AMERICA LOCKED IN CONFLICT

The Inherent Incompatibility of Constitutional Principles and Racial Polarization[1]

Introduction

Despite the spoiler in the subtitle, it seems logical to begin with how I believe our nation is conflicted. Perhaps the best way to do that is to quote the famous English author, Samuel Johnson, when in 1775 he reflected on the inherent conflict between early American legal and moral principles and white supremacy: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” In 1776, a fellow Englishman, abolitionist, and author, Thomas Day, used his acid-dipped pen to add an analogous observation: “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature it is an American patriot signing resolutions of independency with the one hand and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”

Slavery in the Thirteen Colonies had been widely accepted for over 200 years before the rebels fought their way to independence as the United States of America. Thus, even from its first day as a new nation America and its governing system were in conflict over irreconcilable moral and legal values: freedom and equality for all under the law vs. the right of whites to own and breed black slaves and treat them as sub-human cattle.

The political compromises made by the powerful white elites who created the Constitution and built a new nation came at the direct expense of black slaves, who had no voice in those discussions and whose primary role was to serve their masters until death. Contemporary Americans should realize that slavery was tolerated in the Colonies and in the newly formed Republic because it served the interests of a small but enormously powerful slave-owning class as well as those who benefited from it, including national and state politicians, bankers, merchants, manufacturers, ship owners, and ordinary consumers in every part of the country, not just the South.

Evidence that that conflict was based on a culturally shared preference for whiteness is contained in the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted American citizenship to whites only and which, courtesy of numerous supportive Supreme Court decisions, remained the rule of law until the 1950s—when the McCarran-Walter Act was passed—systematically excluding most Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians from citizenship. For more information, see Takao Ozawa v. United States, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, Hirabayashi v. United States, and Korematsu v. United States, and the Chinese Exclusion Law of 1882.

Although that moral and legal conflict grew until it boiled over into the Civil War, it survived that War as well as Reconstruction. Here’s how that happened. When Reconstruction was terminated, it was critical for the powerful class of Southern plantation owners and industrialists whose fortunes had been built on the backs of slaves to remain in control of the newly freed blacks. The total emancipation of the former slaves would have not only destroyed their personal fortunes but also their “Southern way of life” that was built on white supremacy. Since neither alternative was unacceptable, white Southerners waged a brutal war against freedom, the Constitution, the 13th Amendment, and the very humanity of black Americans with the sole purpose of maintaining white supremacy and the dominant white culture’s stranglehold on blacks.

The South that emerged after 1877 almost exactly mirrored the pre-Civil War South in terms of its foundation on white supremacy, with the exception that black slavery was replaced by a neo-slavery system of peonage, false imprisonment, convict leasing, and a culture controlled by intimidation and brutal violence supported by every level of government and by every element of Southern white society. That system prevailed because as painful memories of the Civil War faded, most Northerners lost interest in maintaining what turned out to be a difficult and prolonged struggle to ensure black Americans would be granted the freedoms, dignity, and equality guaranteed by the Constitution. The Northern States, immersed in their own growing struggles to keep blacks separate from whites, had little interest in racial issues in the South and no political stamina with which to address state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism because most moderate Republicans and Northern Democrats had begun to regard blacks as simply another special interest group that had to stand on its own feet.

As an aside, white supremacy’s reign as the law of the land was assured by key Supreme Court decisions, including Blyew v. United States, Minor v. Happersett, United States v. Cruikshank, Williams v. Mississippi, Civil Rights Cases, Plessy v. Ferguson, discussed in the following section.

Summary of De Jure Discrimination

A.           After the Civil War, the U.S. Supreme Court quickly demonstrated it was unwilling to accept blacks as Americans with the full range of rights guaranteed to white citizens. In Blyew v. United States (1871), the Court effectively ruled that whites in Southern and Border states could cheat, rob, or kill black Americans as long as the only witnesses were black because those states had enacted laws prohibiting blacks from testifying in court against whites. Thus, no federal prosecution could result since those acts were the province of the states, not the national government. In Minor v. Happersett (1875) the Supreme Court held that the right to vote was not inherent to citizenship, therefore states could decide which citizens were allowed to vote, which in the real world meant it was A-Okay for Southern and Border States to ensure blacks could not vote. In United States v. Cruikshank (1875), the Court set aside the convictions of three white men stemming from a horrific massacre in Colfax, Louisiana, in which an armed white mob killed about 150 freedmen who were defending a local courthouse as official members of the Louisiana State Militia. Many of those murders occurred as brutal executions after the freedmen had surrendered and had been disarmed. In its drive to eviscerate the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, the Supreme Court held that the federal government had no power to protect newly freed slaves from crimes since those acts were under the authority of the states, not the federal government.

B.           With the Blyew, Minor, and Cruikshank decisions, day-to-day federal enforcement of civil rights came to an abrupt end and organized white terrorism of the KKK and other armed militias was unleashed on helpless black citizens who had no hope that any court of any jurisdiction would protect them from state-supported white terrorism.

C.           After the end of Reconstruction, 34 of the then 40 U.S. states, including every Southern and Border State, passed Jim Crow laws that prevented contact between blacks and whites as equals and tightly restricted the lives and freedoms of former slaves and their access to civil institutions to ensure the continued dominance of white culture and white supremacy.

D.          The KKK, White Citizens’ Councils, Red Shirts, Knights of the White Camellia, Sabre and Rifle Clubs, and other well-armed white supremacist groups in the South and Border States initiated a physical and mental reign of terror against black Americans, who the whites felt were responsible for their loss of political privilege and socioeconomic status: lynching, firebombing and burning churches and homes, beatings, public humiliation, false arrests, and numerous other acts of violence and uncounted threats of violence.

E.           For those who hold fast to the conviction of the decency and goodness of the U.S. as a governing institution, it may be instructive that from 1882 to 1968, approximately 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress. Seven presidents and many dozen politicians fought for anti-lynching federal legislation. But no law was ever passed that made lynching illegal because arch-conservative Democratic Congressmen who controlled the Southern and Border States opposed all legislation that would have made lynching a federal crime.

