Manifesto

The Enormous Price We Have Paid for Allowing the Explicitly Racist Policies of Federal and Local Governments to Segregate America ABStrAct: this article argues that the unconstitutional and racist policies of the federal government and of local governments have segregated housing throughout the United States and that the consequences of these policies have had an enduring negative effect, not just on African Americans, but on our whole society. African Americans have been excluded from most of the benefits of American social policy, yet they have been treated as if their lower resulting medium household wealth ($11,030 for African Americans compared to $134,230 for whites) is their own fault. In 1993 it was predicted that if housing segregation was permitted to con- tinue, poverty, crime and drugs would become more widespread in the black com- munity, and racial inequality would grow as would white fear and hostility toward blacks. currently racial polarization has corrupted our politics so that interracial political alliances have become difficult to organize. Unless we make genuine ef- forts to end segregation, we cannot hope to move forward as a people and a nation.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions told the Senate Judiciary Committee 20 years ago that affirmative action irritated people because it could cause

people to lose opportunities, “simply because of their race.” This sense of grievance among whites still exists and implies that “all that stands be- tween hard-working whites and success are undeserving minorities who are doled out benefits” by the government (Katznelson, 2017). Historian Eric Foner states that there is “a sort of exhaustion with black protest, an attitude of ‘What are these people really complaining about? Look at what we’ve done for you’ “(Wilkerson, 2016).

In fact, the most important parts of American social policy, such as the minimum wage, union rights, Social Security, and the G.I. Bill, “con- ferred enormous benefits on whites while excluding most Southern blacks”

GiLda Graff

The Journal of Psychohistory 47 (1) Summer 2019

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(Katznelson, 2017). Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unem- ployment insurance excluded farm workers and domestics—jobs heavily occupied by blacks. “65 percent of African Americans nationally and be- tween 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protest- ed, calling the new American safety net ‘a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through’” (Coates, 2014, p. 10). The G.I. bill also failed African Americans by mirroring the country’s racist housing policy. Title III of the bill, which:

aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with white officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The G.I. Bill, that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits “that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title” (Coates, 2014, p. 10).

“The Homeowners Loan Corporation, established in the 1930’s to refi- nance mortgages set a discriminatory pattern when it drew lines around black communities—a system known as redlining—and decreed them un- safe for federal investment” (New York Times, 4/15/18). A 2017 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago found “evidence of a long-run decline in home ownership, house values, and credit scores” that persists to this day in the formerly redlined neighborhoods (New York Times, 4/15/18).

The National Housing Act of 1934, which insured private mortgages, might also have been able to ward off housing segregation and help blacks purchase homes. Instead, it supported racial covenants and typically denied mortgages to African Americans (Katzelnelson, 2017), “shutting out even affluent black people from the suburban homeownership boom that remade the residential landscape during the middle decades of the 20th century (New York Times, 4/8/18). Particularly telling, “federal insistence on segregated housing introduced Jim Crow segregation in areas of the country outside the South where it had previously been unknown” and razed existing racially integrated communities to make way for Jim Crow housing (New York Times, 4/8/18) The 1968 Kerner Report released 2/29/68 stated, bluntly:

What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society con- dones it (cited by Cobb, 04/09/18, and Massey & Denton, 1993 p.4).

The Fair Housing Act, signed by President Lyndon Johnson one week after Martin Luther King’s assassination on 4/4/68, ended the most blatant

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discrimination and brought a modest rise in black homeownership (New York Times, 4/15/18), but “the systematic removal of its enforcement pro- visions prior to passage meant that its lofty goals were virtually guaranteed to remain unrealized” (Massey & Denton, 1993, p.195). The modest rise in black home ownership—and the hard won wealth that it represented—was wiped out by the Great Recession 10 years ago (New York Times, 4/15/18). These losses occurred because African Americans were set up for default when they were targeted for predatory loans that were often deceptively marketed. A study in Baltimore found that blacks were “charged higher rates and discriminated against at every stage of the transactions compared with qualified white customers” (New York Times, 4/15/18).

The Obama administration introduced a rule requiring communities to analyze housing segregation and submit plans to address it as a condi- tion for receiving billions of dollars in federal aid. However, Ben Carson, the current secretary of housing and urban development, suspended those rules until 2020 (New York Times, 4/8/18).

