We spent a lot of time at our town swim club this weekend. It’s not my favorite place. Redheads don’t like the sun. Antsy, hyper-active adults have trouble sitting on a lawn chair for longer than a five minute stretch. But the cool parents invited us to their pizza party on Saturday night, and we had a birthday party for Jonah’s buddies there on Sunday morning. So, while I nervously paced around the lounge area, too hyper to sit still, I checked out the crowd of families sitting at picnic benches and applying sunscreen to their kids’ shoulders.
It was a sea of white with one black family in the midst. The black kids splashed happily in the water with their white counterparts. The family blended in with the white families on blankets surrounding them. The woman wore the obligatory Lands End bathing suit and pulled food from the obligatory cooler. But they were alone in the sea of white.
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that schools cannot use race as a factor in school assignments. Scott Lemieux has some excellent posts about the legal decision itself. Let’s just talk about the problems with public policy and diversity.
Jeff Rosen had a good article in Sunday’s Times, which discussed the Brown v. Board of Ed debunkers – those that think Brown had little positive impact on segregation by itself.
“Brown didn’t transform society very much, and to the extent that it did it was indirect,” says Mr. Klarman, who is a law professor at the University of Virginia. “Brown brought out the worst in White Supremacy, and Northerners were appalled by the police dogs they saw on television, and that advanced the civil rights movement.” He argues that meaningful desegregation didn’t occur until the Johnson administration’s Justice Department became committed to enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Department of Health, Education and Welfare threatened to cut off financing to school districts that refused to integrate.
Professor Klarman said he believed that just as the court couldn’t bring about integration on its own in 1954, so it won’t be able to mandate colorblindness on its own today. “Just as Brown produced massive resistance in the South and therefore had little impact on desegregation for a decade, this decision is going to be similarly inconsequential,” he says. “This affects only the tiny percentage of school districts that use race to assign students, and even in those districts, like Louisville and Seattle, it won’t be consequential because there are so many opportunities for committed school boards to circumvent it.”
In light of the recent research by Bob Putnam, I think this assessment is pretty correct. People don’t like change, don’t really want diversity. One law alone can’t alter that really annoying aspect of human nature.
Look at our swim club. Look at our schools. White, white, white. Middle class down the line. The few Mexicans in town who walk to the supermarket with their kids in strollers are viewed with suspicion by the SUVs who speed past them. At our pizza party on Saturday, one mom told me that the middle school might offer Chinese as a foreign language next year. A man piped up from the next lawn chair, "they need to learn English."
To really achieve diversity, there has to be more one law on the books aimed at getting towards that goal. People can too easily wiggle around one law. You tell them that their kids have to bused, then they’ll send their kids to private schools. It also has to be about more than just diversity of skin color, but diversity of economic classes. I’m not sure even if schools should be the place to push the diversity agenda. Why not housing?
I’m also not sure if diversity laws are the right goal. Why don’t we have more black families in our town? There’s no law barring them from buying homes. Nobody shunned the black family at the pool. We don’t have more black families, because the homes are too expensive. We also don’t have many poor Albanians, Chinese, or Columbians.
I like the idea of diversity, but I like the idea of economic equality more. I do think that Walter Benn Michaels was on the right track though he didn’t have enough follow through on the economic equality part of his book. (Here’s a link to his book.) I’m not sure America is ready for any real commitment to dealing with poverty or diversity or whatever you want to call it, but I think the lesson of Brown is that one law isn’t enough.
Apt. 11d 
I like reading your blog because you bring up topics like this one. Life is never easy and solutions are not nearly as clear cut as I once believed. At least you make us think about the issues and nuances involved.
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Laura, you wrote: “Why don’t we have more black families in our town? There’s no law barring them from buying homes. Nobody shunned the black family at the pool. We don’t have more black families, because the homes are too expensive. We also don’t have many poor Albanians, Chinese, or Columbians.”