F.           By the late 1800s, Southern states had adopted new constitutions that disenfranchised nearly all black citizens through literacy tests (found to be legal by U.S. Supreme Court in Williams v. Mississippi), poll taxes, multiple ballot box laws, white-only primaries, grandfather clauses, and residency requirements that cut black voter enrollment to near non-existence. State laws prohibited inter-racial marriage and co-habitation and required segregation in education, housing and residential locations, hospitals, commercial transactions, employment, transportation, hotels and restaurants, and excluded blacks from public places like parks, swimming pools, and beaches. State funded universities across the country rejected black applicants solely because of their race; as examples, the first blacks were admitted to the Universities of South Carolina and Alabama in 1963, despite the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 prohibiting racial discrimination in educational institutions.

G.          De jure racial discrimination was ruled constitutional in the infamous Civil Rights Cases, which originally were five separate legal cases the U.S. Supreme Court consolidated into a single ruling on October 15, 1883. The ruling also declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional and that Congress lacked the constitutional authority under the 14th Amendment to grant equal protection under the law to blacks, stating that only states and local governments had that authority. In that now infamous 8-1 decision, the Court struck down the following provision in the Civil Rights Act: “… all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude.” In essence, the ruling was a betrayal of Constitutional guarantees as well as a near mortal blow to the rights and wellbeing of black Americans. The ruling barred Congress from remedying racial discrimination and in effect green-lighted state-sponsored Jim Crow violence without the U.S. Department of Justice blinking an eye and without any white person being brought to justice (Daniel 1972).

H.          In the South, newly freed blacks were pressured by law and plantation owners into becoming tenant farmers or sharecroppers who would receive between 33 to 75 percent of the crops they grew. But that system involved not free labor but peonage/debt slavery, a type of forced labor established and imposed by state law and local sheriffs in which workers could not leave employment until all debts were paid in full. Since newly freed blacks were totally without assets, they were forced to borrow on credit from white land owners, merchants, company stores, and other employers the cost of food, clothing, seed, farm animals, farm implements and equipment, fuel, medical care, and even the shacks in which they lived to tide them over until the crops could be harvested or other debt could be paid. The white owners typically set the cost of those items as well as the price paid for the resulting crops. As a result, most black tenant farmers, share croppers, and other employees were shackled by long-term debt and were prevented by state law from leaving until that debt was paid (Daniel 1972; Myrdal 1944; Ransom and Sutch 1972; Winters 1988).

I.            From the 1880s through the mid-1950s when the federal Department of Justice finally ended it, Southern states and local political jurisdictions created a neo-slavery system that falsely convicted well more than one hundred thousand blacks of trivial or nonsensical offenses and leased them to industrial enterprises and agricultural plantations where they were subject to subhuman working and living conditions, starvation, physical torture, and often early death, proving that black slavery in America did not end with the Civil War or the 13th Amendment. Hundreds of documents demonstrate that the DOJ knew what was going on in the horrifically unjust and brutal system of convict leasing and refused to act until the late 1940s and early 1950s (Blackmon 2008; Oshinsky 1997).

J.            Unbeknownst to most Americans, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the Supreme Court also upheld the legality of state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism and other forms of de jure racial discrimination on the grounds that segregation in itself did not constitute unlawful discrimination. That racist ruling stood for the next 70 plus years and allowed state and local governments throughout the U.S. to legally discriminate against and oppress black Americans.

K.           Beginning shortly after the termination of Reconstruction, states and local jurisdictions across the U.S. enacted racially restrictive ordinances and property covenants that segregated blacks and forced them to live in areas of substandard housing. By the beginning of the 20th Century, many if not most states had passed enabling legislation permitting the creation of racially discriminatory zoning districts by local governments. Although local jurisdiction zoning based on racial grounds was prohibited by the Supreme Court in Buchanan v. Warley (1917), many states either ignored that ruling (examples were still in effect as late as the mid-1980s, Rothstein 2017, pp. 47-48), or provided work-arounds in the form of racially restrictive covenants in property deeds and redlining by financial institutions, insurance firms, and real estate companies to ensure residential segregation by race remained in effect (Brooks and Rose 2013; Jackson 1985; Lewinnek 2014; Rothstein 2017; Seitles 1998).

L.           The first wave of black migration to northern industrial cities occurred from 1910 and 1930, when between 1.5 million to two million blacks fled the state-supported violence of the South. When that first wave of black migrants arrived in northern cities they found a system of legally and socially enforced segregation and mostly low-wage, low-skill jobs. Municipalities had enacted racially restrictive zoning ordinances and property covenants that required segregation (Jackson 1985; Seitles 1998). The use of threats and physical violence, such as firebombing residential and office buildings owned by black Americans to force them from white neighborhoods, was commonplace. From the late 1890s through the 1960s, state-sanctioned violence occurred in cities throughout the country, including Chicago, Tulsa, Boston, New York City, Newark, Philadelphia, Detroit, East St. Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and dozens of other cities large and small. I use the term “state-sanctioned” to indicate that state and local police forces failed to suppress white violence against blacks. That tacit police tolerance of and indifference to violence by whites that violated the property and human rights of black Americans was systemic and nationwide (Rothstein 2017).

M.          The first federal government public housing policies/programs provided white civilian war-related workers and their families with housing during WWI but specifically excluded blacks (Rothstein 2017).

N.          In 1926, the Supreme Court’s decision in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926) endorsed the right of a municipality to designate zones for certain types of buildings and dictate restrictions on lot and building sizes. By upholding local zoning power, the Supreme Court endorsed what has become known as “Euclidian Zoning” even though that specific zoning code openly promoted class and racial segregation. With the Supreme Court’s blessing, exclusionary zoning became a legal tool designed to keep people in their proper place in society, meaning well-to-do whites with well-to-do whites, blacks with blacks, and ethnics/immigrants with their fellow unwashed masses. With little change, that form of zoning remains in effect in political jurisdictions throughout the U.S. and continues to create and perpetuate segregated neighborhoods because it is based on discrimination by wealth and race/ethnicity.

O.          When President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal initiated the first national housing programs for non-war worker civilians, the federal government typically either excluded blacks or segregated them from whites in inferior housing. Those specific federal housing programs discriminating against blacks were authorized and implemented by the Tennessee Valley Authority, Civilian Conservation Corps, Public Works Administration, U.S. Housing Authority, Federal Works Agency, and the Federal Housing Authority, agencies that also restricted the access of blacks to the federal programs they administered or minimized their participation (Jackson 1985; Rothstein 2017).

