Ferguson & Baltimore, Segregation to Separation:
Prophecy Coming To Pass
Source FT April 28th, 2015
It is unfortunate that, the
violent racial riots in Ferguson and Baltimore,after the death
of clearly innocent Black youth, is turned into a public debate on ‘need for
better policing’. The casualty has been more fundamental issues
like; century-old public policy of systematic social segregation, increasing
economic inequality, and wholesale abdication by the state of social welfare obligations
Century-Old Systematic Segregation
According to The University of Chicago’s sociologist, Douglas S.
Massey, “Housing segregation is both a consequence and a cause of Black
poverty.
Housing markets distribute not only a place to live, but they
also distribute wealth in the form of home equity, education, the peer
environment and exposure to crime,"
In 1910, a Black Yale Law School graduate
purchased a home, in a previously all-White neighbourhood in Baltimore. The
alarmed city fathers promptly issued an ordinance adopting residential segregation, thereby restricting African-Americans to designated
blocks.
This was
overturned in
1917, when the U.S. Supreme Court found the
Baltimore ordinances
unconstitutional by restricting the property rights of White homeowners to
sell to whomever they wished. Baltimore
immediately formed an official
Committee on Segregation, which through building and
health departments, persuaded real estate
industry and White community organisations, to apply pressure to any Whites
tempted to sell or rent to Blacks.
Members
of the city’s real estate board, for example, accompanied building and health
inspectors to warn property owners not to violate the city’s color line. Neighbourhood residential associations made it impossible for isolated White
property owners to sell or rent their property to Non-White customers.
Developers could access subsidised housing loans, only if they gave an
undertaking that they would not sell their properties to Blacks.
Moving on to 1945 and the end of the
Second World War, that brought home war veterans, who needed housing. One such
returning unit had, 20% African-Americans who were housed alongside their White
fellow men, with whom they had lived and fought, looking after each other’s
backs day and night. The very next day, all hell broke loose. Four hundred policemen
were trying to keep at bay a White mob of 1500 men, some of them being their
own fellowmen in uniforms. After Fifteen days of the struggle African-American families to made their way elsewhere.
In 1995, a housing lawyer from
Johannesburg, South Africa, visited Baltimore to study; how to 'undo' racial segregation?, merits of integrated neighbourhoods, the constitutional right to choose where to live, and the role
of the government in ensuring, equal opportunities and fair housing practices.
Soon, he realised to his great disappointment, that Baltimore was no different
than his native land, Johannesburg, when it came to a deliberate and intentional
residential segregation. Real-estate agencies ''steering'' and the banks were
''red-lining'' the Blacks with almost identical indifference.
The Kerner Prophecy
During the years
1965 to 1968, America witnessed a huge eruption of over 300, race related
disturbances, in across 200 cities and towns. Distressed by this unprecedented
upsurge of mass fury, which needed federal troops at some places to establish
peace, the then President, Lyndon Johnson, set up an enquiry commission
formally known as the National Advisory Commission on
Civil Disorders, which later on became more popular as the Kerner Commission,
after its chairman, Otto J. Kerner Jr.
While ruling out
any conspiracy, the commission identified racial discrimination,
poverty, high unemployment, poor & inadequate schools, poor health care and
sanitation as major contributing factors to the United States’ racial
apartheid.
The early &
selective leakage of this report incited ferocious criticism from the White
community. Critics argued, that the report has blamed everyone except the
rioters. The opposition was so strong and intense that, Johnson not only
declined the request by commission members, but also took additional six months
to disseminate its findings to the public at large and put the issue in right
perspective, but he himself failed to act upon it.
The most often
quoted statement from the report, the prophetic value of which is only being
realized in recent times is:
“The United States is moving
toward two societies, one Black, and one White—separate and unequal”
A forty year follow up study,
conducted by Milton S. Eisenhower Foundation
in 2008, reported that, while the Black middle class has grown and the Black
businesses have multiplied, inequalities with racial dimensions have deepened further
more.
Sharing some comparisons, with benchmark
conditions of 1968, the year in which Kerner report was published, are most
telling:
§ African-American unemployment has
continued to be twice as high as White unemployment during each of the 4
decades since 1968.
§ The child poverty rate increased from
1968 to 2007.
§ Since the Kerner Commission,
productivity has increased significantly in America, but corporations have
increased wages little, in real terms.
§ At the time of the Kerner Commission,
CEOs of large American companies earned about 40 times as much as average
workers. Today, CEOs of large American companies earn about 275 times as much.
§ There is continuing evidence from
distinguished scholars that;
o Some employers steer minority
applicants into the worst jobs regardless of their qualifications.
o Many real estate agents steer
minorities to less desirable locations, compared to Whites.
o Lenders treat minorities differently
from Whites in terms of percentage of mortgage applications accepted.
(Source: “What
Together We Can Do: A Forty year Update on National Commission on Civil
Disorders –Preliminary Findings” by The Eisenhower Foundation 2008)
What next?
In terms of social segregation and poverty, Ferguson
and Baltimore belong to the top quartile of America’s racially volatile cities.
There are more such places waiting to explode. The flicker of hope created by
the election of Barack Obama as the first American, Black President (in 2008)
has been snuffed out long back. Perhaps the only contribution this historic event has
done, is that, race issues have ceased to make any place in the current Presidential
debates
Racism, whose major
manifestation and the perpetual continuation machine is housing segregation,
has a reason for it. As sociologist Douglas S. Massey
has said, “segregation is a key cause of
poverty because where one lives determines much about the life chances one
faces." And this in the United
States is "Created by White prejudice, actualised by discriminatory behaviour and Condoned, if not supported, by government."
Today both, in the
US and in Europe, overt racism is replaced by “politically correct behaviour” and the reality of social relations
has been rarified. This has made the evil of racism omnipresent, omnipotent but
still invisible. It is to the credit of White societies, that, this art is not
only universalised and its social reproduction is also ensured.
All the same, it
is true that today, world over, the public is way ahead of its political establishment.
Hence, it is not Obama, who will bring the social change, but the more
purposive and peaceful Fergusons and Baltimores that will.
Because
some day, as someone has said, “Americans
have to realize that they all may not have arrived in the same boat, but now
everyone is in the same boat”.
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