I don’t know about this. I learned something very shocking to me today: 4 families live in the house across the street from where I grew up. Now, I grew up in a non-Levittown Levitt house in the same community as Bill O’Reilly (he was in the Ps, I was in the Cs–and he would know exactly what I mean). The Levitt houses were mostly capes or ranches, and this neighborhood was full of Levitt capes. They have no basements, no attics, two bedrooms on the first floor, 2 bedrooms on the second, and sometimes the owners have expanded a little over the years. By no means are these homes lavish or roomy.
We thought, growing up, that it was small for 6 people (I have 3 sisters). I cannot imagine FOUR FAMILIES in these houses.
When I was growing up, this neighborhood was exclusively white, with some Puerto Ricans or other Latino. Now, the area is quite diverse. There are many South Asians and Latinos in the neighborhood, and a black family around the block.
And the existence of these illegal splitting up of houses into multiple apartments is further diversifying the area by race and class. Houses in my parents’ neighborhood go for $400-$500K.
This apartment-fying of these single-family homes is, I think, making it even more difficult for the market to work to lower prices to make them more affordable for families looking for a starter home. A scumlord can buy a house for $500K, split it up into 4 apartments, and easily cover the $4000 in mortgage payments, I bet.
I have nothing against mother-daughter apartments. I think they’re actually great for a community and for people of moderate incomes. My aunt divorced when my cousin was in elementary school, and mother-daughter apartments enabled her to put my cousin into a decent school system.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say here, but I think that assuming that high housing prices are going to exclude people based on class may not exactly be true. I can’t imagine a lot of people with comfortable incomes are seeking out opportunities to live with 3 other families in a Levitt house.
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I don’t see racial and economic diversity (not, admittedly, the word I would choose, although I think Breyer’s dissent makes clear the extent to which the “diversity” goal is an artifact of Lewis Powell and there are more issues at stake) as an “either/or” situation. Especially in schools; in practice, green follows white…
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One of the reasons I think diversity is best employed in school situations is that children learn a lot about their worlds, communities and societies in school, you know? The relationships they build there affect how they will grow into adolescents and adults. It’s probably easier to influence a five-year-old than a thirty-five-year-old who’s never had a neighbor of color, for example.
Also, I have to wonder about the way you talk about the black family at the pool. The way you phrased the post made it appear that you don’t think that black family ever experiences any effects of being the only family of color in their environment, which I find doubtful. On the other hand, economic status can be the great leveler, but do you really think there are no black families that can afford those more expensive houses? I’ve read your blog for a long time, and I don’t think you actually believe those things, but there was a kind of oblivious tone in this post to nuances of racism, I think.
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Jackie – I’m sure you’re right. De facto segregation has a number of causes. Housing cost is the simplest explanation, but I’m sure there are a many other more subtle factors in there. I’m just not sure what they are.
Scott – I have to read the Breyer dissent. Thanks.
One of the best line from Brown v. Board of Ed is that separate is always unequal. I firmly believe that. It’s very depressing that we’ve come to a place in our society where we’ve given up on the goal of having schools and communities of mixed races, ethnicities, and classes.
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“There’s no law barring them from buying homes.”
Was there once such a law? Are the banks redlining? Did they in the past? Will the VFD come to a black family if called? Is there a history of their not coming, even a generation ago? Was it once a sundown town? Were there restrictive covenants?
These are all solid historic reasons I can think of why a black population would be very low in a NJ suburb. Maybe my perspective is colored (you’ll pardon the word) by having lived in DC and Atlanta, but I have to think that the greater NYC area has to have a significant number of African-Americans with a professional background and means to buy houses in the suburbs. Where are they? And why there? There’s a tenured position in history to be had just for convincing answers to those two questions. (Though for all I know, the work’s been done already…)
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Yeah, Doug. I don’t know the answers to those questions either. I think we need to get better answers to them before we propose any policies. As much as I love the ideas behind Brown v. Board of ed, I just think that it has failed to really get beyond the most obvious cases of discrimination that occurred in the past. The latest legal case will no impact, bad or good, on a major of schools. I think that as political scientists we’re stumped about how to create laws to nudge us towards integrated communities. We need sociologists and historians to give us some clue about what to do next.
