HALIMAH DELAINE PRADO: So please
welcome Richard Rothstein.
[APPLAUSE]
RICHARD ROTHSTEIN: Thank
you very much, Halimah.
And thanks to all of
you for coming today
to engage in this
conversation with me.
In the 20th century,
this country
made a commitment to
abolish racial segregation.
We began-- Halimah mentioned I'm
affiliated with the NAACP Legal
Defense Fund.
The Legal Defense Fund began by
challenging racial segregation
in law schools
because it figured
that if judges could
understand nothing else,
they could understand
you couldn't
get a good legal education
in a segregated law school.
So they attacked
segregation in law schools,
desegregated law
schools, then went on
to other institutions
of higher education.
As you probably all
know, in 1954 then,
they abolished segregation
in elementary and secondary
schools with the
Supreme Court decision
in "Brown versus
Board of Education."
And then in the 1960s, a
series of civil rights laws
abolished racial
segregation in everything
from water fountains, to buses,
to public accommodations,
restaurants.
We understood-- we came to an
understanding in this country
that racial segregation
was wrong, it was harmful,
and it was unconstitutional.
And yet, we have abolished
segregation in all these areas
and left untouched the
biggest segregation
of all, which is that
every metropolitan area
in this country is residentially
segregated by race.
I've lived in many of them.
Everyone I've lived in
was segregated by race.
We all accept it as part
of the natural environment
despite the fact that we
came to the conclusion
that racial segregation
was wrong, harmful,
and unconstitutional.
This is part of the
natural environment
that we all accept and
have done nothing about.
We have no-- had no civil rights
movements engaged in trying
to desegregate neighborhoods.
There's no activism.
There's no legislation.
It's not on our radar screen.
And the reason
for that, I think,
is not hard to understand.
At least one is that
it's much harder
to abolish racial
segregation in neighborhoods
than it is any of these other
areas that I talked about.
If we abolish segregation in
water fountains, the next day,
people can drink from
any water fountain.
We abolish segregation
in buses, you
can sit anywhere
you want on a bus.
But if we abolish
segregation in neighborhoods,
the next day things wouldn't
look much different.
It's much harder
to undo once we've
established racial segregation.
So in order to rationalize,
justify to ourselves the fact
that despite the fact
that we understand
that racial segregation
is wrong, harmful,
unconstitutional, and
inconsistent with a democratic
society, we've adopted
the rationalization
to justify the fact that we
haven't done anything about it.
And we call that
rationalization.
It's something, a term that I'm
sure you're all familiar with.
We say we have de
facto segregation,
that the segregation
of neighborhoods
unlike any of these other
segregations I talked about,
was not created
by government, it
wasn't created by laws,
or by regulations,
or by public policy.
It's just sort of
something that happened.
It happened because of
people's personal choices.
They like to live with each
other of the same race.
Or it happened because
private homeowners
refuse to sell to people of
an opposite race, particularly
whites refusing
to sell to blacks.
Or it happened because
maybe real estate agents,
rogue real estate agents,
steered opposite race families
to different neighborhoods.
Or banks discriminated
in the way they lended.
All of these
accidental decisions
that government had
nothing to do with
and that resulted in
segregation of every city
in this country, every
metropolitan area
in this country.
And because it
happened by accident,
the Supreme Court
has said there's
nothing we can do about it.
As Halimah said, I was a
specialist in education policy,
and I got started on
this investigation, which
led to the book
"The Color Of Law"
when I read the Supreme
Court decision in 2007 that
prohibited the school districts
of Louisville and Seattle
from a very, very token
school desegregation plan.
In both cities, the
school districts
had adopted a choice plan where
parents, particularly parents
of adolescents, could
choose which high school
their child would go to.
But if the choice would
exacerbate racial segregation,
that choice would not
be honored in favor
of the choice of
a child who would
help to integrate the school.
So if you had a school that
was overwhelmingly white
and there was one place
left, and both a black
and a white child
applied for it,
let the black child be
given some preference.
And the Supreme Court
said you couldn't do it.
It was a violation
of the Constitution
to implement this very,
very token integration plan.
You couldn't imagine
the more trivial plan.
Most adolescences,
as you probably know,
don't want to go to the school
outside their own neighborhoods
and away from their friends.
And on top of that,
the cases where
you have one place left and two
children, one black, one white,
applies for it is trivial.
But the Supreme Court
said you couldn't do it.
And the reason the Supreme
Court said you couldn't do it
is that the schools in
Louisville and Seattle
are segregated because the
neighborhoods in which they're
located are segregated.
Well, I agree with that.
That is the reason we have
racial segregation in schools
everywhere.
In fact, racial
segregation in schools
is now more intense than it
ever has been in history, more
segregation than
we've ever had before,
because the neighborhoods
in which they're located
are segregated.
But the Supreme Court went on.
The segregation of neighborhoods
in Louisville and Seattle
was not created by government.
It's de facto segregation.
It was created by
accident, by all
of these individual decisions
that I talked about.
And that would be a violation
to recognize a child's race
to remedy something
that wasn't created
by a racial policy
of the government.
It was de facto segregation.
And I remembered
reading about it.
I read this case in
Louisville and Seattle.
And I remembered reading a case
that took place in Louisville
where a white homeowner
in a suburb of Louisville,
called Shively, had a friend
who is an African-American Navy
veteran, a middle
class with income,
who wanted to move to
a suburb to get better
housing for his family, and no
realtor would sell him a home.
So this white homeowner
bought another home
in his own suburb, resold
it to the African-American.
And when the African-American
and his family moved in,
a mob surrounded
the home, protected
by the police, the
mob stoned the home,
broke windows,
eventually dynamited
and firebombed the home.
And when this riot was over,
the state of Kentucky arrested,
tried, convicted, and jailed,
with a 15-year sentence,
the white homeowner
for sedition.
And I said to myself,
this doesn't sound much
like de facto segregation.
I wonder how much
more the government
might have had to do with
segregating metropolitan areas.
And so I began
this investigation.
And I'm exaggerating
a little bit.
Obviously, I had
a little bit more
of a sense of the flaws in
the Supreme Court argument
than just this one case.
But I began this
investigation, and was
stunned myself to find that
de facto segregation is
an "other myth."
There is no basis
to it whatsoever.
The racial segregation in
every metropolitan area
in this country was created
by explicit, racially explicit
government policy
designed to create
racial boundaries, designed to
ensure that African-Americans
and whites could not live near
one another with policies that
are so powerful that
they still determine
the racial landscape that we see
in cities all over the country.
Racial segregation,
I concluded--
and that's the
conclusion of this book--
in neighborhoods is
as unconstitutional
as racial segregation
in water fountains,
or in buses, or in public
accommodations, or in schools.
And it's just as imperative
under our Constitution
to remedy it.
But because we have this
false history that we've all
accepted, we are powerless,
according to the Supreme Court,
to do anything about it.
And none of us do much
to challenge that view.
So let me spend a
few minutes this--
I guess it's afternoon--
this afternoon describing
some of the major policies
that the government followed
to enforce segregation.
And then we can have a
discussion about some of them.