P.           In 1933, appraisers working for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (a federally-sponsored corporation formed by Congress as part of the New Deal and administered by the FHLBB) created a mapping system that evaluated neighborhoods by levels of loan desirability that included homeowner occupation, income, and race/ethnicity as well as the age and physical condition of structures to reduce subjectivity in calculating loan risk (Aaronson et al. 2004):

Category A Best (green): new, homogenous areas (described as “American Business and Professional Men”), in demand as residential location in good times and bad.

Category B Still Desirable (blue): areas that had “reached their peak” but were expected to remain stable for many years.

Category C Definitely Declining (yellow): neighborhoods that were generally sparsely populated fringe areas that were typically bordering on all black neighborhoods.

Category D Hazardous (red, hence the term “red-lining”): Black and low income neighborhoods were considered to be the worst for risk and lending.

Q.          In effect, HOLC’s and the Federal Housing Administration’s use of that risk calculation system allowed racial housing discrimination to be institutionalized in determining areas of greatest risk to be avoided in lending and federal mortgage insurance (Hillier 2003). The FHA also created a “Model” racially restrictive deed covenant and required it to be used as a condition for obtaining FHA financing (Gotham 2000). In other words, HOLC and FHA identified blacks as the mortgage risk to be avoided at all costs; which is how risk in mortgage loans became racialized and how that racialization was spread throughout the national banking and insurance systems. The FHA not only used redlining to identify areas where it refused to insure mortgages to black and poor applicants but also refused to insure mortgages for whites who lived too close to black areas (Jackson 1985; Mahoney 1995; Massey and Denton 1998; Rothstein 2017).

R.           State and local laws that restricted black American’s right to own and lease property, conduct business, and move freely through public spaces in cities ensured blacks lived separate lives from whites in areas characterized by dilapidated and deteriorated housing typically without or with limited indoor plumbing and with minimal urban services (Jackson 1985).

S.           Restrictive racial covenants were recommended by the FHA to housing developers even after the Supreme Court declared them illegal; the national real estate industry (National Association of Real Estate Boards and later the National Association of Realtors) used those covenants until 1977, when it was sued by the Justice Department and forced to abandon that racially discriminatory technique. It is important to note that as early as 1924 NAREB had adopted and enforced a new Code of Ethics that made it an ethical requirement for member real estate agents or brokers to discriminate based on race and ethnicity.

T.           On May 24, 1926, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously refused to hear Corrigan v. Buckley (1926), thus upholding private racially restrictive residential covenants and ensuring more than four decades of legal, racially motivated housing discrimination throughout the U.S. As examples of the widespread nature of racially restrictive covenants, by the 1940s about 85 percent of the housing in Detroit and between 75 to 80 percent of Chicago housing was subject to such covenants (Satter 2010; Sugrue 1996). Effectively, that meant until the Supreme Court’s 1968 Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer decision, FHA and HOLC regulations stipulated that if housing developers sold to blacks, they would not be able to sell houses in the same neighborhood to whites who needed home loans. Home loan programs administered by the U.S. Veterans Administration had similar if not completely identical racially discriminatory regulations. In many hundreds of thousand cases, black families unable to obtain a standard conventional or U.S. Government-insured bank mortgage had no other option but to buy houses in black-only neighborhoods using a financially punitive housing “contract” system that preyed on poor, option-less black buyers (Satter 2010). That situation still exists in heavily racially segregated cities like Milwaukee (Eligon and Gebeloffaug 2016).

U.          The FHA’s underwriting manual required a determination about the presence of “'incompatible racial or social groups” (Schill and Wachter 1995; Tillotson 2014). If people of color lived in an otherwise majority white neighborhood, they were literally classified as nuisances to be avoided along with “stables” and “pig pens.” FHA regulations and guidance urged developers, bankers, and local government to use zoning ordinances, restrictive covenants, and even physical barriers (concrete walls) to protect racial homogeneity by excluding blacks from areas in which new housing was to be built (Rothstein 2017).

V.           In 1935, to get enough votes to pass the federal Social Security Bill, President Roosevelt cut deals with conservative Southern Democrats. Consequently, when the Act was passed it excluded farm workers and domestic workers from accruing benefits. At that time, most blacks lived in the South, were illiterate, and possessed few skills other than agricultural or domestic. As a result, two-thirds of black Americans were intentionally prevented by law from receiving Social Security retirement benefits.

W.         In 1940, Congress passed the Lanham Act, which financed housing for workers in defense industries. But, in many cities only housing for whites was built and in others the housing for blacks was segregated, even in cities that already had racially integrated residential neighborhoods (Rothstein 2017).

X.           In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson segregated federal government agencies, including work places, toilets, and dining areas. Many federal jobs held by blacks were reduced in status; others were simply eliminated. Segregation in the federal government persisted until 1941, when President Roosevelt, under great pressure from noted civil rights leaders Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, issued Executive Order 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination in the federal government and in private businesses with defense contracts. During World War I, the American military was segregated into all-white or all-blacks units, typically with separate, segregated facilities. That segregation continued throughout WWII until 1948, when President Truman issued Executive Order 9981 that mandated equality of treatment and opportunity in the U.S. military regardless of race. Various forms of racial discrimination continued in the military until the Korean War and in the Veterans Administration for many years with regard to equal access to medical treatment and educational benefits provided by the GI Bill.

Y.           The racially restrictive practices detailed above created a system in which home buyers and sellers, realtors, bankers, insurers, and land developers worked in concert with federal government regulations and laws to maintain existing all-white neighborhoods and all-black ghettos and to build all-white suburbs that were largely financed through FHA and VA programs (Jackson 1985; Mahoney 1995). In the critical post-war suburban expansion period that all but exploded into existence when military veterans returned after WWII, the HOLC, FHA, FNMA, Veterans Administration, and private banks used redlining to systematically exclude homeowners in black neighborhoods from securing federally-backed mortgages and home improvement loans (Seitles 1998) and required new suburban housing developments to be uniformly white before investments would be made or insured (Mahoney 1995). Between 1934 and 1950, three out of five homes purchased in the United States were financed by the FHA; less than two percent of those loans were made to non-white buyers (Seitles 1998). By 1948, 85 percent of all new residential developments in the U.S. were racially restricted (Freund 2007), which meant that for all practical purposes only new subdivisions built exclusively for whites were eligible for federal mortgage insurance and for the equity building and wealth creation that came with homeownership.