An additional problem currently facing lower income African American families is the gentrification of their inner city neighborhoods. As higher income whites move in, rents and property taxes increase—forcing low- er income families to leave. Such families often have nowhere else to go (Rothstein, 2017, p.237).

sundown towns The earliest and perhaps the most extreme instances of government (that is, local government) sponsored residential segregation outside the South began as the Jim Crow atmosphere intensified in the South after Recon- struction and fear (turning to hatred) of African Americans spread beyond that region. Whites came to assume black perversity and inferiority (Roth- stein, p. 41). Between 1890 and 1940 many towns across the country ad- opted policies forbidding African Americans from residing, or even from being within town borders after dark (Loewen, 2005 p. 6., Rothstein, 2017 p. 42) The policies were rarely formalized in ordinances, but they were en- forced by police and organized mobs. Some towns rang bells at sundown, while others posted signs at town boundaries warning African Americans not to remain after sundown (Rothstein 2017, p. 42). Such towns became known as sundown towns. Outside the South probably a majority of all incorporated places kept out African Americans. Illinois, for example, had 671 towns and cities with over 1000 people in 1970, of which 475—71%— where all white in census after census. Almost all of these 475 were sun- down towns (Loewen, 2005, p.4). Sundown suburbs arose between 1900

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and 1968 (Loewen, 2005, p. 9), and are found from Darien, Connecticut to La Jolla, California (Loewen, 2005, p.5).

No other group has been so disparaged by Americans and “labeled a pa- riah people—literally to be kept outside the gates of our sundown towns and suburbs” (Loewen, 2005, p. 349). As Daisy Myers stated in 1960, “The housing market, above all else, stands as a symbol of racial inequality.” James W. Loewen, the author of Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, stated in 2005 that “sundown towns drained the morale” of African Americans after Reconstruction, just as sundown suburbs, espe- cially elite suburbs, still contribute to “demoralization in black neighbor- hoods elsewhere in the metropolitan area” (Loewen, 2005, p. 349).[

Why such hatred and resentment of blacks leading to such extreme measures by whites? What was this fear and hatred that spread beyond the South all about? Psychoanalytically-trained sociologist, John Dollard, who studied small town life in the South in the 1930’s wrote:

These white folks down here…seem very much like the psychotics one some- times meets in a mental hospital. One has exactly the sense of a whole society with a psychotic spot, an irrational heavily protected sore through which all manner of venomous hatreds and irrational lusts pour, and—you are eternal- ly striking against that spot (John Dollard, as cited by Adams 2018, p. 245).

“Indeed, bigotry has functioned as the de facto religion of the South for nearly three hundred years and constitutes the core of the psychotic spot that John Dollard encountered” (Adams, 2018 p. 245). After Union troops withdrew in 1877 this vitriol reached new heights and prompted one Re- publican writer to proclaim a new first commandment: “Thou shalt hate the Nigger with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind and with all thy strength” (Adams, 2018, p. 245). Adams contends that the racism of the Jim Crow South can be traced to its developmental origins in white Southern childrearing.

Severe childrearing practices seem to have predominated, with corporal pun- ishment routine, and abusive parenting normative. It is likely that the child’s experiences with parents involved high levels of fear, rage, and splitting, trig- gering the creation of a social alter. We propose that this modus operandi was typical for many southerners, culminating in the individual’s propensity to shift rapidly from normal functioning into a social trance, so as to restage rage at the terrifying mommy of early childhood against the socially designated evil other of adulthood—African Americans (Adams, 2018, p. 248).

We can see an example of an African American child as a container for all things bad for a white teacher of black analyst Kathleen Pogue White when

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she attended kindergarten. The teacher asked if anyone in the class could read. Kathleen truthfully said that she could, but her teacher responded, “Don’t you tell a lie! You can’t possibly be able to read.” When Kathleen showed that she could read, the teacher said:

That’s not reading; you’re not reading it right, that is not the way to read. That’s why you people never amount to anything. You make up lies when you don’t know how to do things the right way! I’ll have to teach you to read properly (Pogue White, 2002, p. 404).