I want to begin--
I'll begin by talking
about public housing.
Public housing-- I
know you all think
of public housing as a place
where poor people live.
That's how I thought about it
before I did this research.
But in fact, civilian public
housing in this country
began in the New Deal,
during the Depression,
during the Roosevelt
Administration
as a program for
working families,
people with good incomes,
not great incomes,
but good incomes--
good enough to rent housing.
But there was no housing
available in the Depression.
And so the government, the
Public Works Administration,
one of the first
New Deal agencies,
began to build housing
for working families.
It was so explicitly
not for poor people
that public housing--
social workers went
to visit applicants
in their homes to make sure
that their children are well
behaved, to make sure
they had good furniture,
not to reduce the standards--
the high standards
of public housing.
They even investigated
to make sure
that there were marriage
licenses uniting
anybody who planned to
live in public housing.
This was middle class,
working class housing.
And it was primarily for whites.
And it was segregated
everywhere in the country--
not in the South, but
everywhere in the country,
frequently, frequently
segregating communities
that had never known
segregation before,
or in some cases
exacerbating segregation
where it might have just
been incipient, but not
well-established.
Some of you-- I don't
know, any of you
familiar with the great
African-American poet,
novelist, the playwright,
Langston Hughes?
The name sounds-- he wrote
an autobiography called
"The Big Sea."
He described how he grew up in
a Cleveland neighborhood that
was integrated in the
early twentieth century.
In fact, his neighborhood was
about half black, half white.
He talked about in
his autobiography
how his best friend was Polish.
He dated a Jewish girl.
This was not unusual in mid
and early twentieth century.
Virtually every metropolitan
area in this country
had some integrated
neighborhoods
for the simple reason
that workers didn't have
automobiles to get to work.
And so if you had a downtown
area with lots of employment,
factories, and
African-American workers,
and Eastern European
immigrant workers,
Jewish immigrant
workers, Irish workers,
they all had to live in roughly
the same neighborhoods in order
to be able to walk to work.
Another reason was that
the railroads would
hire only African-Americans
as baggage handlers
or as Pullman car porters.
So in this area, for example,
in West Oakland, which
was a white neighborhood
had African-Americans
living in it because
the Pullman car
porters had to live close
enough to the Oakland railroad
terminal to be able to walk
there when the trains came in
and they change shifts.
So there were many, many
integrated neighborhoods
in the country.
The Public Works Administration
demolished integrated housing
in this Cleveland neighborhood
where Langston Hughes
grew up and built two separate
projects, one for whites,
one for African-Americans,
creating segregated pattern
in Cleveland which
helped to determine
the growth of that
city and the patterns
that subsequently developed.
It happened everywhere.
I will talk a little bit
about this area some more,
but I like to, in my book,
focus on places like this area
and Cambridge, Massachusetts
because people think
of these as liberal areas.
And I thought that
if I could explain
that it happened in places
like this, it would happen--
it probably happened everywhere.
Well, Cambridge,
Massachusetts the area
around MIT, the Central
Square neighborhood,
was also a neighborhood
that was integrated.
It was about 40/60 black/white.
The Public Works Administration
demolished housing
in that neighborhood, creating
two separate projects, one
for blacks, one for
whites, creating
a pattern of segregation in
the Boston metropolitan area
that hadn't previously existed.
It happened in
the South as well.
We all know that we had
Jim Crow in the South.
That's where the water
fountains, and the buses,
and the restaurants
were segregated.
But housing wasn't
segregated for the reason
that I just described.
There were integrated
neighborhoods in the South.
In Atlanta, the Public
Works Administration
demolished an integrated
neighborhood that
was about half black and
half white called The Flats,
and built a project
for whites only,
segregating a community that
hadn't previously existed--
had segregation before, and
forcing the African-Americans
who were living there to
move in with relatives
and find other housing
elsewhere in the city.
In my book, for those
of you have it--
or if you ever get it--
take a look at the frontispiece.
It's a picture of Franklin
Roosevelt handing the keys
to the 100,000th family to
receive public housing during
the New Deal.
And you can see
from that picture
that these families are
all white, for one thing,
no African-Americans
in this project,
they're all clearly
well-dressed,
middle class families.
The picture was taken in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
where segregated housing was
built, creating and reinforcing
a pattern of segregation that
otherwise would not nearly
have been so strong.
During World War II, the
actions of the government
intensified to
create segregation.
They intensified because
throughout the country,
hundreds of thousands of workers
flocked to centers of defense
production, of war
production, to take
jobs that hadn't existed
during the Depression.
The centers of the
work production
where these factories
were located
grew so rapidly, that there
was no place for the workers
to live.
A good example here
in this area is
Richmond, California,
just north of Berkeley,
just across the Bay.
Richmond was the site
of the Kaiser Shipyards,
which was the major shipbuilding
center here on the West Coast.
There were no shipyards
there before the war.
By the end of the war, there
were five Kaiser Shipyards
employing 100,000 workers.
I don't know if you can imagine
what a community is like
if it grows from--
Richmond had 20,000
residents before the war.
By the end of the war it
had over 100,000 residents.
It's unbelievable.
Richmond was a community
that was all white.
There were a few
African-Americans
who were actually related to
Pullman car porter families who
were living on the
outskirts of Richmond,
mostly working as domestics
in white families' homes.
But it was a white community.
The federal government
had to build housing
for these workers.
It built housing for
African-Americans,
segregated housing, in
Richmond for African-Americans,
temporary housing,
not well constructed
along the railroad tracks
and in the industrial area
of the shipyards.
It was temporary because
the City of Richmond
announced that any
African-Americans who
came to Richmond during
the war would have to leave
after the war was over.
And it built more sturdy
housing, permanent housing,
for white workers
in the shipyards
further inland where
the white families,
the white residential
neighborhoods existed.
This, again, happened all over
the San Francisco Bay Area.
Unlike the East, the great
migration of African-Americans
took place in San Francisco, in
this area, during World War II.
It was the Second
Great Migration
that brought many
African-Americans here.
And there were very
few before, so we
didn't have any segregated
patterns here in the Bay Area
before World War II and
before the government embarked
on these policies.
It built five projects,
five public housing projects
here in San Francisco itself.
Four of them were in white
areas for whites only.
One was in the Western
addition in Fillmore
for African-Americans only.
And the government picked
Fillmore as the place
to build a home--
a project for African-Americans
because Fillmore
was a place where
there were vacancies,
and African-Americans
happened to start moving in.
The reason there
were vacancies was
because many Japanese-Americans
who lived there and had been
evicted in order to move
them to internment camps,
so a few African-Americans
were already
living in that neighborhood,
and the government
decided that this was going to
be an African-American ghetto
in San Francisco.
And that's where the
black project was built.
I want to emphasize this is
not because African-Americans
happen to choose one
project and whites happened
to choose another project.
These were explicitly
designated by race,
by the federal
government, to creating
a pattern of segregation
that didn't need to exist.
And the tragedy of
all this is that it
didn't need to happen because
we have an existence proof here
in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Across the Bay, in
Marin, Marin City,
there was another
shipyard, Marin Ship.
