Colin Gordon is a history professor at the University of Iowa who specializes in the history and long-term effects of American public policy.
Professor Gordon recently wrote a highly informative article for Dissent Magazine which asks the question, “Who Segregated America?”
In this article he demonstrates the pernicious role played by private business interests in pioneering the highly discriminatory methods that would eventually be used by public, government policies to permanently entrench racial segregation through America’s neighborhoods.
Here is one more example of why an understanding of American racism and its dissection though tools like Critical Race Theory are so important to our educational system.
Frankly, it is impossible to understand either our history or our current racial predicament without it.
Below is an excerpt of “Who Segregated America?”:
Federal housing policies contributed to the segregation of American cities in the twentieth century. But it was private interests that led the way.
Recent scholarship and reporting on racial disparities in the United States have emphasized the role of public policy—especially federal policy—in the creation of what the 1968 Kerner Commission famously dubbed “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” This is especially true of housing policy. Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White (2005) skewers the stark exclusion of African-American veterans from the benefits of the GI Bill. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law (2017) offers a damning synthesis on how the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) embraced Jim Crow. More recently, the digitization of the infamous “residential security” redlining maps prepared by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) in the late 1930s has spurred academic interest in the connections between the HOLC’s bluntly racial assessments and contemporary disparities.
This condemnation of federal policy is certainly warranted. Even the constraints of the New Deal coalition (in which the Democratic majority was, as Katznelson observes, a “strange marriage of Sweden and South Africa”) cannot excuse the FHA’s slavish deference to racial prejudice in private realty. One can and should expect more of a public agency, wielding billions in housing subsidies in one hand and the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause in the other, than a set of underwriting guidelines that “could well have been culled from the Nuremberg Laws,” as housing activist Charles Abrams observed in 1955.
But is it true, as Rothstein’s subtitle suggests, that “government segregated America”? Not really. As new work on the scope of private racial restrictions underscores, racial segregation in American cities (especially Northern and border cities) was largely accomplished by private interests and private action long before the FHA spent a dime or the HOLC opened its first bottle of red ink.
Race-restrictive deed covenants and agreements reserved the occupancy of individual lots or entire residential subdivisions to those (in the phrasing preferred by developers in St. Louis County) “wholly of the Caucasian Race.” The result was a sort of pointillist apartheid, filled in parcel by parcel, block by block, and subdivision by subdivision, on a scale sufficient to quarantine existing pockets of African-American residency and mark new developments as largely off limits. . .
(Observe in the following graphic how “Race-restrictive deed covenants and agreements reserved the occupancy of individual lots or entire residential subdivisions to those (in the phrasing preferred by developers in St. Louis County) ‘wholly of the Caucasian Race.'” In other words, private racial regulators orchestrated the creation of black ghettos and white suburbs with all the damaging consequences.)
. . . More to the point, the FHA and other federal housing policies were always—and remain—little more than a poorly regulated trough for private housing interests. They exist not to secure homeownership but to sustain the residential construction and home finance industries with direct subsidies, socialized risk, and tax breaks. In that role, they have always parroted the goals, motives, and prejudices of private interests and deferred to their assessment of what boosted—or threatened—the value of private property.
The segregation of the American city was conceived, accomplished, and justified largely by private action in response to the demographic upheaval of the Great Migration. Federal housing policies unconscionably doubled down on both segregation and its assumptions, but the damage was already done.
Read the entire article here.