Z.           The complex system of legal racial exclusions, including Supreme Court decisions that permitted racial segregation and discrimination, segregated government housing, housing agency regulations that supported home loans only for whites, redlining by banks and insurance firms and real estate companies, and racially restrictive covenants that forced blacks to live in inner city ghettos prevented an entire class of Americans from building wealth through real estate investments that would appreciate in value, from borrowing on their equity, from being able to pass that accumulated wealth on to their children, or from leveraging that wealth into the ability to leave substandard housing and move to a nicer house in a better location (see Sharkey 2013). That systemic exclusion, forced ghettoization, blocked mobility, and income stagnation account for an enormous part of today’s gap between the wealth of whites and that of blacks (in 2016, the median wealth of white households was $171,000, or ten times the wealth of black households, $17,600; Kochhar and Cilluffo 2017).

Reflections on Race in America

Although white Democrats are reputed to be freer from racial animosity than white Republicans, the gap is not nearly as great as many liberals may want to believe. In 2014, Silver and McCann found that an index of negative racial attitudes (constructed from an averaged response to eight General Social Survey questions) stood at 27 percent for white Republicans and 19 percent for white Democrats; a similar but slightly different measure put negative racial attitudes at 22 percent for white Democrats and 26 percent for white Republicans, a distinction without a difference. The point is simple: neither of the major political parties can claim their members are free of racial bias.

The race issue is complicated as many Americans are convinced white people are being discriminated against by government, making anti-white bias a more significant issue for them than discrimination against blacks, which they discount or even deny. Many of those whites reject structural or institutional racism as a cause of racial inequities and put the “blame” on government programs they contend destroy black initiative and independence. For many of those whites, the causes of black-white disparities in terms of equality are inappropriate levels of personal effort and responsibility on the part of blacks and black American culture that is deficient in many significant ways.

Millions of white Americans also prefer not to think about or discuss racial issues and are convinced that whatever the problems are they don’t affect them because they aren’t prejudiced thus aren’t responsible for racial issues that may affect society.

If most whites wanted to live in racially integrated neighborhoods, as they claim in national polls, little to no urban/suburban segregation would exist; but since racially segregated residential areas are common features of the landscape, the most likely conclusion is that the far greater majority of whites have no genuine desire to live in neighborhoods where blacks constitute a significant number (Kryson and Crowder 2017; Kye 2018; Lichter et al. 2015; Mahoney 1995; Sugrue 2014).

The black-white wealth gap is huge (on average white wealth is about ten times that of blacks) and demonstrates no signs of lessening. It doesn’t help that home equity constitutes the vast majority of black wealth, assets that cannot easily be tapped for medical expenses, home repairs, food and clothing, or college tuition. In addition, many black families are so poor their net worth approaches zero and for some is negative (Hamilton et al. 2015). Understanding the racial wealth gap and how it came about requires understanding government policies and programs that kept black incomes low and white incomes high throughout most of the 20th Century. And that means not only de jure segregation that denied blacks the right to live in areas with new homes that could appreciate in value and thus grow their wealth but also the decades-long government-supported dual labor market discrimination that denied blacks access to federal programs and positions as well as to private enterprise and labor union employment that paid well (Rothstein 2017).

Black Americans’ fear and mistrust of police is the result of lived experience. One critical source of black frustration results from the inability of far too many whites to understand or even to acknowledge the existence or the subtleties of modern racism (Fulwood 1996).

One must never forget, underestimate, or ignore America’s nearly bottomless capacity for self-deception on racial issues. As an example, we, as a nation, have never demanded that corporate America answer for its overtly racist and government-supported behavior that enabled and enforced America’s culture of white dominance by restricting black access to jobs, job-related promotions and advancement, restaurants, hotels, loans, insurance, private schools, etc. (Blackmon 2008; Rothstein 2017).

Perhaps the one thing I know with certainty on the topic of racial polarization is America as a nation has failed to address three plus centuries of white subordination of blacks. Those with inquiring minds may want to ask two critical questions: “Why has that happened?” And, “From what arises our unwillingness to demand that government, which actively worked with individual and cultural white racism to discriminate against blacks, exercise the means whereby the long-standing adverse effects of systemic racism can be remedied?” Those questions deserve serious consideration and honest answers. But I’m not going to hold my breath waiting.

As David Shipler has written so much better than I: “Everywhere I have looked, I have seen a country where Blacks and Whites are strangers to each other” (Shipler 1997, p. x).

Concluding Thoughts

Knowledge of American history, including the brutal conditions of slavery and the nature of state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism, has not changed the hearts and minds of whites whose attitudes regarding blacks range from indifference to hostility, of whites who deny the existence of racial discrimination, of whites who claim to be “race-neutral” and “colorblind” about race, or of whites who desire to live only with their own kind. Although Americans still aspire to the great heights embedded in our Founding Documents, they cannot agree on how to heal the persistent and self-inflected wounds of race or on even if those wounds actually exist or are figments of a warped liberal imagination. Today, numerous polls show white Americans who claim to be open to integration are in the majority. But reality paints a far different picture: our cities, suburbs, neighborhoods, schools, and churches are segregated. Changing that situation seems not to be the concern of government, society, or supposedly integration-minded whites. Our principles and racial practices remain in conflict. That wicked problem is one our Founders would recognize immediately.

Our present condition, where nearly 65 percent of Americans believe racism remains a major problem in our society, demonstrates the uncomfortable truth that recognizing a problem but doing nothing to ameliorate it doesn’t result in change. Nor does pretending that that pain is in the past and blacks should get over it and move on because what’s over is over. Nor does whites holding up their hands in innocence while righteously proclaiming no racial group should be given preference under the law, as if the wounds inflicted on black Americans by federal, state, and local governments and a racially prejudiced white culture should be ignored or shrugged off with indifference as unintended adverse consequences irrelevant to today’s America. Too bad, seems to be the attitude of millions of whites who are doing fine since those injustices didn’t hurt them or their ancestors.