And there, the shipyards
grew so rapidly
that workers came
without their families
to work in the shipyards.
And the administrators
of the barracks
that they built to
house these workers
had to accommodate them
so quickly that they just
handed out pillows and
blankets as workers
came without trying to
segregate the buildings by race.
And they were surprised
that there were no problems
with integrated housing.
And so then when they
built family housing,
when the families of
these workers arrived,
they integrated that as well,
and there were no problems.
So there was no
justification for this policy
everywhere else in the country.
It was something-- and as I
said, many of these projects
were built in neighborhoods
where people had been living
in an integrated fashion.
After World War II, there
was still an enormous housing
shortage in this country.
Not only had no housing been
built during the Depression,
but during the War,
it was prohibited
to use construction materials
for civilian purposes
except for housing
for war workers.
So there was a big
backlog in housing needs,
especially as
returning war veterans,
millions of returning
war veterans came home
forming families-- we call
it the Baby Boom generation--
needing a place to live.
Many of them were doubled
up with relatives,
and living in Quonset huts.
We had a national mother-in-law
crisis with all these families
doubled up, and needing
a place to live,
and demanding that
the government do
something about this.
And so President Truman in
the years after World War II
proposed a vast expansion of
the National Public Housing
program.
Now remember, we're still not
talking about poor people.
These were returning
war veterans,
people who had jobs in
the big postwar boom,
but for whom there
was no housing.
And he proposed the
1949 Housing Act
to create housing for returning
war veterans, particularly
public housing.
In Congress, the
1949 Housing Act
was opposed by
conservatives not because--
not for racial reasons,
because it was understood
that it would be segregated.
That was the pattern everywhere.
Not because they didn't
like poor people.
This wasn't housing
for poor people.
It was for working
class families.
They opposed the
simply because they
thought that the public
housing was socialistic,
and the government shouldn't be
involved in the housing market.
It should be done by private
builders, even though private--
the private sector
wasn't doing anything
to house returning war veterans.
And they opposed the bill.
And they came up with a strategy
which you may be familiar
with, you may have
heard of it before, it's
used in other situations
as well, it's called--
we call it a "poison
pill strategy."
And a poison pill
strategy is where
opponents of a bill
in Congress propose
an amendment to a bill which
they think can get passed.
But if the amendment
gets passed,
it makes the entire
bill unpalatable.
So what kind of an
amendment do you
think the conservatives proposed
to the National Housing Act?
They proposed an amendment
that saying that from now
on, all public housing
has to be integrated,
no more discrimination in public
housing, a very clever devise--
strategy.
They figured that
they would vote--
all the conservatives would
vote for this amendment,
Northern liberals
would join them
in voting for the
amendments, so there'd
be a majority to attach
the amendment to the bill.
And then when the full
bill came up to the floor
with this integration
amendment attached,
the conservatives would
flip and vote against it.
Southern Democrats would
also vote against it
because they were in
favor of public housing
on a segregated
basis, but weren't
about to agree to
have integrated
housing in their states.
And so the entire bill
will go down to defeat.
So Northern liberals campaigned
against the integration
amendment in order to preserve
the Public Housing Act.
They were led-- the campaign
against the integration
amendment was led by
the leading civil rights
advocate in the United States
Senate, Hubert Humphrey.
I don't know how much--
a lot of young people here.
I don't know how much you
remember about Hubert Humphrey.
But Hubert Humphrey became
famous by becoming a--
by being a Civil Rights advocate
in the Democratic Party.
Actually in 1948
Democratic Convention,
Southerners walked out because
Hubert Humphrey led an effort
to get a civil rights plank
in the Democratic platform.
So he was the leading Civil
Rights advocate the United
States Senate, and
he led a campaign
to defeat the
integration amendment.
He was successful.
He persuaded Northern liberals
to vote against the integration
amendment.
Southern Democrats
joined them as well.
When the full bill then
came up to the floor,
it was as a continuing
segregated project,
and it passed with the votes
of both Southern Democrats
and Northern Democrats.
And because the segregation
policy, the integration
amendment, had been defeated,
the federal government
used that vote as
its justification
for continuing to
segregate all housing
programs of the
federal government, not
just public housing,
for the next 15 years
into the mid 1960s.
Well, under the
1949 Housing Act,
projects were built
all over the country.
And you're familiar
with many of them.
I know you've probably heard
the Robert Taylor Homes,
these giant high rises all
over the country, in Chicago.
Or in St. Louis, the most
famous one nationally
it was called the
Pruitt-Igoe Projects.
I see some people nodding.
You've heard of that.
Actually, it was two projects.
The Pruitt project was
for African-Americans.
The Igoe project was for whites.
We only call it Pruitt-Igoe now.
It was to Pruitt projects and
the Igoe projects back then.
And very soon after
these projects
were built in the
early 1950s, something
happened that was duplicated
everywhere in the country.
And that is there was suddenly
large numbers of vacancies
in the white projects,
and long waiting lists
in the black projects.
After a while, it
became so conspicuous
that the government had to
open up all the projects
to African-Americans.
You couldn't tolerate
the situation
where there were long waiting
list for some projects
and large numbers of
vacancies in another.
And so all the projects
were opened up,
gradually more and more
vacancies occurred,
the projects became
all African-American.
At about the same time-- we're
now talking about the mid
1950s--
industry left the
cities and moved
to suburban and rural areas.
Prior to that time, industry had
to be located in central cities
because it needs to
be close to railroad
terminals or deep water ports.
But by the 1950s,
highways were being built,
and you longer needed a deep
water port or a railroad
to have a factory.
And so industry moved away.
Fewer and fewer jobs were
available in the city.
The people in public housing
then became poorer and poorer.
Eventually for the first
time, the government
had to start subsidizing
the rents of families
in public housing.
Once they started doing
that, maintenance,
and preventive
maintenance in particular,
declined in the projects.
They became more deteriorated.
The people in them
became poorer and poorer.
And we got to know to develop
the kind of public housing
that we know today,
for poor people.
It's not how it began.
Well, the question that occurred
to me when I read all this--
and I suspect that it
occurred to you as I tell you
about this-- is why did
all these vacancies occur
in the white projects,
and none of them
in the African-American
projects,
and long waiting lists in the
African-American projects?
And that was because of
another federal program
that was even more powerful
in creating racial segregation
in this country.
And that's a program run by the
Federal Housing Administration,
another New Deal
agency, designed
to suburbanized the entire white
population into single family
homes in the suburbs.
It was explicitly racial.
After I published
the book, I came
across some additional research.
I wish I had seen it before,
because I put this in the book.
But I found the poster that the
Federal Housing Administration
had produced.
The poster showed
an African-American
being led away in handcuffs.
And the headline
was "Escape Crime.
Move to The Suburbs."
And this was a poster
that was put up
in white communities
in urban areas
to get them to move
to the suburbs.
It was actually a program--
a little aside-- it was
a program that actually
began many years before.
In World War I, The
Wilson Administration,
some geniuses in
that administration,
figured that if they could
get white families to move
to single family homes after
the Russian Revolution,
they wouldn't become Bolsheviks.
