Integration

Module 4: Negotiating Racism

Structural and Systemic Segregation

If you look at the history of the world, there seems to be a tendency for mankind to distance themselves from “the other.” They could be the poor, those of a different nationality, ethnicity, race, caste, or even class. By default, residential segregation appears to result because as one group moves in the other group tends to move out. 1 This is readily apparent in American history as well with New York City being a classic example as the landing place for immigrants – how else can you explain  this ethnic mosaic of so many communities in NYC?

Invariably these clusters of communities residing in a particular neighborhood came about not because of some natural selection but rather because newcomers were only welcome and able to rent in certain areas. With growth in the numbers of the newly arrived, the previous residents tended to move out to some other areas. The African-American experience, however, was unique in many ways and that experience and its lasting consequences are the reasons why we are where we are today. The Irish were discriminated against when they first arrived but they managed to make it. So did the Italians and the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Swedes, the Germans, the Chinese, the Indians, the Middle-Easterners. So why have the African-Americans been left out? Because of systemic private and public policies and practices.

The Myth of Accidental Segregation

People love to believe the notion that residential segregation was purely accidental driven by misogyny and racism in some places and persons, and driven by the profit motive of private bankers. These narrative factors – income differences, discrimination by real estate agents, and collusion within the banking sector – are what the Supreme Court called de facto segregation, the result of accident or individual choice. In reality, it was the interplay of federal, state, and local policies that actively fostered segregation. How so you wonder?

Come the Great Depression and what happens – middle-class and working-class families lost their homes. President Roosevelt’s New Deal launched the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a large program designed to put as many Americans back to work as possible by way of  numerous infrastructure projects – bridges, canals, roads, buildings, and so on. Take Cleveland, for example, that saw the demolition of old neigborhoods in exchange for three public housing projects – Cedar Central, Outhwaite, and Lakeview Terrace. Look up each of these three on the map and then note down what you notice about where they were built. Take a look at another example, one of my favorites – Chicago. Look up the  Robert Taylor Homes and you will find old evidence of their existence but the image below shows you where that massive complex existed:

These homes, the largest public housing complex in the world, were built to house Black families who had to move from slums in the South Side of Chicago. But to move Black Americans into Chicago meant political disaster given the corrupt, patronage fueled politics of Mayor Daley and his predecessors. However, Daley needed Black Americans’ votes because they had a large presence and the 1955 election was lining up to be a close one. So what does he do? Basically make a statement to the effect that so long as he is the mayor of the city everyone is welcome to live there, no matter their race. He won, but now had to find a place to put the housing projects and chose a four-mile stretch of the Dan Ryan Expressway as a buffer between poor Black American families placed in the Robert Taylor Homes and the rest of Chicago. 2

But working-class and middle-class Black Americans could and did buy into middle-class neighborhoods as early as the 1940s and 1950s. They could afford to, and as a matter of fact, often were willing to pay more than white folk. But white residents tended to make these families feel unwelcome and often moved away. With this history in mind, even the Federal government’s public housing projects leaned on a policy of segregating Black Americans in particular housing projects and putting Whites in other projects. Suburbanization was on the rise too, and with the GIs returning from World War II, housing had to be sold fast. But the Housing Act of 1949 that was supposed to ease the housing crunch not only funded the creation of all-White suburbs not only by forbidding Black Americans from buying these homes but also injecting a no-resale to Black Americans clause in the homeowner deeds. Soon Whites fled the inner cities and next thing you know you have Black Americans stuck in dying cities, not by choice, but because they could not move to the suburbs even if they could afford to pay the mortgage.

Now, one might wonder, why would it matter? What would have happened if Black Americans could have owned homes in the new shiny suburbs? Chances are their children would go to neighborhood schools that would be better funded than the inner city schools, and the  wealth effect that flows from appreciation in home values would have accrued to Black Americans as well. Seems doubtful? Think again; African-American incomes are, on average, 60% those of White Americans but African-American wealth is a meager 5% of White wealth. Besides the financial impacts alone, generations of children would have grown up and studied together in a multicultural setting, and this alone might have diminished the racial prejudice and animosity that we see even today. 3

What about  reverse-redlining? That term is a reference to the fact that in the 2000s, sub-prime loans were targeted at the poor and the minorities. They worked in very specific ways. Say you are a Black homeowner looking to refinance or maybe a new Black homebuyer looking for conventional loans. You would more often than not be denied those loans but sold these ticking time-bomb loans that began with a very low rate of interest that just ballooned very quickly and very steeply. So when the bubble burst in 2008, you had much higher foreclosure rates for African-Americans than you did for any other group, again devastating middle- and lower-middle-class African-American communities.  In all of this long history of housing policies and racial segregation, the role of the federal government, never opposed but indeed often amplified by state and local governments 4  is very tragically conspicuous.

Three Interesting Approaches to Integration

There have been many unique ways in which American jurisdictions have tried to promote racial residential integration in the hope that it will solve many of the other problems that flow from racism and its consequences for Black Americans. But creating multicultural, multiracial societies is not a uniquely American concern either. Consequently, I want to share two things with you – first an overview of two experiments in suburbs that adjoin Chicago, one being  Oak Park and the other being  Evanston, and second a little bit about how  Singapore has tried to promote residential integration.