Here’s a quick synopsis of how we got to where we are today. Starting with the Founders and continuing through the 1970s and beyond, a consensus to maintain white privilege permeated the country. From Boston to Seattle, from Miami to Los Angeles, from New Orleans to the Twin Cities and all cities in between, whites were united in the determination to ensure members of their race stayed in control as blacks and others were subjugated and segregated as inferior lower castes, unworthy of the rights and privileges guaranteed to all in the Constitution.

Members of that white dominance consensus included the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress, the Department of Justice, the federal agencies responsible for racist housing programs, the segregated armed forces, Veterans Administration, Social Security Administration, state and local governments that created the peonage/debt slavery and convict leasing system that falsely imprisoned blacks throughout the South, state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism, state and local governments that forced blacks to live in ghettos where substandard housing and schools were the rule, state and local governments that passed and enforced exclusionary zoning to keep the poor and minorities at bay, developers of all-white suburbs, national and state banks, the insurance industry, and the real estate industry and its National Association of Real Estate Boards that enforced racially restrictive covenants, etc. The list goes on and on. It took that vast national conspiracy nearly one hundred years to almost completely isolate the races, forcing blacks into deteriorated and dilapidated inner city ghettos with substandard schools while subsidizing whites in all-white neighborhoods with well-funded schools, producing today’s racially polarized America.

The actions of federal housing agencies and allied banks, real estate firms, and insurance companies with regard to supporting home mortgages for whites and for white-only subdivisions combined with government-supported employment discrimination against black Americans ushered into existence the largest transformation of Americans into a stable national middle-class characterized by sustained wealth that defined our country well into the 21st Century. The tragedy is that massive increase in wealth was built on a white-only foundation that excluded black Americans. Despite the highly vaunted progress we have made on racial issues in the last seventy plus years, as a nation we remain locked in a fundamental moral conflict over high-minded Constitutional principles and real world racial practices (Fair Housing Justice Center 2018, Rothstein 2017).

We have to ask ourselves: is our nation trending toward a genuine post-racial future or toward persistent racial polarization? Consider the following: President Obama’s very citizenship was denied by his political opponents; a Republican Senate candidate compared Michelle Obama to a chimpanzee; conservative TV actress Roseanne Barr posted a racist tweet in 2018 claiming that Valerie Jarrett, an African-American senior adviser to President Barack Obama, was an ape; brown immigrants are categorized by President Trump as terrifying “others” infused with disease and innate criminality; and where in 2004 and 2012 the overwhelmingly majority of white Alabamans voted to keep the racist state constitutional ban that prevented white and black children from attending school together. The answer to the above question is obvious as is the indisputable fact that the far greater majority of whites choose to live segregated lives and have no lasting personal relationships with blacks (diAngelo 2018 and 2019).

If the above examples are not enough to persuade, consider that in an interview with the New York Times in January 2019 a white Republican Congressman wondered how the term “white supremacy” could be offensive, and in 2018 in his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, a black medical doctor, Naval Academy graduate, and retired Navy medical officer who honorably served two active duty tours in Afghanistan was denied admission to a private, all-white social club.

Will those Americans who claim to be “race-neutral” and “colorblind” about race ever open themselves to historical evidence of more than a hundred years of governmental and cultural suppression of the property and human rights of blacks, recognize the moral conflicts embedded in their beliefs, and become part of the effort to resolve persistent problems like the racial wealth gap or racial polarization? Although I am not optimistic given the current political environment, recent research (Broockman and Kalla 2016) on reducing intergroup prejudices showed that a brief intervention technique lowered anti-transgender prejudice for three months, hinting that similar intervention may work on racial prejudice. But, given our history of failing to address the quintessential American incompatibility between principles and racial practice, I remain pessimistic.

The white Americans who are closet racists, or who are indifferent to the struggles of blacks to achieve equality, or who believe treating blacks differently under the law is wrong have exhibited no desire to address racial discrimination and polarization and are determined their elected representatives will do nothing to remedy what they refuse to believe are government-supported injustices. Thus, the wounds black Americans have suffered as consequences of governments at all levels acting in concert with a culture of white domination to deny their constitutionally guaranteed property and human rights will continue untreated and will intensify. As long as that inequity defines our status quo, the future of America is that of a nation locked in irreconcilable conflict.

Suggested Readings

Although I often despair in private of Americans reading anything on the nature, origin, and real world consequences of our racial conflicts, here I take the optimistic step of listing and commenting, albeit briefly, on various important and even several outstanding sources that address those conflicts objectively and not polemically. For those who might not be enamored with academic literature, the first five listings are from popular but very different online journals, Vox, Chicago Magazine, The Smithsonian, FiveThirtyEight, and The Guardian. The first of those listings is about white, suburban communities and integration. The second is a discussion of how local techniques to keep blacks separate from whites were pioneered in Chicago. The third is an interview with Richard Rothstein, a historian who investigates educational and racial issues. The fourth article is by the well-known pollster, Nate Silver, and a colleague who analyze numerous national polls to determine whether white Republicans are more racist than white Democrats. The fifth article, by Robin diAngelo, examines the role whites being nice to blacks plays in not bringing racism to the table and by reinforcing white solidarity and white silence on race. The remaining sources in the list are largely by academics in various fields specializing in American racial issues. If a listing is not annotated, it simply is a reference in the text.

Popular Sources

Alvin Chang. Vox; July 31, 2018. “White America Is Quietly Self-Segregating.” Available online: https://www.vox.com/2017/1/18/14296126/white-segregated-suburb-neighborhood-cartoon

Whet Moser. Chicago Magazine. March 31, 2017. “Chicago Isn’t Just Segregated, It Basically Invented Modern Segregation.” Available online: https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/March-2017/Why-Is-Chicago-So-Segregated/

Katie Nodjimbadem. Smithsonian.com; May 30, 2017. “The Racial Segregation of American Cities Was Anything But Accidental.” Available online: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-government-intentionally-racially-segregated-american-cities-180963494/

Nate Silver and Allison McCann. 2014. “Are White Republicans More Racist Than White Democrats?” FiveThirtyEight (April 30, 2014). Available online: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-white-republicans-more-racist-than-white-democrats/

Robin diAngelo. The Guardian; January 16, 2019. White People Assume Niceness Is the Answer to Racial Inequality. It's Not. Available online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/16/racial-inequality-niceness-white-people?utm_term=RWRpdG9yaWFsX0Jlc3RPZkd1YXJkaWFuT3BpbmlvblVTLTE5MDExNg%3D%3D&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=BestOfGuardianOpinionUS&CMP=opinionus_email

