This column is by Anthony Iarrapino, who lives in Montpelier and is a partner at Wilschek Iarrapino Law Office. Among other clients, he has provided legal services to the Vermont Journalism Trust. He serves on the board of the ACLU of VT. This commentary reflects his personal views and is not written on behalf of any client.
Fifty-five years ago this month, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. moved his family from the familiar comforts of his Atlanta community to a rundown apartment complex in the wintry Chicago.
He went to assist organizers fighting racist housing policies that crowded Black people into poorly built and maintained slums, while denying them access to nicer neighborhoods that were — by intentional policy design — for whites only.
Then, as now, systemic racism was not solely a policy product of Southern states. Racism was and is a problem in every one of our United States. After his largely fruitless fair housing fight in a Democratic-controlled Northern city, Dr. King remarked that the resistance he met there was every bit as “hostile and hate-filled” as anything he had witnessed in the Jim Crow South.
In his heavily researched yet highly accessible book “The Color of Law,” author Richard Rothstein writes “a forgotten history of how our government segregated America.” Mixing stories of families victimized by housing segregation with startling statistics, the book explains how the federal government on down to municipalities big and small, North and South, under Democrats and Republicans, actively perpetuated policies preventing Black and white people from living together.
Government tactics included discriminatory loan programs and highway projects designed to divide and demolish integrated neighborhoods. Policies packed Black Americans into communities that were separate, but far from equal. The resulting ghettos were — and largely remain — unequal in access to education, healthy food, clean air, clean water, and good job opportunities.
Homeownership is the main driver of wealth accumulation in this country. Until the late 1960s, low-interest federal home lending programs — which enabled generations of middle-class white families to acquire homes at low cost and to build intergenerational wealth as those homes were passed down from parent to child — were, by design, expressly unavailable to Black families.
Because generations of Black Americans were denied this opportunity, there exists a racial wealth gap that is only getting worse. While Black Americans earn about 60% of the income that their white peers earn, median household wealth for Black families is less than 10% of the amount held by their white peers.
The federal Fair Housing Act may have ended the worst forms of discrimination in home lending, but its vestiges remain in the federally regulated banking system.
The book also tells harrowing tales of Black families who endured savage, government-sanctioned violence as they attempted to integrate all-white neighborhoods. White mobs openly intimidated these families, and in some cases destroyed their homes with bombs, bricks, burning crosses, and gunshots. Police — who are government actors — abetted the mobs by doing nothing to enforce laws meant to protect private property owners regardless of race.
The echoes of this unequal use of force by police — or failure to use appropriate force at all — reverberate in the drastically differing responses of law enforcement to the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer and the white supremacist insurrection that occurred recently in our nation’s capital.
Though many of our federal, state and local laws entrenched inequality through segregated housing, the Constitution is the supreme law of our land. It demands more of us all. The Fifth Amendment guarantees equal protection under the laws. That concept is amplified specifically for formerly enslaved people and their descendants by the Civil War Amendments, adopted to eradicate the effects of slavery and its legacy.
Government-backed housing segregation is a continuing constitutional violation we must all take responsibility for remedying.
Mr. Rothstein has many creative policy remedies for unconstitutional housing segregation, but he observes that “only if we can develop a broadly shared understanding of our common history will it be practical to consider steps we could take to fulfill our obligations. … [W]ith very rare exceptions, textbook after textbook adopts the same mythology. If middle school and high school students are being taught a false history, is it any wonder that they come to believe that African Americans are segregated only because they don’t want to marry or because they prefer to live only among themselves? Is it any wonder that they grow up inclined to think that programs to ameliorate ghetto conditions are simply undeserved handouts?”
Many educators from around the country have answered Mr. Rothstein’s call to action by producing teaching guides that adapt his book into digestible formats for high school students and adults. These include an excellent, free online documentary, “Segregated by Design.”
Yet, in this polarized country with its polluted information environment, it is not enough to simply hand teachers a better text and tell them to teach from it. Teachers need access to professional development and tools necessary to guide young minds of all backgrounds through difficult conversations on systemic racism. Organizations like Vermont’s Ethnic Studies Coalition and the Vermont Student Anti-Racism Network are among the groups working to provide such tools.
As educators embrace this challenge, they also need community support in the face of inevitable complaints from parents who may be too far down the racist rabbit hole to accept the hard truths that our classrooms can no longer shy away from.