Oak Park

The next time you are in Chicago and have an afternoon to spare, go ahead and make your way, with a car if possible, to the suburb of Oak Park. It is a quick 8 miles from  The Loop (don’t let the map mislead you) and right beside  Austin, a Chicago neighborhood that was 100% White in 1960 but that, by 1990, had turned 90% Black. In 1960, Oak Park had very few Black residents but in the years that followed the city’s residents were watching the negative impacts of the racism of redlining and exploitative mortgage financing in pent-up Black demand for housing. Local activists, saw Austin’s White residents fleeing as Blacks moved in during the 1960s, and in 1968 established a fair-housing law for the municipality, and then backed this law with a number of policies that forbade realtors from soliciting in the municipality, banned for-sale signs, enforced building codes, and insured the equity in homes to prevent any panicked sales by owners. All this while they were aggressively marketing Oak Park as a desirable place to live.

In 1972 the Oak Park Housing Center opened to actively promote racially integrated rental housing. They do not force renters to live here or there but nudge them, encourage them to consider alternatives. They do license landlords, track racial residency patterns, and encourage building owners to use the Center for leasing referrals (receiving, in exchange, financial aid to keep up with building codes and to make improvements to the property). By some accounts eighty-two percent of the moves it counsels result in sustained or further integration compared to 49 percent of moves that proceed without the Center’s assistance.

Consequently, Oak Park has come far and become one of the  handful of integrated suburbs in the country. While in 1970 only 1% of its residents were Black, they were 21% of the residents by 2017. More crucially, Black Americans are scattered throughout Oak Park rather than being clustered in certain blocks, so much so that its  White-Black dissimilarity index is 38, i.e., only 38 percent of black or white residents would have to move to achieve full integration. In contrast, Columbus Ohio has a score of 61, Cleveland has a score of almost 80, Cincinnati is at 63, Washington DC is at 81, and Chicago is at 88. 5

School desegregation was as important to Oak Park as residential desegregation, and the Bakalis Guidelines issued in 1971 for local school districts in 1971 were additional leverage for Oak Park’s efforts on this front. When the racial makeup of schools began to be tracked in 1973, there was some racial imbalance across ten elementary schools. The school desegregation plan Oak Park came up with was to make sure that the elementary schools fed the junior high schools in a way that the junior high schools would reflect the racial makeup of the district. To achieve this 41% of the students would have to be reassigned to schools and some 1,500 of these would have to be bused.

Between the 1970s and through the 1990s governmental and quasi-governmental entities absorbed the responsibility for managed integration policies. This should have been a blessing because it took the pressure of citizens and local activists but in fact it had the opposite effect – citizens became increasingly removed from and directly involved in desegregation in Oak Park. Newcomers to the community were not as steeped in the history of the community as the old timers and hence not as focused on maintaining integration. By 2000, school desegregation had stopped working, with some schools reflecting an overwhelming majority of White students while others did not (see figures that follow and note the uniformity for the Junior High Schools but the East-West disparity in the K-6 schools).

The segregation has improved since then; updated statistics are  available here but as many have documented, inequality of experiences and outcomes remains. A documentary released two years ago shows how disparity still works in Oak Park; see “America to me” if you have some time in the coming months. A sobering statistic: In 2019, 78% of White students meet or exceed SAT standards in Oak Park, versus only 25% of Black students.

Evanston

Evanston, a posh suburb to the North of Chicago and home to Northwestern University, took a very different approach to racial integration but before we talk about that in particular we need a quick lesson on Evanston’s history. The first African-Americans reached Evanston in the 1850s, mostly in the capacity of domestic help, and numbered 125 by 1880, 737 by 1900. By 1940 another 5,000 or so had arrived, but over the 1900-1940 period local developers had worked to box African-Americans into a triangle bordered by the North Shore channel, railroad tracks, and one main thoroughfare. This was achieved both by white homeowners selling to Black buyers and by developing vacant land. The collusion worked so well that by 1940 this triangular area was 95% Black. Foster School began in 1905 as a predominantly all-white school (located on Foster Street and Dewey Avenue) but by 1940 it had an almost all-Black student body taught by an all-white teaching staff.

Jim Crow-type of segregation was practiced in Evanston – Black Americans had to build their own YMCA, their own park, a Sanatorium had to be built to serve their medical needs, they had to build a separate Boy Scout troop, sit in the balconies of movie theaters, and dine out at the one local restaurant that was willing to serve them. By 1960 their numbers grew but all housing development occurred south of the triangle and in no other direction. It took the Fair Housing Act of 1968 to force local change, but residential segregation had come to roost.

