一本厚厚的精装书，标题是 法律的色彩, students began trickling into the Yawkey 体育运动 Center early on a Monday evening to claim seats for a lecture by the book’s author, 理查德Rothstein. They came to hear the Berkeley scholar tell what he describes as the forgotten story of how America’s metropolitan areas came to be segregated along racial lines—and stayed that way.
超过150名听众, 大部分是本科生，还有少量教员和其他人, wound up crowding the Murray Function Room for the November 6 talk sponsored by the 约瑟夫E. 科科伦房地产和城市行动中心. 在他的介绍中, Corcoran Executive Director Neil McCullagh braced the audience: “This is a tough topic to explore, 也不讨好各级政府. 这肯定会造成代际伤害.”
Rothstein holds research posts at a few institutions including the Haas Institute at the University of California—Berkeley. 他在演讲一开始就谈到了美国是如何与中国合作的.S. Supreme Court gradually abolished segregation in many areas of American life, starting in the 1930s with a decision banning separate law schools for African Americans. And yet, to this day “the biggest segregation of all” continues, he added.
He was referring to “the fact that every metropolitan area in this country is residentially segregated by race.” This broad swath of segregation is not only permitted—“we accept it as perfectly normal,罗斯坦说.
“我们”包括公民，政治家，法院，每个人. 据作者所说, we’ve developed a myth about residential segregation in metro centers—that it happened just by accident, perhaps because whites chose not to sell houses to African Americans, 或者因为非裔美国人买不起郊区的房子. 这个神话有一个名字，罗斯坦说. 这被称为“事实上的种族隔离”,” as distinct from de jure segregation (separation enforced by law).
现实, 正如罗斯坦所说, is encapsulated in the subtitle of his book—“A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.”
首先，他指出，在20世纪初th 世纪, neighborhoods across much of urban America were fairly well integrated, 部分原因是汽车少，人多, 黑白电影, 需要住在工作地点附近. 献给栗树山的观众们, Rothstein offered an example close to home—the area around Central Square in Cambridge.
有一段时间，中央广场大约一半是黑人，一半是白人. 然后, 在30年代中期, the federal Public Works Administration demolished tenements that had been integrated and replaced them with a housing project restricted to whites. A decade later, a separate project was built for African Americans on the outskirts of the district.
That was the pattern in urban centers from Boston to Detroit to San Francisco—“creating segregation in a neighborhood that hadn’t known segregation before,罗斯坦说, who is also a fellow at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington and the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
行为与过失
这段历史最令人不安的部分出现在后面, 随着二战后郊区房地产的繁荣.
联邦住房管理局(Federal Housing Administration)在很大程度上推动了这种繁荣, 房利美和房地美, 谁为大型小区的开发商提供贷款担保, 最著名的, 长岛的莱维敦, 纽约. But there was a stipulation well known at the time: builders could not sell any homes to African Americans, 只对白人开放. 除了, developers had to include a clause in the deed of each home prohibiting sale or rental to African Americans, 正如罗斯坦所说. Yes, these were provisions set down in print, not a “gentleman's agreement.”
在路易斯维尔郊区, 肯塔基州, a socially enlightened white family took the extraordinary step of buying a home on behalf of a middle-class African American family. After the black family moved in, a white mob surrounded the property. “在警察的保护下，房子被燃烧弹炸毁了. The police did nothing to stop or interfere with the mob’s violence against the home,罗斯坦说. “暴乱之后, 肯塔基州逮捕了他, 试着, 被判有罪, 并以煽动叛乱罪监禁了白人卖家.”
法律规定的居住隔离逐渐结束, notably with the 1968 Fair Housing Act (it took Congress another two decades to include enforcement mechanisms in the statute). 但罗斯坦说，损害已经造成，而且是永久性的.
In 1950, those modest single-family homes in Levittown went for around $7,000 each with no money down (doable for any working-class family with FHA backing). 如今，它们通常能卖到50万美元, which translates into substantial equity for generations of white homeowners. Rothstein points out that African Americans who had to remain in rented apartments gained no such equity.
他说，结果就是今天, 而非裔美国人的收入是白人的60%, 他们的整体家庭财富仅为白人财富的10%, 平均. “That enormous difference between the 60 percent income ratio and the 10 percent wealth ratio is entirely attributable to unconstitutional federal housing policy practiced in the mid-20th 罗斯坦在演讲快结束时说. It was one of several moments when members of the audience shook their heads, 被发人深省的细节惊呆了.
在这一点上, one might have expected Rothstein to tick off a list of policy proposals for undoing the effects of residential segregation. 他什么也没说.
任何重大补救措施在政治上都是不现实的, Rothstein说, and what’s needed first is a “national conversation about the history.在他的书中，作者提到了几个可能的步骤. The most poetic would be his idea of having the government buy homes that come up for sale in white suburbs—and reselling them to African Americans for the going price in 1950, 经通货膨胀调整. That would be around $75,000 today for a typical home in Levittown.
Q期间&A, a young African American woman asked what could be done about the forces of gentrification, which often bring white professionals into revitalized city neighborhoods while forcing out others, including African Americans who can no longer afford the rising rents. 给n the widespread anxieties over gentrification, Rothstein’s response was surprising.
“我认为每个社区都应该中产阶级化. 每个社区都应该有富人, 中产阶级, 以及两种种族的中低收入家庭,他说. 一些非裔美国人可能会流离失所, 但真正的问题是, Rothstein说, is that they often have nowhere to go other than segregated neighborhoods elsewhere—a legacy of this “forgotten history.”
William Bole is senior writer and editor at the 卡罗尔管理学院.