This teacher persisted in calling little Kathleen Pogue White a “rotten apple” through all of her grade school accomplishments (Pogue White, 2002, p.404).

The legacy of segregation in housing persists. The median household wealth for white families, which consists primarily of equity in hous- ing, stands today at $134,230, according to the Economic Policy Insti- tute. But for African American families, it is just $11,030” (Katznelson, 2017). Housing segregation, the cause of this enormous gap in median household wealth is considered by Arnold Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, to be the result of the unconstitutional segregation of housing brought about by federal, state, and local governments (Roth- stein, 2017. P. X). Rothstein explodes the myth that American cities came to be racially divided mainly via de facto segregation—that is through in- dividual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institu- tions, like banks and real estate agencies (Rothstein, 2017, Book Jacket). He states “We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explic- it government policies. Although most of these policies are now off the books, they have never been remedied and their effects endure” (Roth- stein cited by Oshinsky, 2017).

Rothstein indicated that in 1965 Joseph Lee Jones and Barbara Jo Jones sued the Alfred H. Mayer Company, a St. Louis developer, who refused to sell a home to them solely because they were African Americans. In 1968 the Supreme Court upheld the Joneses’ claim and recognized the validity of the 1866 Civil Rights Act’s declaration that housing segregation was a residue of slave status that the Thirteenth Amendment empowered Con- gress to eliminate (Rothstein, 2017 p. IX). This meant that the Court re- versed its 1883 decision that exclusion from housing markets could not be considered a residue of slave status. Unfortunately, in 1974 when civ- il rights groups sued to desegregate Detroit’s public schools, the Supreme Court decided that, because government policy in the suburbs had not seg- regated Detroit’s schools, the suburbs could not be included in a remedy.

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Although the plaintiffs did offer evidence to prove that residential patterns within Detroit and in the surrounding areas were in significant measure caused by governmental activity, Justice Stewart and his colleagues chose to ignore it, denying that such evidence even existed.

This narrow view was again expressed by Justice Kennedy and later endorsed by Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues. In a 1992 case involving school segregation in Georgia, Justice Kennedy wrote: “[V]es- tiges of past segregation by state decree do remain in our society and in our schools. Past wrongs to the black race, wrongs committed by the State and in its name, are a stubborn fact of history. But …[t]he vestiges of segregation…must be so real that they have a causal link to the de jure violation being remedied. It is simply not always the case that demo- graphic forces causing population change bear any real and substantial relation to a de jure violation.” The decision written by Chief Justice Roberts in 2007 “prohibited school districts in Louisville and Seattle from accounting for a student’s race as part of modest school integra- tion plans…The chief justice noted that racially homogenous housing arrangements in these cities had led to racially homogenous student bodies in neighborhood schools…Because neighborhoods in Louisville and Seattle had been segregated by private choices, he concluded, school districts should be prohibited from taking purposeful action to reverse their own resulting segregation.” Justice Kennedy and Chief Justice John Roberts believed “that wrongs committed by the state have little causal link to the residential segregation we see around us” (Rothstein, 2017, p. XIII-XIV).

Many legal scholars believe that de jure and de facto discrimination (gov- ernment vs. private) are really indistinguishable. Both contribute to what is called “structural racism,” which means that most institutions in the Unit- ed States operate to the disadvantage of African Americans. These scholars think that the government has an obligation to remedy structural racism regardless of its cause decades ago (Rothstein, 2017, p xiv-xv).

Rothstein states, “As a nation we have paid an enormous price for avoid- ing an obligation to remedy the segregation we have allowed” (Rothstein, 2017, p. 195). African Americans, of course, suffer from our evasions, and I will have more to say about that later, but, so, too does the nation as a whole, as do whites in particular (Rothstein, 2017, p. 195).