And so the federal
government had a program
to propagandize
starting in 1920,
to propagandize white families
to move to single family
homes in the suburbs.
They actually sent out
the community organizers.
The Department of Commerce
sent out community organizers
around the country to hold
meetings telling people
that they could avoid
racial strife by moving
to the suburbs.
But it didn't have much effect
because working class families
didn't have the money
to move to single family
homes in the suburbs.
There was no money
behind this program.
It was just a
propaganda campaign.
But the Federal Housing
Administration, the New Deal
agency, began to
put money behind it.
And beginning
slowly in the 1930s,
and then ramping up the
1940s and early 1950s,
the Federal Housing
Administration
began to subsidize
the developers
of giant subdivisions in
every city in the country
to create single family home
subdivisions for working
class families, white only.
The most famous of
these was Levittown,
east of New York City.
I assume you've heard of that.
But they were here as well.
San Lorenzo was one of them.
San Leandro was another.
Some you may remember a song
that Pete Seeger used to sing
written by Malvina
Reynolds about houses made
of ticky-tacky,-- little boxes--
I'm sorry-- little
boxes on the hillside
made of ticky-tacky,
ticky-tacky.
They all looked the same.
That was a song about
Westlake in Daly City,
just south of the city here.
That was another one of these
FHA-financed developments
for working class families.
That development was built
by Henry Doelger, a developer
here in San Francisco, or
San Lorenzo across the Bay,
built by another developer,
David Bohannon, or Levittown.
These developers could never
have assembled the capital
to build these giant
subdivisions on their own.
Levittown was 17,000 homes.
Where do you get the capital
to build 17,000 homes for which
you don't have any buyers?
You have to buy the land.
You have to build homes.
It was inconceivable.
The only way you could
develop the capital
was by going to the federal
government, the Federal Housing
Administration,
proposing a development,
submitting your
plans, everything
from the architectural
design, to the materials
you were going to use, to
the layout of the streets,
and the commitment never to
sell a home to a non-white.
And with that commitment, the
Federal Housing Administration
would guarantee a bank
loan or bank loans
to build the development.
The Federal Housing
Administration
even required that
the developers
of these subdivisions,
like Levittown and those
here in the Bay Area,
include a clause
in the deed of every
home prohibiting resale
to African-Americans.
And those clauses
still exist today.
If you look at the deeds of
homes anywhere in the Bay Area,
you'll see these federally
required clauses that prohibit
resale to African-Americans.
So the white families were able
to move out of the suburbs--
out of the public
housing projects
and out of urban areas generally
into the single family home
suburbs.
The subsidy for these was so
great-- these were, I say,
very small homes.
They were for working class
families, not wealthy people,
750 square feet, small homes.
They sold in that
period of time,
around 1950 in the
mid-twentieth century,
initially for about
$8,000 or $9,000.
In today's money,
that's about $100,000
adjusted for inflation,
inexpensive homes, $100,000.
Those were for working
class families.
My uncle moved to Levittown.
He stocked vegetables
in the supermarket.
These were not homes
for wealthy people.
They were homes to get the white
population out of urban areas
into the suburbs.
Those homes, like I
said, sold in those days
for about $100,000
in today's money.
Today, those homes sell for
$300,000, $400,000, $500,000
depending on the
area of the country.
And they are in
every-- these suburbs
are in every area
of the country.
This is how the country
came to be suburbanized.
The white families who
moved into those homes
with this federal subsidy-- you
can move out of public housing
and move into one of these
homes in a place like Levittown
and pay less in
your monthly housing
costs than you were paying
for rent in public housing.
That's how enormous the
subsidy was for white families
to do that.
They gained over the next two
or three generations, $300,000,
$400,000 in equity in wealth.
Most middle class
families in this country--
not the very wealthy,
but most middle
class families in
this country, gained
what wealth they have
from the equity they
have in their homes.
The white families who
were able to move--
and this is most of the suburban
population in this country--
use that wealth to send
their children to college.
They used it to take
care of emergencies,
medical emergencies, or
even bouts of unemployment.
If you have wealth, you
can weather unemployment.
If you don't have wealth,
it's much more difficult.
And they used it to bequeath
it to their children who
then had down payments
for their own homes.
Today, African-American
incomes in this country
are 60%, 6-0% of white incomes.
You would expect that if
there was a 60% income ratio,
there'd be a 60%
wealth ratio as well.
But you can-- if you have
income of the same amount,
you can save the same amount.
The reality is that
today, although the income
ratio between blacks
and whites is 60%,
the wealth ratio is 10%.
African-Americans have 10% of
the average wealth of whites,
even though they have 60%
of the average income.
And that enormous disparity
which affects so much
of the racial inequality
in this country,
so many of the problems
we face in this country,
is entirely attributable
to unconstitutional federal
housing policy that was
practiced in the mid-twentieth
century--
entirely attributable to
an unconstitutional housing
policy.
The wealth gap, the fact that
we have segregated neighborhoods
still because homes
itself sold for $100,000--
in 1950, that was twice
the national median income.
Any working class
family can afford that.
Homes that sell for today
$500,000, six or eight times
national median income,
are unaffordable to working
class families of any race.
So this-- we passed the
Fair Housing Act in 1968.
We said in the Fair
Housing Act in effect,
OK, African-Americans you can
now move to Levittown or to any
of these other suburbs.
But it was an empty
offer because the homes
are no longer
affordable to working
class families of any race.
So we've never addressed it.
We've never remedied it.
The Fair Housing Act is
inadequate to address
these problems.
There are many, many
other federal, state,
and local policies that
I describe in the book.
I only mentioned two of the most
important, the public housing
program, and the Federal
Housing Administration
subsidization of the suburbs.
But it goes from the top
from the federal government
all the way down to
the very local level.
I'll just give you a
couple of local examples.
In the course of
doing this research,
I was looking through
in Southern California,
an African-American newspaper
called "The California Eagle,"
just rifling through it.
And I came across an article
that described how the City
Attorney of Culver City--
Culver City is a suburb
just west of Los Angeles.
You may be familiar with it
because they make movies there
now.
But it was an all-white suburb
just west of Los Angeles.
The City Attorney of Culver
City assembled a meeting,
called a meeting
of all of the air
raid wardens during World
War II in Culver City.
During World War II, both
here on the West Coast
and on the East
Coast, every city
had air raid wardens
whose job was
to go door to door to make
sure that people turned off
their lights, and close their
blackout curtains if they
had them, and made sure
not to give guidance
to enemy bombers that might
have been coming this way.
So the City Attorney
of Culver City
called the meeting of
all the air raid wardens
and gave them a
contract to distribute
to every family in the community
while they were telling
to turn off the lights
committing them legally never
to sell a home to
an African-American.
That was the lowest
level of this.
And, of course, I described
the use of the police,
and the prosecutors in
Louisville at the beginning.
Halimah was telling
me earlier-- or maybe
it was [INAUDIBLE],,
I forget that Google
started in Mountain View.
