Myth 2 - Any segregation in housing that Blacks may experience is strictly individual choice
Did you ever wonder—as I did for several decades—why so many African Americans throughout our nation live in neighborhoods lacking in amenities, opportunity, and investment? As a young adult, I would say to myself, “It’s so bad; why don’t they just leave?” If it were only that simple.
I didn’t realize until I was much older the historical context and systemic policies that have perpetuated residential segregation and marginalized Black communities for well more than 100 years.
Residential segregation by race had no legal framework immediately after the Civil War. Obviously, though, Whites had no desire to live with Blacks in the South, where well over 90% of Blacks lived until the early 20th century—unless they were sharecropping on White farms. However, even in the North in the late 1800s, both formal and informal policies ensured that Blacks could not live near Whites. Read the history of ‘sundown’ towns throughout the nation that would ensure in many places that Blacks could not even stay within town boundaries after dark.
The Long History of White Affirmative Action: The (Not-So) “Secret” Too Few Americans Accept
In 2005, Ira Katznelson published a provocative book, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. It told the unvarnished truth about a period in America—from the New Deal in the 1930s to the G.I. Bill in the 1950s—when federal politics and policy dictated that Whites would comprehensively accrue benefits while Blacks would essentially sit on the sidelines.
The book was an eye-opener for me during my four years of research writing It’s Never Been a Level Playing Field. It simply hadn’t occurred to me how strategic and methodical White leaders had been throughout our history to preserve White advantage intentionally.
It goes without saying how Whites’ wholesale enslaving of Black people for the first 75+ years of our nation’s history (not to mention the even more extended period of slavery that accompanied the British colonization of the 13 colonies starting in 1619) was the foundation of White advantage.
The Myths We Tell Ourselves
“A myth is something that explains the world; it is, mysteriously, bigger than itself.” (Charles Eisenstein from “The Conspiracy Myth,” May 2020)
In the introduction to my new book, I write that to interrogate the history of race and racism as a White person in America “requires reexamining how growing up in an America that’s been so White-oriented, White-dominant, and White-pervasive undoubtedly has influenced so many of our assumptions, presumptions, and systems of belief in profound ways.”
Not true, you might think—or even argue—until you realize how countless systems that White leaders set up and predominantly White communities bought into for more than two centuries benefited Whites near-exclusively. And disadvantaged, damaged, and harmed Black people. Yes, not just the 18th and 19th centuries, but for all intents and purposes, the twentieth century too.
Much of White America Clings to the Myth of a Level Playing Field
“The American Negro has the great advantage of never having believed that collection of myths to which white America clings.” (from James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time)
The preface of my book opens with this incisive quote from Baldwin. In a single sentence, he calls out the White people who believe a wide-ranging set of myths about Black people, our national origin story, and why race does or doesn’t continue to matter in America.
The opening paragraphs of my Preface continue, in which I write:
“As a White man, I am embarrassed to say that it has taken me nearly six decades to understand fully the legacy of our nation’s White supremacist founding and the consequences of our ongoing, systemic racism. My initial awakening occurred upon meeting and marrying an African American woman twenty-plus years ago and parenting two biracial kids in a time of increased White racist threats, yet even that awakening was insufficient.
My Whiteness … and the Unwarranted Advantage of Whiteness
Let me share a little bit more of my personal history.
As you may know from earlier Substack posts, I was born in 1961. In 1962, my family moved to Simsbury, Connecticut, which was 99.5% white (maybe 100% when we first moved in). At that time, it was quite easy for working- and middle-class Whites to move to the suburbs; for Blacks, it was nearly impossible.
On my street, all my neighbors were White. By the time I reached elementary school, every family in my neighborhood (of a couple hundred homes) but two were White. Every kid in my kindergarten through 9th grade classes and every teacher I had were White except for my kindergarten friend, Larry, who rode the bus from Hartford every day.
The Intersection Between Race and Place
My colleague Ebony Walden uniquely positions her life’s work as critically examining the intersection between race (& racism) and place. As an African American urban planner, such a focus makes imminent sense.
When she shared this with me some years ago, I realized that although my consulting work has not served as a critical examination of that intersection, the legacy of racism, discrimination, and oppression has shown up in nearly every important community engagement project I’ve done. Those legacies were not always acknowledged or named and weren’t addressed in ways to repair past and current harms. But the painful legacies persisted.
A Wedding in Black and White
The Move to Chocolate City
When I was getting ready to move to Washington, DC, in 1988, I had been told that it was the most segregated city in America. Although segregated, for sure, there were certainly cities even more segregated: Milwaukee, Detroit, and Chicago, to name a few.
I moved at a time when the District’s population had been declining for decades. The city’s population peaked in 1950 at just a smidge more than 800,000 people: 64% White, 35% Black. By 1960, it was already majority Black, as White flight to the suburbs had already begun. By 1980, the city had lost 164,000 people in only 30 years; more starkly, it had lost 346,000 Whites but added 168,000 Blacks.
A Decade Blanketed in White
In his book, Black in White Space, Elijah Anderson powerfully demonstrates how Blacks must learn to navigate White space in our society, whereas Whites hardly ever enter Black space.
His book has made me reflect on my time in the 1980s, when I spent almost my waking hours surrounded by White people.
A White Boy’s Formative Years Around Race
I was born in 1961, the year JFK was inaugurated president. Through the efforts of a robust Civil Rights movement, the interrogation of Jim Crow laws had finally reached national prominence that year. Yet, Jim Crow laws seemed as solid and steady as ever.
At the same time, across the Northeast, Midwest, and West, the segregation of African Americans in ghettos had only intensified, with the continuing second wave of the Great Migration of Blacks from the South to points North and West and local and national housing laws preventing them from moving just about anywhere except the ghetto.
Some ‘Color’ (Finally) in my Lily-White Town
I became much more aware of race in the early 1970s when my father founded a local chapter of a relatively new and growing non-profit, A Better Chance (ABC, https://abetterchance.org/). ABC’s mission remains the same 50 years later: to “place high-performing students of color into the nation’s leadership pipeline through increased access to the nation’s top independent and public schools.” My high school, in upper-middle-class Simsbury, regularly ranked as one of Connecticut's top college-preparatory public high schools.
No, It's Never Been a Level Playing Field
As I publish It’s Never Been a Level Playing Field: Eight Race Myths We Still Believe & Strategies to Even the Field (officially out today!), I have come to realize that writing the book should only be the first step along this journey.
