Why Are the “Most Desirable” [1] Suburbs Largely White and Inner Cities Largely Black?

Let’s dive into the thick of this discussion, not by answering the question in the title, but by posing a related query that hopefully will get us started on the right track: why haven’t black Americans followed the pattern of European immigrants and fended for themselves without decades of reliance on handouts and special aid programs from the government? A reality-based answer is straightforward, at least in part. Here’s that straightforward segment. Once recent European immigrants and their children had mastered English and started earning a decent income, which happened fairly quickly since many had a basic education and soon acquired employment-related skills if they hadn’t had them before they moved from their initial places of residence in ethnic enclaves to neighborhoods with newer and larger homes and from there to mostly white neighborhoods and suburbs where they were gradually accepted as part of the highly vaunted, if mostly illusory, American melting pot.

On the other hand, and here’s where it gets complicated, blacks were and are seen by whites as non-white, which is understandable, lower-caste, and in the main highly undesirable as neighbors or, far worse, as potential in-laws and thus historically were forced by restrictive legal covenants and zoning ordinances enacted by cities throughout the U.S., as well as by social convention, to live in substandard housing in overcrowded inner city ghettoes characterized by schools with marginal resources and by low-paying, low-status jobs. Later, after those racially restrictive de jure devices were tossed out by the U.S. Supreme Court in Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917), similar neighborhood-based housing covenants and redlining enforced nationally by federal housing agencies, the Veterans Administration, banks, mortgage firms, real estate companies, and the insurance industry combined to continue depriving blacks of their property rights and prevented them from moving into white neighborhoods and suburbs. Those actions that kept blacks from living in safe neighborhoods and in houses that would appreciate in value were supported by U.S. Supreme Court decisions, especially by Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926) and Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. 429 U.S. 252 (1977), that permitted and even encouraged discrimination by socioeconomic class, effectively forcing blacks and Hispanics, who typically earn far less than whites, to live in less desirable areas. As a direct result of that de jure and de facto denial of property and human rights of black Americans, the primary ways in which Americans accrue wealth and pass it along to their children were denied to them.

In other words, the initial prejudice against certain white European immigrants—and here you should be thinking Irish, German, Eastern European, Italian, and Jewish among others—diminished owing to their gradually being accepted as mainstream white and to their directly related propensity to be absorbed fairly quickly into the labor force and then into the larger white culture. However, the prejudice directed at blacks from Colonial times and the founding of this nation has decreased but has never disappeared, largely because blacks were and are demonstrably non-white and were deemed lower caste and thus culturally unacceptable to the majority of white Americans.[2]

Some might ask why people don’t address racial issues by sitting down and talking to each other. The real world answer is that conservatives think about race a lot differently than progressives and therefore an open and honest exchange of ideas is fraught with difficulty. A critical issue is that the far greater majority of Americans do not think of themselves as racist or prejudiced since they associate “racism” with people like Birmingham (Alabama) Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor, politicians like George Wallace and Strom Thurmond, Southerners who committed vicious, indefensible acts against blacks during nearly one hundred years of state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism, or with vicious white supremacists like the convicted murderer, Dylann Roof. They somehow fail to identify with ordinary white Bostonians, Chicagoans, Philadelphians, New Yorkers, Milwaukeeans, and residents of many other Northern and Western cities who fought like cornered wild animals for decades against any kind of integration with black citizens, whether in schools or in their segregated neighborhoods. Therefore, most whites, knowing they aren’t like those horrible proto-typical racists, deny with high indignation that they have a racist bone in their bodies.

Many Americans conclude that because overt race-based hatred is rare today the history of slavery and segregation is not relevant to modern life. Here’s what Jonah Goldberg wrote on that topic in a 2013 National Review article: “I think racism should be defined as knowing and intentional ill-will or negative actions aimed at an individual or group solely because of their race.” Thus, since racism can only be conscious bigotry, the greater majority of Americans do not see themselves as racist even though the policies and programs they advocate have disproportionately high adverse effects on minorities.

So, what do Americans really believe about race? They frequently start with the critical assumption that racial equality exists and then base their understanding of the present on that assumption. Thus, many Americans are much less apt to adopt sympathetic attitudes toward racial minorities on the basis of the historical record, which they typically ignore or deny its relevance to the contemporary world. In addition, a great many Americans believe that the way our lives turn out is primarily the result of decisions made by each individual. That core value arises from the concepts of rugged individualism and self-reliance that combine to create the primacy of individual responsibility, a view that minimizes and even denies the reality of structural-institutional racism.

Many Americans who are opposed to the government’s delivering certain kinds of assistance to known classes (poor, minorities, legal immigrants, etc.) typically describe themselves as strong supporters of individual responsibility. But such people often simultaneously favor strengthening social institutions like the family, church, or community. In that respect, they are not acting as individuals but as proponents of non-governmental collectivism. Therefore, it is easy to conclude that those Americans find non-governmental collectivism beneficial and denigrate governmental collectivism as unproductive and even evil.

Many Americans loudly proclaim their belief in virtues and that our social order and concepts of freedom and justice have been built on a moral foundation. Then they turn away from and refuse to acknowledge the real world effects of the most protracted evil acts in American history: the 300 plus years of chattel slavery, the 100 years of state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism inflicted on black American citizens, and the white culture’s systematic denial of the property and human rights of blacks throughout the U.S. For them, the past is past and we should be willing to put it behind us and simply move forward. They tend to disparage the historical record as irrelevant as they do many decades of social science research that document discrimination by whites against blacks in terms of property and human rights depredation whose effects have carried over to the present.

So, by this point the answer to the question posed in the title of this paper should be obvious. Americans as a collective want the “Most Desirable” suburbs to remain largely white and inner cities largely black and are very happy with that arrangement. If we didn’t want to live in mostly white suburbs while blacks live in mostly black residential areas, we would change that situation. Of course, blacks no longer live only in inner cities but have followed whites to the suburbs. But an interesting thing has happened; as blacks move to suburban municipalities in any numbers, whites leave. As an illustration, in 1970 ninety-nine percent of the population of Ferguson, Missouri, was white and one percent was black. As of U.S. Census Bureau estimates, in 2018 66 percent of that City’s residents was black, and 30 percent white.

Most white Americans have never allowed themselves to see the drastic changes that would be necessary in our national fabric if we truly addressed the 350 years of slavery, 100 years of state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism, 150 years of the federal government denying the property and human rights of black Americans, widespread racial animus on the part of white Americans, and the structural racism characteristic of the larger American culture. Whether that failure to understand the barriers we as a nation have historically erected to insulate and isolate our white selves from black Americans is intentional or is based on indifference, ignorance, or ideology is a question I have neither the time nor the energy to address in this paper although I am strongly convinced that racial polarization is real and affects many if not most white Americans.

Notes:
1. I briefly struggled with the descriptive adjective in the title to this paper until deciding on the one used. Among the other adjectives considered were “nice,” “nicer,” “nicest,” “desirable,” “more desirable,”and “best.” I finally settled on “Most Desirable” because that seemed to best express the cultural sensibilities of those who chose to live in such places, an unashamedly subjective decision.

2. See: John Dollard. 1937. Caste and Class in a Southern Town. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Gunnar Myrdal. 1944. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Bros.; Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. 1998. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.