In Mountain View-- well, here
in Richmond, one of the--
I write about this
a lot in the book--
in addition to the
shipyards, there
was a Ford Motor
plant in Richmond
that was making Jeeps and
tanks during World War II.
And as industry left the
cities, as I described before
in the mid 1950s,
that Ford plant
moved to Milpitas,
which at the time
was a completely rural area.
And developers started to
build these FHA developments
in the area around
Milpitas to house the war
workers for white workers only.
The Ford plant was about
25% African-American.
The UAW, the union,
representing the Ford workers,
negotiated an agreement
with the company
that gave every
worker in the plant
the right to relocate
to the Milpitas plant
to keep their jobs.
But, of course, the white
workers could relocate,
and the black workers
had much more difficulty
because the white workers
could find housing,
and the black workers couldn't
because of the FHA policy.
So the UAW itself decided
it would build housing
for workers.
And it went through a--
it recruited builders,
it bought land.
And one of the places it
bought was in Mountain View.
And when the Mountain View found
out, the City of Mountain View
found out that the
UAW was planning
to build integrated
housing in its community,
it rezoned the
property for industry
and prevented the
development of housing
that the workers in Milpitas
could have access to.
And this one, of course,
the zoning requirements,
changes in zoning
requirements to prevent
integrated housing also
existed throughout the country.
Let me just conclude
with a couple of things,
then we can have a discussion.
In the course of--
as I said before, I used to
spend a lot of time thinking
about education policy, so
it was sort of natural for me
when I was writing this book
to look at how all of this
is addressed in textbooks that
high school and middle school
students use today to
learn American history.
And what I found was that
every textbook in this country
lies about this history.
Not one of them tells
the truth about it.
They either-- well, some of them
brag about the wonderful job
that the FHA did in creating
suburban homes for the working
class, never mentioning that it
wasn't the entire working class
it was creating homes for.
The most popularly use
American history textbook
is something called
"The Americans,"
has one paragraph
that's subheaded
"Discrimination in the North."
It has one sentence in that
paragraph about housing.
And the sentence
reads as follows.
"In the North,
African-Americans found
themselves forced into
segregated neighborhoods."
That's it.
That's the entire explanation.
As you know-- well, you
know because you're here
that I write books.
I know how publishing works.
I know that
publishers spent a lot
of money hiring copy
editors to look out
for passive voice sentences.
[LAUGHTER]
This is one that they missed.
No explanation of who did the
forcing, why they were there.
It's like, African-Americans
woke up one day,
they looked out their
window, and they said, hey,
we're in a segregated
neighborhood.
This is a crime because if young
people don't learn this history
any better than
we've learned it--
and I include myself in this--
if they don't learn this
history any better than we've
learned it, they'll be
in as poor a position
to remedy it as we've been.
So when I say everywhere
I talk-- and I've
been invited to speak
at a lot of places--
is every one of you lives
in a school district.
You have children, or
nieces, or nephews,
or I see even some who
aren't yet in school.
And you can make
an issue of this.
You can insist that
we start teaching
this history accurately.
And I guarantee you if you start
a conversation about what's
being taught in
the schools, it'll
generate a conversation in
the adult community as well.
So I do have a small chapter
in the book about remedies.
I can certainly answer
some of that in questions.
But this is not a
book about remedies.
It's a book about the history
because a precondition
of the remedies is developing
political support for them,
for which there is none now.
And unless people
learn this history,
we'll never be able to build
the political support that's
necessary to integrate
this country.
So long as we think it
happened by accident,
we'll believe it has to
unhappen by accident.
But if we understand
that was created
by a very powerful
government policy,
we can understand that
government policy is
equally capable of undoing it.
So thank you for your
attention, and Halimah,
we have to take questions and--
[APPLAUSE]
HALIMAH DELAINE
PRADO: I will say--
I'll reiterate a point that
you had mentioned in the talk
but had a lot of
resonance with me
was, for me, the most
surprising thing was learning
about the rampant history
in a historically sort
of open-minded
liberal [INAUDIBLE]
and community like the Bay Area.
I will add a personal
anecdote just
because it would
explain why this
had so much resonance with me.
I'm from the East Coast.
I purchased a home a little
bit south of Santa Cruz.
And as a lawyer
doing the diligence,
went through all
of the paperwork
and laughed out
loud when I actually
found the racially
restrictive covenant
in the actual document.
The realtor-- because I guess
didn't share my lawyer cynical
humor, I was like, oh,
someone's rolling in there grave
because I've just
bought their house--
was horrified and apologized
profusely, and said,
oh, we can cover it up.
We can-- we'll take
it out of the file
to make sure no one
sees this again.
And I was like, no,
keep it in, actually.
This is history,
it's important, and I
get a dizzying
self-satisfaction about being
a black woman buying a house
that previously 40 years ago I
would have been
prevented from buying.
And so it has been
super fascinating
that throughout
the book you have
this revolutive truth about
what happened in the Bay Area.
How has the Bay Area
received your book
and that truth telling?
Have you had negative
reactions to that?
Have folks sort of become
a bit defensive in that?
Or is it just sort of
well, that's history,
and we should move on?
RICHARD ROTHSTEIN: I haven't
had negative reactions.
But as I concluded by saying
is the negative reactions
will come when we actually
start enacting policies
to reverse it.
This is now, it's
interesting history,
it's horrifying history, but it
doesn't really require anybody
to make any changes in the way
they live because we're not yet
reversing it.
Many things will
have to be done.
People will have to make
some changes in order
to create the
integrated society which
we say we're committed to.
So no, I have not had
any negative reactions.
The only negative
reaction I've had--
the book has been received
with a lot of enthusiasm
by conservatives, by some
of the conservative think
tanks of Washington because
they say this proves
that government can do no good.
[LAUGHTER]
And their response is well,
two wrongs don't make a right.
Just because the
government did this,
it doesn't mean the
government should fix it.
The market should fix it.
And, of course, there's
no way the market--
this is so powerfully
embedded in our institutions,
that the market can't fix it.
So I haven't had
negative reactions to it.
No fact in the book
that I've described
has been challenged by
any historian or lawyer.
But the truth will--
we'll come to grips with
this when we actually
start implementing policies.
And as you all know--
or maybe you know--
there's a big controversy
right now here in
California in the Bay Area
about there's a bill
before the SB-827.
Are you all familiar with that?
That would prohibit
single family home zoning
in areas near
transit stops, that
would permit the
construction of townhouses,
and apartments, and single
family homes on small lot sizes
that moderate income
families could access.
And there's no doubt that
that will go down to defeat.
And it's a very,
very modest program.
And it will go down
to defeat by being--
and it'll be opposed
by many people who
are enthusiastic about hearing
this history I talk about.
So it needs to be
translated into action.
AUDIENCE: We talked about how
the government incentivized
people to move out into
these subdivisions,
and then that was, of course,
I guess, as an addition,
racially segregated in a
sense that only whites were
able to do it.
But I was wondering if you
could talk a little bit
about the history of why--
why there was a motivation to
move out of this city at all.
What is the catalyst
of moving people out
regardless of whether
it was racially or not
racially motivated?