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Another way people have looked at the racial diversity in towns/neighborhoods is through preferences for living in neighborhoods with people who are like themselves. If you want to look at a game theory analysis of this, a great starting place is Thomas Schelling’s groundbreaking work on preferences and how a very small preference for living in “like” communities leads to almost total segregation. With that as a starting point, interesting to think about how one law, or numerous laws, might be necessary to change those preferences, and hence, the outcome.
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I’m usually the only white person at my apartment’s lovely pool, and one of few in the nearest grocery store. The other families are mostly Indian or Hispanic. Our town experiences lots of what Wendy described above — multiple families sharing a space intended for one family. Perhaps the effects of illegal immigration haven’t reached your region?
It is very easy to underestimate diversity when going by looks alone. Cubans, Europeans, white South Africans, Australians, and New Zealanders often don’t look different from Caucasian Americans. I didn’t know that a good friend of 3 years was 1/4 Japanese until I saw a photo of his parents. I didn’t realize another acquaintance was a native of Holland until she told me.
Cultural diversity goes beyond race. Many white members of our DC church lived overseas for years at a time as because they were in the military or foreign service. My grandfather, who was born to missionaries in Hong Kong, was probably more culturally “diverse” than many Asian-Americans who were born and educated exclusively in this country.
Your neighborhood is probably more diverse than you realize.
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V good discussion on sundown towns here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2005/10/21/DI2005102100762.html
When I was a kid, we lived for about four years in a Chicago suburb, just over the line in Indiana. My mom told me that she was given to understand that if there was a fire at a black family’s house, the VFD wouldn’t come. I don’t know if she was also given to understand that if a black family moved to town, there *would* be a fire, but I can see it’s not a big leap to make.
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Doug’s questions are the ones I was going to ask, and that I think are vital to ask. You stated that there are no laws _now_ but laws clearly have an effect into the future. I once read someone compare the effect of federal housing loans (which were available in a discriminatory way) as an example of a fixed (i.e. cheating) poker game. The solution to cheating in a historical/generational poker game does not go away because you end the cheating now. The people playing the game are left with vastly different stakes as a result of the cheating in the past.
Our historical housing laws have clearly had such an effect (especially when combined with the vast increases in housing prices that have occurred through much of the west). I continue to be shocked at how recent legalized discrimination was in my liberal and diverse city in Seattle (it’s not clear how the supreme court decision will affect even us).
We had sundowner laws — the border persists to this day in the extreme racial segregation in our schools. My own house’s lease has a blacked out section that I suspect is a restrictive covenant. The properties in my neighborhood were all developed post-war; the developer has conveniently forgotten the restrictive covenants written into the contracts (others had to dig them up). He wrote them in because they were standard at the time, almost certainly not because he was personally racist. They disappeared (because of the court) and the neighborhood has changed dramatically (mostly with the introduction of Asians) since then. The developers wife continued to live into the neighborhood as the neighborhood changed. The covenants are ugly to read because of how specific they are. But, my long term neighbors bought houses with covenants in the leases, and didn’t worry about them. It’s easy to miss those rules when they don’t apply to you — even when you are not racist, and don’t care what color your neighbors are.
Re Mrs. Ewer: I agree that diversity is about more than the way you look. But, visible diversity is different from the other kinds, precisely because it is visible. This same question plays a role in thinking about visible v invisible disabilities, too. In general it takes more time and effort to discriminate against someone because of their invisible diversity or disability. You may have lots of diversity to offer your environment because you were raised in Asia, but if you don’t look Asian, you get to choose whether you want that to matter or not. If you look Asian, people can use that information, even if in every other way you are identical to your next door neighbor, and you can’t choose when they use it.
bj
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And, we can add to the slight preference for “like” for minorities to actually seek (when they can, and when it’s not forced upon them) communities that over-represent the minority group. It’s tough being the only black family in the pool, or the brownest person in your school. So, many minorities choose to avoid those situations. So, the second tier law firms, the second tier schools, especially those in less diverse areas, loose out on attracting qualified minorities. And we get tipping point effects.