Mostly Academic Sources

Aaronson, Daniel, Daniel Hartley, and Bhashkar Mazumder. 2018. The Effects of the 1930s HOLC “Redlining” Maps. Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Working Paper No. WP-2017-12; revised August 2018. Technical analysis of how HOLC created residential security maps for over 200 cities to grade the riskiness of mortgage lending to residential neighborhoods. The authors trace the effects of those maps by linking geocoded HOLC maps to both Census and modern credit bureau data. They conclude by stating: “Our results provide strongly suggestive evidence that the HOLC maps had a causal and persistent effect on the development of neighborhoods through credit access.” Available online: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3038733

Blackmon, Douglas A. 2008. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday. Blackmon, the Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta bureau chief, reveals a sordid, morally repugnant, and one of the most shameful chapters in American history: the neo-slavery, human trafficking/convict leasing system organized by Southern state and local governments after the Civil War. This little known facet of state-sponsored Jim Crow terrorism in the Deep South involved state laws that were passed specifically to subjugate over a hundred thousand black Americans who were arbitrarily arrested for trivial and even nonsensical pseudo-offenses, charged enormous fines as well as the costs of their own arrests, sold by county sheriffs as forced laborers to industrial operations and plantations, and treated as sub-humans. This book is a terrible shock to the conscience of all who believe in liberty, the rule of law, and human rights. A MUST read.

Broockman, David, and Joshua Kalla. 2016. Durably Reducing Transphobia: A Field Experiment on Door-To-Door Canvassing, Science 352(6282): 220-224. Available online: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6282/220.full

Brooks, Richard, and Carol Rose. 2013. Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. This penetrating legal history documents the rise, fall, and persistence of racially restrictive residential covenants by whites to maintain racial segregation in the mid-20th Century. The authors argue that local political jurisdictions and white neighborhood organizations turned to racially restrictive covenants when large populations of black migrants from the South threated to upset already existing social norms of racial segregation in urban middle-class neighborhoods. This excellent, well-written book targets a non-academic audience.

Daniel, Pete R. 1972. The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois.

DiAngelo, Robin. 2018. White Fragility: Why It's so Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. New York: Beacon Press.

Eligon, John and Robert Gebeloffaug. August 20, 2016. New York Times. “Affluent and black, and still trapped by segregation.” Available online: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/milwaukee-segregation-ealthy-black-families.html?_r=0

Fair Housing Justice Center. 2018. Building the Beloved Community Interfaith Initiative. A great introduction to racial discrimination throughout American history. Available online: http://www.bbcfairhousing.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/History-1.1.pdf

Feagin, Joe R. 2014. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations. New York: Routledge; 3rd Edition. Feagin ‘s research into the intersections of race and power in the U.S. presents an unvarnished view of the conflicted worlds we live in regarding race, focusing on issues involving racism, white racial frames, and government policies that explicitly or implicitly facilitate systemic racism.

Foner, Eric. 2004. Give Me Liberty! An American History. New York: W.W. Norton. Foner’s historical research focuses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and 19^th Century America. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Society of American Historians. His book focuses on the social conditions that made freedom possible, and the shifting meaning of freedom from our Colonial Era to the 21st Century. Foner is a distinguished professor of history at Columbia University.

Foner, Eric. 2010. The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. New York: W.W. Norton. Foner’s broad-ranging knowledge of 19th Century U.S. history enables him to create a detailed account of Lincoln’s often contradictory attitudes toward slavery, which he opposed but also regarded black slaves as physically and mentally inferior to whites. Foner puts into context Lincoln’s now repugnant beliefs that blacks, even if freed, could never live on equal terms with whites and should be deported to Africa or Central America to rid the country of an intractable problem.

Freund, David M. P. 2007. Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fulwood III, Sam. 1996. Waking from the Dream: My Life in the Black Middle Class. New York: Anchor Books. In the journalist Sam Fulwood’s autobiography, he describes coming to consciousness as a black person with great potential for success in mainstream white society. But in contrast to that expectation, his adult life experiences proved disheartening. If you read this book you’ll discover that Fulwood attributes his anger to the inability of whites to recognize or to acknowledge the power or the effects of modern racism.

Gotham, Keith F. 2000. Urban Space, Restrictive Covenants and the Origins of Racial Residential Segregation in a U.S. City, 1900-1950. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24(3): 616-633.

Hamilton, Darrick, Tressie McMillan Cottom, William Darity, Jr., Alan A. Aja, and Carolyn Ash. 2014. Still We Rise: The Continuing Case for America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The American Prospect 25(4). Available online: https://prospect.org/article/why-black-colleges-and-universities-still-matter  

Hillier Amy E. 2003. Redlining and the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. Journal of Urban History 29(4): 394-420. The article analyzes the impact of the residential security maps created by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) during the 1930s on residential mortgages in Philadelphia. Abstract only available online.

Jackson, Kenneth T. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. If you want to know how federal government policies created a country of largely white suburbs, kept blacks penned up in central city ghettos, and why whites on average have high per capita wealth while blacks have low per capita wealth, this extremely well-documented and well-written history is for you. If you decide to read two sources on this list, Jackson’s should be one. A terrific MUST read.

Kochhar, Rakesh, and Anthony Cilluffo. November 1, 2017. How Wealth Inequality has Changed in the U.S. since the Great Recession, by Race, Ethnicity and Income. Pew Research Center, November 1, 2017. Available online: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/11/01/how-wealth-inequality-has-changed-in-the-u-s-since-the-great-recession-by-race-ethnicity-and-income/

Kryson, Maria and Kyle Crowder. 2017. Cycle of Segregation: Social Processes and Residential Stratification. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Even when predominantly white suburbs are surrounded by more racially and ethnically diverse communities, the authors found that white families aren't as comfortable moving into those nearby areas and that “growing concentrations of non-white minority residents in nearby tracts significantly increase the likelihood that whites will leave their neighborhood of residence.” They conclude: “Our results suggest that white flight in its most basic form remains a defining feature of the American urban landscape.” An informative work with high relevance.