RICHARD ROTHSTEIN: Clearly, it
was propaganda in favor of it.
Other industrial countries
haven't developed in this way.
Other industrial countries,
middle class families
have continued to
live in the cities.
We developed in this
country a culture
of frontier independence.
And single family homes
looked a lot like that,
not living crowded
in apartments.
Clearly, the homes were
better quality homes
that people were moving into
than the frequently slum
dwellings that they were moving
out of, overcrowded homes
and they were moving out of.
But it wasn't a
necessary ideology,
so I really don't know.
What do you think?
AUDIENCE: I don't know.
I'm so young.
[LAUGHTER]
RICHARD ROTHSTEIN: Well,
the culture is now changing.
And the white middle
class families
are moving back into cities.
Not-- its impact is
exaggerated, not many of them
relative to the number
who remain in the suburbs,
but there is a movement to
move back into urban areas
even after people have children.
So the culture is changing.
AUDIENCE: Could you talk
a little bit about it
in your research you came across
the effects of these policies
on the Great Migration?
You talked a lot about how there
was these long waiting lists.
Did you see that playing out
in the sense that a lot--
it extended the Great
Migration in the sense
that people went
further than they
were planning on
going because they
were unable to find housing?
Or did you find that maybe
they stayed and stayed
on these lists?
RICHARD ROTHSTEIN:
Most people who
needed housing couldn't find
it, even with public housing.
They wound up being overcrowded.
I'm sure you've heard
the term "redlining."
In fact, the cover of my
book has a redlining map.
We think of redlining as
something that banks did.
But in fact, the map,
the redlining maps,
were maps that were built--
drawn by the federal government,
by the Homeowners Loan
Corporation, and then used
by the Federal Housing
Administration, the
Veteran's Administration,
to indicate areas
that were colored red
where African-Americans
lived and no mortgages could
be granted.
Well, the result of that
was that African-Americans
had to pay.
Even if they didn't
have public housing,
if they were living in private
housing in these same areas--
which, urban areas-- they had
to pay much more for housing
than whites had to pay
for similar housing
because they couldn't
get FHA or VA mortgages.
There was in many cities
a contract buying system
which was, in effect, buying
a home on the installment plan
where you gain no equity until
the house is completely paid
off.
And of course, it
was more expensive.
So what happened is
African-Americans
in these neighborhoods, even if
they weren't in public housing,
had to pay more for housing.
They had to subdivide
their homes.
They frequently doubled
and tripled up in families.
At the same time, cities didn't
maintain these neighborhoods
as well.
Garbage was collected less
frequently, for example,
and so they became slums.
And that created a
stereotype in the minds
of the white population of what
African-Americans were like.
And they-- and so
"white flight" resulted
when African-Americans began to
move into their neighborhoods
because they looked to
African-Americans and said,
oh, their slum dwellers.
We don't want slums
in our neighborhoods,
not realizing that
the slums were not
a characteristic of the people,
but a characteristic result
of government policy.
So even those who couldn't
find public housing,
homes in public housing,
were doubled and tripled up
in the same neighborhoods.
And these became
low-income neighborhoods.
And I can add one other thing.
It's not just the stereotype
that whites developed
of African-Americans,
it's the stereotype
that African-Americans
developed of themselves.
And one of the most
moving experiences
I had from this book
is that I got a letter
from a young man, an
African-American young man,
18 years old in New
Orleans, who wrote to me.
He said that he grew up in
the black neighborhood of New
Orleans.
He looked around him, he saw
that black people were poor,
that white people were rich.
He thought that's the way
things were naturally.
And then he read my book.
And he said, when I realized
that government actually
created this, I felt that
I would have tried harder
in school if I had known this.
And social psychologists
have a name for this.
They call the
"stereotype threat."
But it's an indication
of how our whole--
the culture of our caste
system was created.
It wasn't just a
housing policy, it
was a social psychology policy.
AUDIENCE: So towards
the end of your book,
you cover briefly a few
interesting possible solutions
involving government.
Google's a company that
earns $100 billion a year.
We've got over $60
billion in the bank.
We build a lot of
corporate buildings.
We are directly involved in
decisions related to housing.
We have transportation
networks that influence
how patterns of residency.
Is there-- do you
envision a role
that corporations like
Google can play to correct
for some of this history?
RICHARD ROTHSTEIN:
Well, certainly.
I assume you're not
talking about Google going
into the housing business.
But there are public
policies that--
Google is an
influential corporation.
And there are public
policies that Google
could advocate that would
help address this problem.
One of the things that's
happening in this area
is that lower income workers,
particularly minority workers,
are having to travel
enormous distances in order
to get to work because we are
not providing mixed income
housing in any of
our communities.
So this SB-827, the
bill I saw before,
is just a tiny, tiny step.
Google could support that.
It could become vocal in it.
We have other policies.
Many, many-- I talked about
some of them in the book.
We have many policies today that
reinforce racial segregation
without actually being explicit.
We don't have to
be explicit anymore
because the boundaries were set
by the policies I talked about.
But the federal government runs
a program called the Low Income
Housing Tax Credit, which
gives a subsidy to builders
of low-income housing.
All those projects
are built-- and it's
administered by the
states, and by the cities,
and by the counties--
and all that housing--
well, it's exaggeration--
almost all of that housing
is placed in already
segregated neighborhoods,
low-income neighborhoods.
Developers would rather build
low-income housing projects
in already low-income
neighborhoods
because the land is
cheaper, and they
don't have to have 25
community meetings to explain
why they're doing it.
And they can put the
sign up in the window,
and people who want
the housing can walk by
and see an apartment for rent.
Well, the State of California,
Alameda County, San Francisco
County, could easily
administer that program
so they place the priority
on giving the tax credits
to developers who would build
in middle class communities
to help to integrate
those communities.
The same thing is true of the--
I'm sure you're familiar with
it-- the Section 8 voucher
program.
You've heard of it.
It's a program that
the HUD administers
to subsidize the rents
of low-income families.
It reinforces segregation today.
A Section 8 housing
voucher family
is more likely to live in
a segregated neighborhood
than a family who is just as
poor who doesn't have a Section
8 voucher.
And that's because
the Section 8 voucher
is structured in the way
that it can only be used
in segregated neighborhoods.
It's based on the average
rent in a metropolitan area.
But, of course, you
know enough arithmetic
to know that the
average rent is going
to be too low to rent in
a middle class community.
And so it's-- and landlords,
although they're not permitted
in California to discriminate
against Section 8 voucher
holders, it's not enforced.
That discriminatory-- that
anti-discrimination provision
isn't enforced.
So that's another
area of public policy
that you could be
influential in influencing.
The whole zoning
system in this country
preserves the segregation
that I was talking about.
And that needs to be attacked
if we're going to address this.
Suburbs have zoning
ordinances that
prevent anything but homes on
large lots sizes, single family
homes on large lot sizes.
Many of those ordinances
were originally
developed for a
discriminatory purpose,
but they're not written with
racial language in it the way
the policy I described
earlier were,
but they need to be changed.
And there have been
places in the country
where it's being done.