I agree Laura that the underlying variables that produce non-diverse environments are complicated, and can’t be fixed with one point interventions. My personal belief is that the wave of the future is people who are so complicated in terms of race that classifying it becomes nearly impossible, and then combining this with the possibility that a person of any race can be a member of your family. There are some stats out there that say that something like >30% of children in Seattle & San Francisco are mixed race. It mixes things up in complicated ways, and also gives people access to both cultures. The data from Brazil (where similar stats apply) suggest that Brazilians have turned race into a scalar rather than a categorical judgment, but that it still plays a role. That could be the direction we’re going, but I’m hoping for something different. Race and class is correlated in Brazil. I think we’re introducing race into the American system in some instances in a way that’s divorced from class (most notably, again, with Asians).
Not sure what this does for Laura’s concern about class segregation; in some senses it might make things worse, because racial group might contain more mixing of class than a class based group (at least there’s the potential. Class segregation will maximize class differences. Race segregation might result in the same class segregation, but can’t result in more, by definition. ).
bj
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To me, in the States at least, it’s all about police harassment. Black folks can live wherever they want, but they’re going to get pulled over all the time. And before long they’ll have some sort of incident on their record. And then they won’t be able to get into the right school, or get the right job … which will depress their wages. And then they won’t have the same real estate buying power. And they’ll end up in a neighborhood where the police arrest everybody. And it starts all over again.
You can say what you want about school desegregation, and it’s a good starting point, but until we’ve solved the policing issue it can’t win the day alone.
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My daughters’ South Jersey kindergarten class of 20 has a 25% “minority” rate consisting of 2 black boys and 3 Asian girls — all five of whom are the adopted children of middle/upper class white parents like us. I’m not sure what she’s learning about diversity beyond the fact that people of every race are pretty much identical, or that maybe we all turn white when we get older.
On the other hand, my daughter is the only “practicing” Jewish student (i.e., goes the synogogue and Hebrew School), so in that sense she’s the “diversity kid” (and is often used as such in a “please describe how your culture is different” sort of way. Luckily, she’s outgoing and doesn’t get embarrassed by getting singled out.)
I guess my point is that “diversity” very rarely accomplishes what it intends to. The “minority” kids at Harvard are more often immigrants, children of immigrants, or children of inter-racial marriages than they are examples of “real” American diversity. The rare examples (like, say, Clarence Thomas) notwithstanding, the examples of really poor kids from the inner cities or rural slums making it to the big time are pretty rare, even in a school with a dedicated diversity policy.
And, with greater immigration from Africa now than ever before, using “race” as a proxy for what you really want from a diversity policy becomes an increasingly blunt instrument.
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Let’s not forget that “racial profiling” and steering have been documented quite recently; indeed, there was a series of reports not that many years ago that made it quite clear that selective racial targeting by police in New Jersey was a serious problem.
On racial profiling in NJ, for instance, see this 2001 press release:
http://www.aclu.org/racialjustice/racialprofiling/15856prs20011010.html
For one recent example of steering in NJ, see this 2004 press release:
http://nj.gov/lps/newsreleases04/pr20040427b.html
(I’ll note that the one time I’ve ever been stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike was several years ago for no good reason– when someone whose hair looked “black” — dark dreadlocks — was sitting in the back seat, clearly visible to cars behind.)
I’m not saying the area where I live is necessarily any better than NJ; I’m just providing examples from that state since they document situations in this blog’s “home area”.
The particular neighborhood where I live now (Mount Airy in Philadelphia) does have a reasonably stable and diverse black-white mix and generally strong property values. But it’s the exception rather than the rule in our area, and is the way it is in part because back in the 1950s a lot of the neighbors decided they would have an integrated neighborhood, and created a number of local organizations to help encourage this.
In a lot of other place, there are a whole lot of subtle and not-so-subtle “you’re not welcome here” cues and precedents that can’t be ignored in many placed.
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