Comments on Alex M. Johnson, Jr.'s 'Destabilizing race.' (in this issue, p. 1595) (Symposium - Shaping American Communities: Segregation, Housing & the Urban Poor)

• Author: Polikoff, Alexander

INTRODUCTION

Alex Johnson's thoughtful article concludes that to combat effectively the intractable problem of housing segregation in American society we must "destabilize" or "deconstruct" race--by which Johnson means that we must get rid of our practice of formally classifying persons on one side or the other of a black-white fault line.(1) Specifically, Johnson recommends that we add a multiracial box to the census form.(2) This, he believes, will set us on the path toward "eliminating race and racism in this society,"(3) and thereby lead us to residential integration.

I agree with much that Johnson says, and I specifically agree with his recommendation. Unfortunately, I am not as optimistic as he about what will follow from embracing it. I will explain my pessimism--which leads me to add a recommendation of my own--but I must acknowledge that I have no crystal ball. I hope that he is right and that I am wrong. Certainly his recommendation concerning the census form will be easier to implement than mine concerning the black ghetto.

1. THE JOHNSON RECOMMENDATION

   I will pass quickly over how Johnson gets to his recommendation because I am in basic accord. Johnson identifies four causes of housing segregation: private discrimination, government discrimination, white flight from cities, and poverty, the last being a product as well as a cause of segregation.(4) When you put them all together they pack quite a wallop. Although minorities have progressed in other areas--voting rights, public facilities, transportation, and jury service, for example--housing segregation remains solidly in place, like a vise clamped on our collective lives from which we cannot shake loose. Indeed, as Johnson points out, the level of housing segregation may not be dropping at all; by some accounts it is actually rising.(5) Studies point to plain old-fashioned racial discrimination, especially against blacks, as the principal cause.(6)

   In this context, Johnson understandably lacks confidence that the two antidotes to housing discrimination he discusses will work any better in the future than they have in the past. He is surely right about one of them, reliance on the economic market. In the area of our lives so heavily freighted with emotional factors, exemplified by the home-as-castle metaphor, the NIMBY acronym, and the cliche about the largest investment we will ever make, and in which the theoretically free real estate market remains largely a creature of a real estate industry possessed by a race-conscious "gate-keeper" mentality, the argument is very nearly absurd that market mechanisms will by themselves erode housing discrimination.

   As for antidiscrimination law, Johnson's dismissiveness on the ground "[q]uite simply ... that the model has not worked"(7) is arguably less persuasive. True, it has not worked so far, but the reason may be that it has not yet really been tried. Putting some teeth into the fair housing law was, after all, an operation only very recently performed. Maybe it is too early to judge definitively whether the teeth will bite.

   However, Johnson also advances another dismissive argument. To be effective, he reasons, antidiscrimination law must articulate a clear message that can be internalized and can affect behavior.(8) But through the use of fixed racial categories the law sends a contrary message that "race matters," which "inevitably leads to discriminatory behavior because ... [racial] differences[] are recognized and valued."(9) Johnson is saying that the voting rights law, for example, which relies upon black-white classification to advantage blacks, will inevitably undermine the antidiscrimination precepts of the fair housing law and prevent its message from being internalized.

   Well, maybe so. But is there something of a non sequitur here? Why must it follow from society's attempt to use a racial classification remedially that prohibitions against racial discrimination, vigorously enforced, can never be effective? If one were inclined to argue that Johnson is too pessimistic here, a bit of history might help.

   Soon after the Civil War, we gutted the Fourteenth Amendment and began to lynch blacks by the hundreds each year, a practice that continued into the 1920s. When little more than fifty years ago we entered the life and death struggle of the Second World War, it was with completely segregated armed forces. Yet in the ensuing half-century those forces have been desegregated (and their leadership given over to a black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), and we have enacted an impressive array of antidiscrimination laws. Beyond this, blacks have become so much a part of our public awareness that--selecting only a few examples from among many that are available--the safety procedures video on United Airlines flights begins with a black pilot sitting in the cockpit, both big and small cities with nonblack majorities have elected blacks as their chief executives (Los Angeles, California, and Rockford, Illinois, to cite but two instances), and the CEO of the Ford Foundation, the country's largest foundation, is black.

   Indeed, even in the housing arena we have strengthened our fair housing law, we are beginning to zero in on lender discrimination, until now almost totally insulated from fair housing enforcement, and some astoundingly high damage verdicts have been rendered in recent fair housing cases. In light of developments such as these, which have come to pass notwithstanding the law's fixed racial categories and mostly within the last third of the 130 years since the Civil War's end, one may ask whether our antidiscrimination glass is half full and filling, or half empty with the faucet turned off.

   Yet, I am basically inclined to join Johnson in his pessimism. Yes, as Shelby Steele says, black Americans are infinitely freer today than ever before.(10) But that is the case in our public lives, on trains, in public buildings, on juries, in the polling booth, and even in the workplace and in many schools. In our residential neighborhoods, however, extreme segregation persists.(11) There the antidiscrimination promise of the law has not been, and is not being, transformed into integrated residential neighborhoods. And for reasons I will discuss, it seems to me unlikely that in this most difficult area the law alone can prevail. So I accept Johnson's view that more antidiscrimination law, including better enforcement of the fair housing law, will not get us to where we want to go. Thus I turn to his recommendation.

   "[T]he only viable way to attack [racial] segregation is by attacking the stable classifications of race,"(12) Johnson says. Let us get rid of the "exclusivity" of the two marks of "white" and "black"--these should be "deconstructed and destroyed"--as a way to make our antidiscrimination law effective.(13) That law will remain ineffective as a tool for combating housing discrimination so long as the law is based on "dichotomous and inconsistent premises," such as racial categorizations that recognize only black and white and nothing in between.(14) We must "take into account the products of mixed unions," Johnson says.(15) "The express adoption of multiracial categories ... is for the long-term benefit of eliminating race and racism in this society."(16)

   I think Johnson's multiracial box recommendation is sound for the reason, among others, of simple human compassion--we cannot go on having our government insist that the child of a mixed union label herself as black or white. And it is sound too for the reason that a multiracial box would be a step toward recognizing...