Sociologist William J. Wilson uses “social isolation” as an explanation (in part) for the social pathology of the black ghetto. The social patholo- gy of the white ghetto is similarly caused by social isolation. Residents of

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all white communities become both, more racist toward African Ameri- cans, and, more prejudiced toward gays and other minorities. They also collect white racists from the outside world, who are attracted by the area’s lack of diversity (Loewen, 2005, p.299). Children of all white communi- ties are likely to move into positions of corporate and political leadership when they grow up. This makes their constricted upbringing a problem for all of us, because such communities “inculcate a distinctive form of obtuse thinking about American society” which Loewen calls “soclexia”— that “incorporates remarkable ethnocentrism as well as NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) politics” (Loewen, 2005. P. 300). All white communities increase white racism because they provoke whites to think of a black person not as an individual but as an African American person first. In addition, res- idential segregation can give whites an unrealistic belief in their own su- periority, leading to poorer performance. Experiments show that when we are on teams with others of similar backgrounds, we tend to go along with the popular view rather than think for ourselves, resulting in less creative groups more prone to make errors (Rothstein, 2017, p. 196).

“The powerful, lacking the need to be vigilant, tend to make fast judg- ments, readily approach rewards and are prone to stereotyping behavior. They use simple rules to come to quick judgments and tend to be less accu- rate in their assessments of others’ attitudes, interests and positions…Per- ceiving the less powerful from a prospective that develops in the context of power leads the powerful to assume that personal qualities rather than social forces account for the diminished status of the relatively less power- ful” (Campbell, 2011, p. 35).

Our nation as a whole has serious problems, many of which either origi- nate with racial segregation, or are intractable because of it.

We have greater political and social conflict because we must add unfamil- iarity with fellow citizens of different racial backgrounds to the challenges we confront in resolving legitimate disagreements about public issues. Ra- cial polarization stemming from our separateness has corrupted our politics, permitting leaders who ignore the interests of white working-class voters to mobilize them with racial appeals. Whites may support political candidates who pander to their sense of racial entitlement while advocating policies that perpetuate the inferior economic opportunities that some whites might face. Interracial political alliances become more difficult to organize when whites develop overly intolerant judgments of the unfortunate—from a need to jus- tify their own acceptance of segregation that so obviously conflicts with both their civic ideals and their religious ones” (Rothstein, 2017, p.195-196).

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effects of seGreGation on blacks Martin Luther King Jr. stated:

Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personal- ity. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation substitutes an “I-it” relationship for an “I-thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. (Martin Luther King as cited by La Mothe, 2012, p. 851).

Frantz Fanon, political analyst and psychiatrist, described the negative psychological effects of colonialism and racism in Algeria, while James Baldwin, a Fanon contemporary, writing about the colonizing effect of rac- ism in the United States, argues that:

long before the Negro child perceives this difference [white superiority and black inferiority], and even longer before he understands it, he has begun to react to it, he has begun to be controlled by it (James Baldwin as cited by La- Mothe, 2012, p. 851-852).

Both Fanon and Baldwin observed that the psychic colonization of rac- ism can result in debilitating psychic wounds. Baldwin observed this in his father: “He was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him” (James Bald- win, as cited by La Mothe, 2012, p. 851).

After experiencing many occasions of being degraded and humiliated in childhood, as well as daily reminders of white privilege, Martin Luther King Jr. recalled traveling with a teacher as a teenager. The white driver ordered the two to give up their seats. When they didn’t move quickly enough, he began cursing them. King wrote

I had grown up not only abhorring segregation, but also the oppressive and barbarous acts that grew out of it. I had seen police brutality with my own eyes and watched Negroes receive the most tragic injustice in the courts. (La Mothe, 2012, p. 863-864).

Irvin Quintyne moved in 1961 to North Amityville, a black town near the white suburbs of Long Island. He remembered in 2003 how “other growing Long Island communities, Levittown in particular, made it clear that they didn’t want blacks.” The message to black suburbanites by the surrounding all white community was “We do not care who you are or what you have done; as far as this town is concerned, you are a nigger and unfit for human companionship (Loewen, 2005, p. 349). Whenever blacks move into a previously all white community and the white residents move to more distant all white suburbs, all African Americans in the area “are

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invited to remember that they are still so despised by our mainstream cul- ture that whites feel they must flee them en masse” (Loewen, 2005, p. 350). Langston Hughes wrote in part in “Restrictive Covenants” in 1949:

When I move Into a neighborhood Folks fly. Even every foreigner That can move, moves. Why? (Loewen, 2005, p.350).