Kye, Samuel H. 2018. The Persistence of White Flight in Middle-Class Suburbia. Social Science Research 72: 38-52. Kye focuses on white flight in suburban neighborhoods in the country's 150 largest metropolitan areas. In his research Kye found that, “relative to poorer neighborhoods, white flight becomes systematically more likely in middle-class neighborhoods at higher thresholds of black, Hispanic, and Asian population presence.” Meaning white flight is real and not imagined. Sadly, except for the abstract, this on-target article is not available online.

Lewinnek, Elaine. 2014. The Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl. New York: Oxford University Press. Lewinnek, an urban historian, writes about the various and many factors that were part of the formation of the first suburbs and the struggle of the real-estate lobby to secure single-race, single-use residential spaces to lessen risk and ensure property values would increase, especially in suburbs built exclusively for working whites. Consequently, when the Great Migration of blacks from the Deep South got under way, Lewinnek demonstrates Chicagoans had both the motive and the means to segregate the city and its new suburbs.

Lichter, Daniel T., Domenico Parisi, and Michael C. Taquino. 2015. Toward a New Macro-Segregation? Decomposing Segregation within and between Metropolitan Cities and Suburbs. American Sociological Review 80(4): 844-873. According to principal author Lichter, “You've got one group of white Americans who are comfortable with diversity and integrating with minorities, including blacks and Hispanics and Asians, and another America that is hunkering down in overwhelmingly white areas in overwhelmingly white places—and you see them moving further out.” Lichter also found that whites are leaving areas that are diversifying and are being replaced by blacks. Behind a paywall but well worth it if you can obtain a copy.

Mahoney, Martha R. 1995. Segregation, Whiteness, and Transformation. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 143(5): 1659-1684. This extraordinary article examines a factor in housing segregation most of us never question or even think of: white preference for other whites in which vacancies in integrated residential neighborhoods created by whites leaving for areas that have higher percentages of white residents are filled by blacks rather than whites. In that scenario, racial transition is a naturalized process, in which white preference for white neighbors is less examined in social science research than hostility to black neighbors. Available online: http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3577&context=penn_law_review.

Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. 1998. American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. The authors demonstrate that is race and class are considered together, blacks face levels of segregation significantly higher than any other group in American history. Massey and Denton determined a combination of prejudice and discrimination force blacks to remain in segregated communities, a situation they claim is analogous to apartheid. A MUST read.

Myrdal, Gunnar (with the assistance of Richard Sterner and Arnold M. Rose). 1944. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York, Harper and Brothers. A great historical resource written by a noted Swedish economist, university professor, and later Nobel Prize winner (1974). However, contrary to what Myrdal wrote and apparently believed, Americans were not and are not a common folk united by egalitarian national ideals that superseded racial hostility. Witness our present condition. The book, published in 1944, may not be readily available, so here’s a link to an excellent online background review and summary issued by the foundation responsible for the study: https://www.carnegie.org/media/filer_public/98/65/9865c794-39d9-4659-862e-aae1583278a8/ccny_cresults_2004_americandilemma.pdf

Oshinsky, David M. 1997. Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. New York: Free Press.

Ransom, Roger L. and Richard Sutch. 1972. Debt Peonage in the Cotton South After the Civil War. The Journal of Economic History 32(3): 641-669.

Rothstein, Richard. 2017. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright Publishing (division of W.W. Norton). As someone who has spent the greater part of his professional life as a university professor and an urban planner, it is my opinion that Rothstein’s book is easily one of the most critical sources of information on how legislation, regulations, programs, and policies passed and enforced by federal, state, and local governments systematically denied blacks the free exercise of their constitutionally guaranteed property and civil rights by segregating them in central city ghettos while subsidizing white flight into white-only suburbs, thus creating a system that made the gap between white and black wealth inevitable. Rothstein takes great pains to document how those adverse effects remain in place today and will be in place in the future unless that government-enforced racial discrimination and its adverse effects are ameliorated. A brief summary can be found online at: https://reason.com/archives/2019/01/21/washington-forced-segregation. If you are going to read only one of the sources on this list, READ THIS ONE or Satter’s Family Properties.

Satter, Beryl. 2010. Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America. New York: Metropolitan Books (Macmillan). This incredible, eye-opening book serves up heartbreaking personal stories (Satter’s father was a crusading attorney who fought all his professional life for the property rights of poor Chicago blacks) as well as painstaking legal and historical research into the brutal reality of greedy real-estate speculators and racist Chicago housing laws. This book is an urban history of how raw financial exploitation ruled the roost for decades. A MUST read that Ta-Nahisi Coates credits as the basis of his article in The Atlantic on racial reparations. If you are going to read only one of the sources on this list, READ THIS ONE or Rothstein’s The Color of Law.

Schill, Michael H. and Susan M. Wachter. 1995. The Spatial Bias of Federal Housing Law and Policy: Concentrated Poverty in Urban America. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 143: 1285-1342. The authors reported that the FHA's underwriting manual required a determination about the presence of “incompatible racial or social groups.” People of color were literally classified as nuisances to be avoided along with “stables” and “pig pens.” Another eye-opener. Available online: https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=3566&context=penn_law_review

Seitles, Marc. 2018. The Perpetuation of Residential Racial Segregation in America: Historical Discrimination, Modern Forms of Exclusion, and Inclusionary Remedies. Florida State University Journal of Land Use and Environmental Law: 14(1): 89-124, Article 3. To be honest, I selected this article not because of its sharp focus on the causes and effects of housing segregation but because it identifies doable ways to remedy those adverse effects, in this case inclusionary zoning techniques. Available online: https://ir.law.fsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1191&context=jluel

Sharkey, Patrick. 2013. Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shipler, David K. 1997. A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. A review by Publishers Weekly calls this book timely and perceptive, and it is all that and much more as Shipler carefully lays bare the attitudes dividing whites from blacks. Another MUST read that is full of first-class information, much of which was collected via face-to-face interviews with blacks and whites.

Sugrue, Thomas J. 2014. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NY: Princeton University Press. In this incisive book, Sugrue documents the structural roots of urban poverty and inequality found in Detroit today that were present in the 1940s and 1950s. A very detailed urban history, the book is another MUST read.