Montgomery County,
Maryland, which
is an affluent suburb
of Washington DC,
but still with lots
of vacant land,
has a policy where any
developer in Montgomery County
has to set aside
15% of its units
for moderate income families.
And then the Public
Housing Authority
of Montgomery County purchases
one-third of those units,
those set aside units, so 5%
for the total development,
for public housing
eligible families.
And it's produced
some integration
in Montgomery County.
AUDIENCE: So one of the
questions from the Dory.
Labor unions are mentioned
at a few points in your book.
It appears that there was
a pattern of unions tending
toward supporting integrated
housing in contrast
to the harmful effects of
government institutions.
Was this pattern real?
What led unions to
be more supportive
than other institutions?
RICHARD ROTHSTEIN: Well,
it wasn't all unions.
For those of you who know
your American history,
you know that they were--
in the mid 20th century,
there were two branches
of the American Labor Movement.
There was the
American Federation
of Labor, which was predominant
in the construction trades.
And there was the CIO--
it's now merged
in one federation,
but these were two
separate federations--
that were industrial
unions, and they
were much more progressive.
So the example I gave
before of the Ford plant
that moved to Milpitas,
that was a Ford plant where
the union protected the rights
of African-American workers.
And as I say, it tried to
build integrated housing
for its members.
But just to give you another
example of how pervasive
federal policy was-- and this is
not a housing policy directly,
but it affects housing.
Another New Deal agency was the
National Labor Relations Board,
which was adopted
in 1935, I think,
in the National Labor Relations
Act called the Wagner Act.
When Senator Robert Wagner, who
was a senator from New York,
and who sponsored
this law, the law
provides for federal government
certification of unions
so that once the federal
government certifies a union,
an employer has to
bargain with it.
And the law-- when
Wagner proposed the law,
it had a provision in it that
said that the government could
not certify unions that were
racially discriminatory.
That provision was removed
for the bill-- from the bill
before the bill was passed.
And so for 30 years after
that bill was passed,
the federal government
certified unions that excluded
African-Americans
from membership.
The result-- and the unions
that exclude African-Americans
from membership were the
construction trades, primarily,
the very trades
that were building
the suburbs that
African-Americans
couldn't live in.
So both the African-Americans
couldn't live in the suburbs,
and they couldn't
participate in the jobs
boom that created them.
So there were two kinds of
unions when it comes to race.
The CIO unions were much more
integrating and progressive.
And the AFL unions
were discriminatory.
AUDIENCE: So I'm trying to
imagine the human experience
of these policies.
And I think you
spoke, for example,
of a neighborhood called
The Flats in Atlanta,
and that there were black
and white folks that
were living there,
and then there
was government housing that
was built for whites only.
And so what was the experience
of a typical black person
in The Flats?
Were government agents evicting
them from their houses?
Was there-- were they
renters that were just
told to leave and not given
any subsidy or relocation?
What was the experience
for this folks?
RICHARD ROTHSTEIN: Yes.
We talk a lot about
gentrification these days,
but it's a very old policy.
We just had a different name
for it 20 or 30 years ago.
We called it urban renewal.
And it was exactly
the same policy.
And no, there were no subsidies
for these families who
were evicted from their homes.
The government, eminent
domain, demolished the homes
in order to build the
public housing project.
And they were forced to
double up with relatives.
And this has caused
the overcrowding
in African-American communities,
or find a lower-quality housing
where they could.
So the effect of these
policies, urban renewal--
people when-- after the
riots in Ferguson in 2014,
lots of people ask, you know,
how did Ferguson, a suburb
become majority black?
We thought suburb--
African-Americans
lived in cities?
What are they doing in
a suburb like Ferguson?
Well, Ferguson
became majority black
because during the mid-twentieth
century into really 1980
or so, the City of
St. Louis demolished
African-American neighborhoods
in the central city.
It wasn't because whites
were buying up the homes
and raising the
prices, they simply
demolished them
in order to build
that half of the McDonald's
sign that's, you know,
the Mississippi River,
the "Gateway to the West."
That was a large
African-American neighborhood
that was demolished.
They built hospitals there.
Well, where were the
people going to go?
Well, the federal
government gave some of them
Section 8 vouchers, but
the State of Missouri
doesn't have a law that
prohibits discrimination
against Section 8
voucher holders.
So there were only one or two
communities they could go to.
Ferguson was one of them.
There was another right
near it called Jennings,
and another right near it
called Berkeley, it happens.
And those are the only
places that African-Americans
could go to.
And the same thing's
happening now
as a result of
gentrification in Oakland.
African-Americans aren't able--
because we're not providing
housing for moderate income
families in most suburbs,
so they're--
Antioch is becoming a new
African-American community.
We're just shifting the black
community from one place
to another as a result
of these policies.
So unless we do something
to desegregate the suburbs--
I'm talking about the
middle class suburbs--
we're going to just shift the
African-American population
around from one
place to another just
as we did in Atlanta and in
many other places at the time.
AUDIENCE: You
mentioned in the FAQ
that Asians and
Hispanics did not
experience the same
targeted and persistent
residential segregation
as African-Americans.
Did they still get
caught in the net
of the same
discriminatory policies
like restrictive covenants,
and the inability
to get federally-backed
mortgages?
RICHARD ROTHSTEIN: Yeah, I
would certainly not deny--
and I-- that's a mild way
of saying that certainly
the case that African-Americans
and Asian-Americans have
discriminate-- have experienced
discrimination in housing,
and some of it
government sponsored.
But it was nowhere
near the extent
to which African-Americans
experience it.
You have to remember that
during the mid-twentieth century
and these policies
that I'm describing,
the farthest West baseball
team was St. Louis.
This was a country that
revolved around the East.
And the policies were
directed primarily
against the minority
in the East,
which is African-Americans.
There were very few Asians
living in the East and very
few Hispanics.
And we have a caste
system in this country.
I think one of the
most-- and I say
this in the book-- one of the
most dangerous things we do
is when we invent this
term "people of color"
as though African-Americans and
Hispanics suffer the same kinds
of discrimination.
They don't.
It's not that Hispanics
aren't discriminated against,
but it's not the same
as African-Americans.
For example, third-generation
and beyond Hispanics
in this country
marry non-Hispanics.
It's a very rapid
assimilation rate.
I used to live in Whittier
outside Los Angeles,
and there was a
community where there
were many families that were
blended Hispanic and Anglo.
There were no blacks
in that community,
even though it's a big black
community in Los Angeles.
Hispanic homeownership
rates are much higher
than African-American
homeownership rates,
even though they were
discriminated against.
In California, these
restrictive covenants
of the kind that you had in your
house in Santa Cruz excluded
Hispanics as well.
But judges refused to enforce
them against Hispanics.
California judges,
when a white family
tried to sue to have a Hispanic
family evicted because they
bought a home in violation
of the restrictive covenant,
judges in California said
they couldn't enforce it
because Hispanics were
really Caucasians.
So I'm not minimizing the
experience that Hispanics--
the discrimination that
Hispanics have experienced,
but I think it's-- we have
a legacy of slavery in this
country which puts--
we have a caste system,
which puts African-Americans
in an entirely different
position than Hispanics.