In 2002 psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint stated “Segregation promotes the devaluation of black life even among blacks, and can lead to self-hatred” (Leowen, 2005. P. 352). Indeed, sundown communities rely on stereotypes about African Americans that unfortunately reach African Americans. Such stereotypes “dramatically depress” the performance of African American students on the SAT and similar tests per Claude Steele and his associates at Stanford (Loewen, 2003, p.352). Malcolm X stated “A segregated school system produces children who, when they graduate, graduate with crippled minds.” It is not easy for black parents to convince their children that they are valuable human beings when society devalues them. It’s also hard to answer questions like, “Why are we in the ghetto?” “Why do whites move away?’ Children’s comments around these questions include statements like “We must have done something wrong!” (Loewen, 2003, p. 353).

The denial of full access to housing markets for African Americans has been central to their individual social and economic well-being because such markets also distribute resources that shape and largely determine one’s life chances, such as schooling, peer groups, safety, jobs, insur- ance costs, public services, home equity, and ultimately, wealth (Massey & Denton, 1993, p. 235). The Housing Choice Vouchers program (pop- ularly known as Section 8 housing), the nation’s largest rental assistance program, makes an attempt to remedy this situation by giving families an opportunity to move to safer neighborhoods with less poverty. Research shows that children whose families move to such neighborhoods when they are young are far more likely to attend college and less likely to be- come single parents, and earn significantly more as adults. Unfortunately, due to funding limitations, only about one in four families eligible for a voucher receives any form of rental assistance (Fischer, 2015, Figure 3). Thus the Section 8 voucher program, which mostly benefits African Amer- icans, is not an entitlement, while the housing subsidy that the federal government gives to middle class (mostly white) homeowners in the form of property tax and mortgage insurance income tax deductions is an enti-

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tlement since any homeowner who itemizes deductions on his or her tax returns gets the benefit of those deductions (Rothstein, 2017, p. 209). For poor renters, there is never enough housing assistance to go around (Bad- ger & Wilson, 2018. P.1). Trump’s new tax bill allows fewer homeowners to claim the mortgage deduction, but the tax bill’s implications for poor renters will be even more profound. A lower corporate tax rate would mean that companies would have less reason to put equity into affordable hous- ing in exchange for credits to offset their taxes (Badger & Wilson, 2018).

Kate Hartley, director of the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development, stated “This country does have a national housing policy and that is that we provide our greatest subsidies to rela- tively affluent, housed people” (Badger & Wilson, 2018 p. 5). Regarding housing segregation, Massey and Denton end their 1993 book American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass with this wise and prescient statement:

For America, the failure to end segregation will perpetuate a bitter dilemma that has long divided the nation. If segregation is permitted to continue, pov- erty will inevitably deepen and become more persistent within a large share of the black community, crime and drugs will become more firmly rooted, and social institutions will fragment further under the weight of deteriorating conditions. As racial inequality sharpens, white fears will grow, racial prej- udices will be reinforced, and hostility toward blacks will increase, making the problems of racial justice and equal opportunity even more insoluble. Until we face up to the difficult task of dismantling the ghetto, the disastrous consequences of residential segregation will radiate outward to poison Amer- ican society. Until we decide to end the long reign of American apartheid, we cannot hope to move forward as a people and a nation. (Massey and Denton, 1993, p. 235-236).

Gilda Graff MA, LP, is Vice President of IPA, and has a private practice in Nassau County and in New York City. A prior version of this paper was presented at the 2018 IPA conference. Many other articles about slavery and its aftereffects have been published in the Journal of Psychohistory.

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Cobb, J. (2018). Comment: Death of a King. The New Yorker, The Talk of the Town. 04/09/18.

Coates, T.N. (2014). The case for reparations. The Atlantic, June. 2014. Fischer, W. (2015). Research shows housing vouchers reduce hardship and provide plat-

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Underclass. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. New York Times Editorial Board, 4/8/18 “America’s Federally Financed Ghettos” New York Times Editorial Board, 4/15/18 “A Black Tax on Housing” New York Times Editorial Board, 5/17/15 “Housing Apartheid, American Style” Oshinsky, D. (2017) Don’t you be my neighbor: A history of residential segregation in

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