Tillotson, Amanda. 2014. Race, Risk and Real Estate: The Federal Housing Administration and Black Homeownership in the Post World War II Home Ownership State, DePaul Journal for Social Justice 8(1): 25-52. Tillotson’s research on race, property, and risk offers this targeted conclusion: “the FHA was created in a financial and legal environment that was pervaded by a racialized notion of risk. The FHA did not originate the notion that race exacerbated lending risks, but it legitimized and reproduced these understandings at a critical period in the history of American home ownership.” Available online: https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1099&context=jsj

Winters. Donald L. 1988. Postbellum Reorganization of Southern Agriculture: The Economics of Sharecropping in Tennessee. Agricultural History 62(4): 1-19. Presidential Address to the Agricultural History Society.

Relevant Legal Cases and Laws

Listed by decision dates

Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856). In this infamous case, the Court held that slaves “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.” Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/60/393/

Blyew v. United States, 80 U.S. 13 Wall. 581 581 (1871). In this case, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ruled that in Kentucky, and nearly all Southern and Border States, whites could kill, rob, or cheat black Americans as long as the only witnesses were black because those states had laws prohibiting blacks from testifying in court against whites, thus no prosecution could result since those acts were the province of the states, not the federal government. Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/80/581/.

Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875). In this decision, the Supreme Court held that the right to vote was not inherent to being a citizen, and that states could decide which citizens could vote, meaning in the real world it was A-okay for Southern and Border states to not let blacks vote. Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/88/162/

United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875). The Supreme Court held that the federal government had no power to protect newly freed slaves from crimes such as murder since those acts were under the authority of the states, not the federal government. Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/92/542/case.html

Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883) (Consolidating: United States v. Stanley, United States v. Ryan, United States v. Nichols, United States v. Singleton, and Robinson and wife v. Memphis & Charleston R.R. Co. Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/109/3/

Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). This Supreme Court decision upheld the legality of Jim Crow laws and other forms of racial discrimination on the grounds that segregation in itself did not constitute unlawful discrimination. The 7-1 majority opinion noted that “in the nature of things it [the 14th Amendment] could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races unsatisfactory to either.” That ruling stood as law for the next 70 years. Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/163/537/

Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898). In 1890, Mississippi adopted a new constitution that disenfranchised nearly all black citizens through literacy tests that the ever obliging U.S. Supreme Court found to be legal in this decision. Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/170/213/

Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60 (1917). In this decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down municipal racially restrictive zoning ordinances and property covenants as unconstitutional. However, real estate agents quickly wrote “codes of ethics” that included bans on selling homes to African Americans (and other people of color) outside of black ghettos. In many cities, white residents responded to the arrival of black families with private racial covenants—legal language in private property deeds that barred any subsequent owner from selling to anyone but whites. Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/245/60/case.html.

Takao Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922). The Supreme Court in this decision ruled that under the Naturalization Act of 1906, which limited naturalization to “free white persons,” only persons of what was popularly known as the Caucasian race were eligible, not Asians, and, in this specific case, certainly not Japanese. Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/260/178/case.html

United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923). In this case the Court ruled that Hindus were not Caucasians as was commonly understood and thus were not "free white persons" and were racially ineligible for citizenship. Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/261/204/case.html

Corrigan v. Buckley, 271 U.S. 323 (1926). The legality of racial restrictive property covenants was affirmed when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in in this case that such covenants constituted private and not municipal actions and therefore were not subject to the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It wasn’t until Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1968 that racial housing covenants were finally outlawed after more than four decades of legal, racially motivated housing discrimination throughout the U.S. Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/271/323/.

Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U.S. 81 (1943) and Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944). In these two linked decisions, more than a hundred thousand Japanese-American citizens and legal residents were forced by Presidential order and the U.S. military to relocate to concentration camps where they were incarcerated until the end of WWII as the Supreme Court intentionally refused to consider the Constitutional issue of imprisoning a known class of U.S. citizens without due process of law. Hirabayashi is available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/320/81/case.html. Korematsu is available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/323/214/case.html

Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948). In a unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court held that although racially restrictive real estate covenants were not per se illegal, since they did not involve state action, courts could not enforce them under the Fourteenth Amendment. Private parties may abide by the terms of such a covenant, but they may not seek judicial enforcement of such a covenant, as that would be an impermissible state action. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/334/1/

Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967). In this long overdue landmark decision the Court unanimously struck down all state laws (“anti-miscegenation” statutes) banning interracial marriage. It’s important to note that in the 1950s, more than half the states—including every Southern state—still restricted marriage by racial classifications. In 2000, Alabama became the last state to officially remove an anti-miscegenation provision from its Constitution. Although 60 percent of those voting approved that ballot measure, nearly 526,000 Alabamans, the remaining 40 percent, voted to continue the prohibition of racial inter-marriage. Available online: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/388/1/

Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974). In this decision, the Supreme Court upheld the lower courts' finding that the Detroit public school system was segregated de jure, but reversed the lower court's holding that the metropolitan desegregation remedy was both mandated by the Constitution and lay within the equity powers of federal district courts.” Available online: https://scholarlycommons.law.hofstra.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1082&context=hlr

Naturalization Act of 1790. Available online: http://rs6.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=001/llsl001.db&recNum=226

Civil Rights Act of 1866, 14 Statutes 27–30. Available online: https://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/39th-congress/session-1/c39s1ch31.pdf

Civil Rights Act of 1875, 18 Statutes 335-337. Available online: http://legisworks.org/sal/18/stats/STATUTE-18-Pg335a.pdf

Chinese Exclusion Act. 1882 (An act to inaugurate certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese). Session I, Chapter 126; 22 Statute 58. 47th Congress; approved May 6, 1882. Available online: http://library.uwb.edu/guides/usimmigration/1882_chinese_exclusion_act.html.

McCarran-Walter Act, 166 Statute 163, 8 U. S. C. §§ 1101-503 (1952). Available online: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-66/pdf/STATUTE-66-Pg163.pdf; for a historical explanation of the context of the Act, see: U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (The McCarran-Walter Act). Available online: https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/immigration-act.

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[1] I struggled in finding a term that best fit the complex relationship of whites with blacks across the span of American history. Several of the terms considered were rejected as so strident and polemical (racial animus and white supremacy) as to alienate potential readers. Others were rejected as too weak (racial unrest or strife) to effectively describe what has been and continues to be a multifaceted relationship ranging from indifference to the sickening racial hatred of people like Dylan Roof. In the end, I settled on racial polarization.