drive in the South. Yet the CIO’s 1946-49 “Operation
Dixie,” which spurred a parallel campaign by the more conservative AFL, was
defeated because it failed to frontally take on Jim Crow segregation laws. Had
the labor leadership done so, that would have been a significant gain for labor
and a milestone in the struggle for black equality.
American exceptionalism – chattel
slavery and its legacy of radical social and economic racial inequality – continues
to be expressed as mass incarceration, police violence and educational
apartheid. Successful opposition requires integrated class struggle led by a
multi-racial revolutionary workers party that fights against the racist
oppression inherent in U.S. capitalist society. And that includes housing. In
the early 1930s Depression, the Communist Party that had lurched left
temporarily led militant anti-eviction demonstrations that brought thousands to
the homes of evicted families to confront the marshals. They occupied the evicted
family’s furniture so it could not be removed. Although the number of evictions
in the depth of the Depression was only a small fraction of the number of
evictions today, community resistance was fierce. When three Bronx families
were evicted in 1932, the New York Times
observed of the protest: “Probably because of the cold, the crowd numbered only
1,000” (see Desmond, Evicted).
The failure of the civil
rights movement to affect the oppression of African Americans north of the
Mason-Dixon line spurred the rise of the Black Panther Party, which was
destroyed by murderous government repression. The frustration in the Northern ghettos
exploded in a series of black upheavals (called “riots” in the bourgeois media),
put down by military force, leaving devastated neighborhoods that have never
been rebuilt. Poverty programs were legislated to siphon off discontent. And
the language was changed. Calls for black power were replaced by deceptive talk
of “black empowerment”; instead of integration, the goal was proclaimed as “diversity,”
instead of equality they talk of “equity.” There was opportunity for an
expanded black middle class, but only crumbs – if that – and mass incarceration
for the millions of black poor.
The fight to end American
apartheid must be part of the struggle for black liberation through socialist
revolution. That requires a break with both capitalist parties and the
programmatic construction of a revolutionary multi-racial workers party that
will lead the struggle for a workers government as it fights on every front
against racial oppression. With some 18.5 million habitable housing units
sitting vacant in the U.S. as of 2015, most due to foreclosures, while an
estimated 3.5 million people are homeless, a victorious revolutionary workers
government would expropriate and redistribute the existing stock of unoccupied
housing with a disposition to compensate sectors of the population that have
suffered from historic exclusions, while “repurposing” palatial estates for
recreational purposes. This is different than the call for “reparations” (as if
the ongoing legacy of centuries of racial oppression could be compensated by a
check) or other “remedies” under capitalism. As a workers state moves forward
toward socialism, the contradictions and tensions between rural and urban
economies will be ameliorated. Socialist city planners will design and build
environmentally sustainable and architecturally wondrous living spaces for
creative work and recreation that will at last undo the history of apartheid racism
and allow people to associate freely in a classless egalitarian society. ■
No Place Like Homeowner
Ideology
In Richard Rothstein’s
dialogue with the audience at John Jay College on September 6, it was evident
that many of the students experienced his thesis of government-designed racial
segregation as “breaking news.” Rothstein was not surprised. Although this
history has been hidden in plain sight, the students would not have learned
this essential lesson in school.
As an educational
journalist and researcher, Rothstein is particularly interested in the
ideological underpinning of the historical amnesia he has chronicled in Color of Law. So he surveyed high school text
books to demonstrate the omission of this history. He offered the students the
example of one of the most commonly used high school textbooks: The Americans: Reconstruction to the 21st
Century, a thousand-page tome written and edited by well-known and
respected historians and educators. The 2012 edition reserves just one
paragraph on residential segregation and contains this passive voice sentence: “African
Americans found themselves forced into segregated neighborhoods” (p. 199).
Nothing about who and what policies did the forcing. It is as if black people
woke up one morning, looked around, and said, “Wow! Look at this, all my
neighbors are black. Wonder how that happened?” Rothstein’s research on school
textbooks shows that the same historical amnesia is promoted by all of the
major educational publishers.
The suppression of the
history of the conscious design of American apartheid is part of the homeowner
ideology that dominates much of American thinking at the intersection of race
and private property. The country’s racial residential landscape must be made
to seem as natural as the “amber waves of grain” and “purple mountains’
majesty.” But this ideology has been carefully constructed.
Although the racial
landscape of American apartheid was largely constructed by New Deal planners as
an alternative to decent public housing, federal promotion of home ownership
began earlier as an anti-communist crusade against working class regard for the
Bolshevik Revolution. In 1917 the U.S. Department of Labor launched a PR
campaign called, “Own Your Own Home.” They passed out, “We Own Our Own
Home” buttons to school children, sponsored lectures and distributed posters.
The aim of the propaganda campaign was to inoculate American workers against
the dangerous idea that private property could be expropriated for the benefit
of all. As one organization of realtors put it at the time, "socialism and communism do not take root in the ranks of those who have their feet firmly embeddeded in the soil of America through homeownership" (Vincent Cannato, "A home of One's Own," National Affairs, Spring 2010).