Right around this time, in 1966 to be precise, Gregory Coffin, a civil rights legend was hired to desegregate local schools. Without integrated housing, Black and White students had no chance to interact in a school, and even if they did, Black students were bussed – which meant leaving home earlier and returning home later than most other students, which also did not foster making friends. Students also came home for lunch so there was no lunchtime interaction possible either. Coffin knew true would mean more than the mixing of bodies in a physical space and so he advocated for cafeterias in elementary schools, and the hiring and promotion of Black teachers, staff, and administrators. These ideas did not sit well with the conservative school board. By High School, however, students would resegregate, the White students taking academic courses while the Black students enrolled in vocational classes, partly because o the way their curriculum were setup and partly because of familial nudging.

Coffin built a magnet school (King Labs) in the Foster school, but although Black students were supposed to be automatically enrolled in it, that rarely happened. Instead, by 1979 the Foster school building was sold, King Labs moved to a middle school, and Black children lost the only neighborhood school they had while a very active Foster school PTA lost its reason for existence and was dissolved.

To this day segregation persists, even in the schools and  attempts to force a more egalitarian solution go nowhere.

Evanston is trying, yet again. In June 2019 the City Council committed to ending structural racism and achieving racial equity. Policies for local reparations were voted on and the recommendations approved. They are focusing yet again on bridging gaps in test scores; 2019 test results show no Black student in 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 7th grade met mathematics or reading proficiency standards at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Literary and Fine Arts School.

Singapore

Thousands of miles away sits that small island city-state (roughly the size of Manhattan in New York City), an economic powerhouse with a population of less than six million individuals. One could describe Singapore in many different ways but the reason we look at it in this module is because it too has tried to weave, since its founding, an integrated multicultural society made up largely of Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Eurasian/Caucasian citizens. Some 85% of Singaporeans live, even today, in public housing estates and yet 90% of Singaporeans own their homes! These public housing estates, managed by the government, have an enforced ethnic quota with maximum proportions set for the residents from various ethnic groups in these blocks of apartments. Sales of a new or resale apartment are not approved to a buyer from a particular ethnic group if it would lead to that group’s limit being exceeded.

Where are these public housing projects (Singapore calls them HDBs, short for the Housing Development Board blocks) located? All over, such that it is difficult to find places where they do not exist. This seems to be a very different approach compared to how we have segregated people, using railroad tracks and expressways to cordon off the minorities. This approach, the government would tell you, avoids the rise of racial enclaves and thereby promotes ethnic integration. Well, we have an interview prefaced with two readings that will not only lay out how Singapore goes about it but also whether it appears to have worked or not to achieve its goals.

How Can we Repair the Historical Breach?

Many people, both academic and otherwise, often talk about South Africa as an example of how a nation can heal from the bitterness of long-standing Apartheid and build racial harmony and reconciliation. Nelson Mandela’s name is invoked as a blessing, as the harbinger of miracles. In any other time I am sure he would be canonized but not in this life. Some would say Archbishop Desmond Tutu should have been canonized as well. Both men played a crucial role in the transition post-Apartheid, Mandela as the leader of a new South Africa and Tutu as the chairman of the now famous Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Since 1948, South Africa dictated social, economic, and political rights on the basis of a citizen’s color, with Whites ruling the roost and Blacks at the very bottom of the heap. Internal strife and steady international opprobrium and sanctions finally brought South African apartheid to its knees, leading to the elections of 1994 that brought President Mandela to office as the leader of a new multiracial government of national unity.

Although there have been many similar commissions since the 1970s, the most famous TRC happens to be the South African experience. Much has been written about it, much has been lauded and as much perhaps criticized. The South African TRC was empowered to grant amnesty to those who admitted their role in gross human rights violations, and this was important because without amnesty internal civil war would have surely resulted. In addition, the law that established the TRC stipulated that the goal “of the Commission shall be to promote national unity and reconciliation in a spirit of understanding which transcends the conflicts and divisions of the past” (National Unity and Reconciliation Act, Section (3)(1)), which meant speaking directly to the hearts and minds of ordinary South Africans.

Was the TRC a success? The answer to that questions depends upon whom you ask, and how you define “success.” You will have to figure that one out for yourself once you have gone through the relevant materials this week. But the attraction of such commissions is clear to see. Over the past four decades more than 40 countries have established truth commissions, including Canada, Chile, Ecuador, Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya, Liberia, Morocco, Philippines, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa and South Korea. Australia and New Zealand recently joined the club. The latest member of this burgeoning club – New York City and a few of its ilk.

Last month New York’s Mayor de Blasio announced on the occasion of Juneteenth that the city would establish a Racial Justice and Reconciliation Commission that will “give New Yorkers a platform to discuss their experiences with racism, examine possible discrimination in public policy and recommend changes like removing symbols of racism from public spaces.” It will also be tasked with identifying enduring discrimination in public housing, the criminal justice system and other institutions. Two weeks ago district attorneys from Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco announced that they were teaming up on a pilot effort patterned after South Africa’s post-apartheid truth and reconciliation commission to confront racism in the criminal justice system.  The Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission is formally expected to launch in the Fall. Other cities are likely to join this effort but, again, how effective the pilot is remains to be seen. Perhaps your thoughts and actions will help them do better than other commissions that may have fallen short.