And it would be a
mistake to, I think,
to think that it's
just all the same,
it's just people of color.
AUDIENCE: MLK talks in his
letter from Birmingham jail
about the white moderate.
And I'm curious as to
how you would convey
a lot of the topics in your book
to that population of people
that is, in my opinion, it's
a very problematic group
of people that we really need
to bring forward and help
us fight this good fight.
RICHARD ROTHSTEIN:
Yeah, certainly--
I don't want-- we should never--
I should never exaggerate,
and you should never
exaggerate my book.
There has to be lots
of this going on,
and I'm trying to make
the impact that I can.
But the real problem,
as I said before,
is translating this
knowledge into action.
What you called white moderates
are people in this room-- me,
lots of my white moderates
are learning this history.
But in order to remedy the
unconstitutional actions
of the government, that's going
to require a new Civil Rights
Movement that's going
to have to not just be
based on understanding,
but be based on activism,
and demonstrations, and marches.
And during the Civil Rights
Movement through the 1960s,
many white moderates
joined in later.
It started with people
who weren't moderate,
and as it became
more-- and you know,
I think we need in the
Civil Rights Movement
to address housing segregation.
I gave-- I give a lot of talks.
One that sticks in my mind is
I gave a talk about a month ago
to an audience of 600 members
of white Protestant churches
in Louisville, Kentucky.
People are interested in this.
Whether we'll take
action is the next step.
AUDIENCE: With the
right-to-work legislation
that had passed in some
states, and now that there's
a push for federal
right-to-work legislation,
do you think that
segregation is a motive
for this type of legislation,
or just a byproduct of it?
And if they're the
same, what's the benefit
for the government for that?
RICHARD ROTHSTEIN: Well, I
think the racial polarization
that characterizes our
politics is reinforced,
if not in the major
part, created by the fact
that we live so separately.
And that racial polarization
not only affects
right-to-work legislation,
it affects opposition
to universal health
insurance, it
affects opposition to
minimum wage increases.
We have developed an
attitude in this country
where large sections
of the white population
are opposed to social
programs which they support
in other countries because they
think it benefits black people.
And this is, I think,
a product of the fact
that we live so separately.
So I guess I would include
right-to-work legislation
in that.
But it's part of a whole
configuration of policies
that are much more
conservative in this country
than they are in other
industrialized countries
because of our
racial polarization.
And it's not based, again,
to take the previous example,
it's not based because people
don't want to help Asians
or don't want to
help Hispanics, it's
a racial issue, which
was unfortunately
empowered by the President
of the United States.
AUDIENCE: My family migrated
from Mississippi to Detroit.
And my grandmother
purchased our first home
because she could pass.
So when her and my
grandfather went
to get a mortgage because
he looked African-American
and she could pass as
white and was passing,
that was how our family was
able to actually purchase
the first home that anyone in
our family actually purchased.
So I'm really interested
in this research.
But my question is can
you talk a little bit
about the impact and the effect
that these racist policies have
had on public education
in this country?
RICHARD ROTHSTEIN:
Yeah, absolutely.
And I started out by
talking about this.
I was an education policy writer
before I got involved in this.
I didn't know anything
about housing.
This is not my field.
And in the course of writing
about education policy,
I became convinced and wrote
about how the entire education
policy of this
country was following,
the No Child Left Behind law
and so forth, was flawed.
It was nonsense
because it assumed
that the reason
that particularly
low-income African-American
children were not achieving
at high levels was because
the teachers didn't have
high expectations of them,
and they weren't accountable,
and we didn't test them
enough, and force people
to get their test scores up.
And I understood that the reason
that we have an achievement
gap-- which is what it's
called in education policy--
is because of the social
and economic conditions
that children come
to school with.
There are hundreds and
hundreds of these examples.
I've written about many of them.
One example is-- just a
simple example, asthma.
Low-income African-American
children with asthma
at four times the rate
of middle class children
because of the kinds of
neighborhoods they live in,
the kind of environment, that
kind of air they're breathing.
If a child has
asthma, it's drowsy
because it's sleepless,
up late at night wheezing,
sometimes absent from school.
If you have two
groups of children
who are equal in every
conceivable respect
except one group has a higher
rate of asthma than the other,
that group is going to have
lower average achievement,
which is not to say that
some children with asthma
don't achieve at higher levels.
You all know that there's
a distribution of outcomes
for every human characteristic.
So you add all these up, and
it creates an achievement gap.
But what happens when you
concentrate all these children
in single schools?
So it's not just one
or two children who
have asthma, or lead
poisoning, or a stress
from economic instability,
or lack of access
to primary care physicians,
or homes in which
parents are well-educated.
It's not just one
child in the classroom,
or two child, or a half--
but every single child
in the classroom has one
of these characteristics.
That classroom is
inevitably going
to have lower
average achievement,
much lower average achievement
than the classroom where
children come to school
well-fed, and nourished,
and well-rested, and unstressed.
So that's how I came to this.
I came to conclude
that the concentration
of disadvantaged
children in schools
was the cause of the
achievement gap, the major cause
of the achievement gap.
The schools are concentrated
because the neighborhoods were
that way, and that we had
no chance of addressing
the serious economic--
educational problems that we
have in this country so long
as we had segregated schools.
And the schools were segregated
because the neighborhoods
were segregated.
So that's how I came
to this conclusion,
and why I began
this investigation.
AUDIENCE: So I'm an
organizer in the Mission,
in my part-time-- or
my out-of-work time.
And I organize
Mission [? Yemby. ?]
And our belief is that one--
a big way of stopping--
or preventing gentrification
and displacement
is that we just have to
build a lot everywhere.
And I think SB-827
ties into that.
So I'm curious if you
agree with that approach.
And what would you add onto it?
What should we follow A27 with?
What kind of legislation?
RICHARD ROTHSTEIN:
Well, when you
say what should we
follow 827 with,
you're more optimistic that
I am that it will actually be
passed that we can follow it.
But I think that the advocates--
the opponents of the costs
of gentrification
I think mostly--
and maybe you don't-- but mostly
they miss half the picture
because when neighborhoods
gentrify, which means--
that's a good thing.
They become integrated
temporarily.
And so the advocates of
preserving that integration
propose policies that
ensure that some homes
in those neighborhoods
remain accessible
for the former residents,
or for low-income families,
or for moderate income families.
But if we're going to have-- and
even if that we're successful,
most people in
those neighborhoods
would be displaced.
And where do they go?
And so for the opponents
of gentrification
to focus only on
preserving a share of homes
in those neighborhoods
for the previous residents
or people like the
previous residents
without focusing on the
segregation of the broader
metropolitan area,
which affects where
the people who will
inevitably be displaced go,
I think is a mistake.
So what I would like
to see followed--
if you're asking me
what would follow it,
if 827 ever got passed
is an inclusionary zoning
policy for the entire
metropolitan area,
not just for the areas
around transit stops.
HALIMAH DELAINE PRADO:
Thank you again for coming.
RICHARD ROTHSTEIN: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