The fact of American
apartheid is buttressed by the ideology of home ownership and capitalist
devotion to private property. Home ownership is a chief god in the worship of
the American Dream. It is credited with personal success, financial stability,
middle-class respectability and moral virtue. Home ownership in the U.S. is
viewed as the proper environment for raising children, a requirement for safety
and evidence of good citizenship. Of course, if homeownership actually bestowed
such benefits, West Virginia would be the most prosperous and stable state in
the country as it has the highest rate of home ownership since 1980. George W.
Bush’s “ownership society” followed a similar campaign promise by Clinton. Bush
promoted a particularly saccharine version of the anthem. Here is an excerpt
from the transcript of his speech
in 2004 to the National Association of Home Builders:
“For millions of our citizens, the American Dream starts with owning a home. (Applause.) Home ownership gives people a sense of pride and independence and confidence for the future. When you work hard, like you've done, and there are good policies coming out of our nation's capital we're creating a home – an ownership society in this country, where more Americans than ever will be able to open up their door where they live and say, welcome to my house, welcome to my piece of property. (Applause.)”
The aim of this ideology is
to sell the idea that all workers can own their own homes. Of course, this
marketing fantasy came to a bitter end in 2008 with the financial bust.
Predatory lending schemes led working people, particularly black working people
into a cavern of debt where they lost their homes and what little wealth they
had managed to accumulate over generations.
Some cultural historians
note that this ideology has deep roots in U.S. history and the development of
capitalism. De Tocqueville observed: “In no country in the world is the love of
property more active and more anxious than in the United States.” (Democracy in America). The Constitution
excluded from the vote not only slaves, indentured servants, women, and Native
Americans, but also anyone who was not an owner of property. The famous line in
the Declaration of Independence about, “the pursuit of happiness” was
originally, “the pursuit of property.” In the arguments between land-value
represented by slave-owner Jefferson and the money-values of Franklin, Jefferson’s
fantasy vision of a democracy guided by yeoman farmers won out, at least
temporarily. Although they disagreed with Jefferson about many things, Hamilton
and Adams agreed that only property owners should be allowed suffrage. Faced
with threats of rebellion by the destitute landless everywhere among them, the “founders”
did not trust anyone who was not a property owner.
By the late 19th Century,
even before the time of the government’s push for the suburbanization of white
America, the idolization of the detached single-family home with enough land to
separate from neighbors had a tight grip on the American imagination. Walt
Whitman, the voice of America’s collective unconscious, captured the dream and
the yearning: “A man is not a whole and complete man unless he owns a house and
the ground it stands on.” It was an idealized version of the Anglo-Saxon
country cottage. The dreamy image is captured perfectly by Charlie Chaplain in Modern Times, as the little proletarian
visualizes his sweet, white picket-fenced house as an escape from the dark
satanic mills of industrialization.
Homeowner ideology
supported the FHA government hostility to dense urban housing. Its racist
purpose was sustained by that dream of the idealized single-family, detached
home away from the city. The role of ideology is to render invisible the real
economic and social forces that the capitalist state facilitated and which continue
to maintain a racist housing pattern. So self-satisfied homeowners believe that
their homeownership was achieved by virtue of hard work, an ethos of thrift and
correct life choices, unlike “those people” who do not own their own homes. They
gloss over the fact that of the 73 million owner-occupied homes in the U.S., almost
two-thirds (46 million) were encumbered by mortgages or equity loans and could
be “repossessed” (Urban Institute, How
Much House Do Americans Really Own [2016]). Who really owns those homes
are the banks and other lenders, as millions realized after the 2008 crash.
Contemporary homeowners
don’t think much about the role of government in facilitating segregated
residential housing. And they don’t talk about the mortgage tax deduction they
receive at the expense of renters, a tax break that artificially inflates home
prices and is an obstacle to prospective first-time buyers. The mortgage
deduction is a substantial government subsidy that largely benefits upper
middle-class and wealthy homeowners. In 2012, it withheld $68.2 billion in
taxes. Only 3 percent went to households earning under $50,000 a
year, while 77 percent went to households earning more than $100,000 a
year.
The suburbanization of
America is also deadly for the environment in terms of relative carbon
footprint and transportation patterns, as it is based on mass automobile ownership.
But even self-described environmentalists seem unaware (“unwoke”?) as they
blithely drive from their suburban and exurban homes to take their clothes to
the organic dry cleaner.
The ideology of home
ownership is instrumental in shaping the American dream of independence as it
conceals the actual racist history of housing in the U.S. Although we cannot
expect any time soon that high school textbooks will acknowledge the decisive
role of government in designing American Apartheid, Richard Rothstein’s Color of Law contributes mightily to our
understanding of that history and helps to lift the veil of that insidious
ideology. ■
Class
Struggle Education Workers (CSEW) is part of the fight for a
revitalization and transformation of the labor movement into an
instrument for the emancipation of the working class and the oppressed. See the CSEW program here.