Matthew’s criticism of St. Patrick’s Day is well taken, and as someone who’s given to teasing my “Irish” friends about their debased heritage and Papist superstitions, I should be very enthusiastic about putting St. Paddy down.

But despite my bias, I’ve always felt pretty good about our crude assimilation of Irish culture. By now, Irish-American historical lore is well-established: generations of discrimination, “Dogs and Irishmen Keep Out,” Kennedy’s storied presidential campaign, and so on. But look: The Irish have made it! A group that was once thought of as completely alien is now firmly established within the American mainstream. You can take several lessons from this experience, but the one that seems most relevant is that the United States has been astonishingly successful at assimilating disparate ethnic groups. This strikes me as something worth celebrating.

Conservatives will sometimes ask why organizations like the NAACP are necessary when white ethnic groups have no comparable political representation. The answer to this is simple: Most white ethnics have made it! Their traditions have been thoroughly assimilated into American culture (a cynic might say they were thoroughly diluted in the process, but that’s another story). They no longer need organizations that grew out of political and cultural oppression.

I look forward to the day when the NAACP is universally viewed as a cultural curator or an outdated relic of past political struggles. Maybe we’ll have Black History Month parades and everyone will claim they’re secretly descended from Frederick Douglas or something. This assimilatory process – fueled by commercialism and crude cultural generalizations – will undoubtedly sap some of the vitality from African-American culture (just as St. Patrick’s Day is a far cry from anything authentically Irish). But the end result is still something worth celebrating.

I don’t have much to say about race issues in the USA, since I think I’m still at a stage where I should be doing much more listening than speaking, but this month-old blog post by Pitchfork critic Nitsuh Abebe seems sharp enough that I should post an excerpt and point you to the rest of it. [Read more →]

A few months ago, I recommended Jason Kuznicki’s excellent article on America’s history of state-sanctioned racial discrimination. In it, Kuznicki discusses the relationship between government regulations and social prejudice (emphasis mine):

In a mobile and egalitarian commercial republic influenced by Christianity, practicing racism ought to be difficult. It becomes much easier, however, when there are legally established definitions of race and when outcomes and opportunities are clearly bound to racial identity. Laws to this effect work to fix definitions of race in the public mind, even if these definitions don’t map well onto physiological reality.

Law reifies race. Racialized laws are likely to be enacted by lawmakers who were racists to begin with, but their continued existence also makes racism easier to practice in the future, whether in the public sector, the private sector, or even the confines of one’s own mind.

In a new article from Southern Spaces, we see this dynamic at work in turn-of-the-century Atlanta, where white residents sought to exclude blacks from a desirable neighborhood in the Fourth Ward:

White home-owning residents of the Fourth Ward went to considerable lengths to push through the relocation of Morris Brown, a major African American institution in the hopes that the black populace would follow. They organized meetings between white political leadership and school and African Methodist Episcopal Church officials. They offered cash. They offered land. And black Fourth Warders declined each.

Faced with effective black resistance, Jackson Hill’s white home-owning residents met in October 1910 to delineate a fourteen block area in the neighborhood with a racial boundary line and, as the Atlanta Constitution reported, “put the public and all real estate developers on notice that the sale or renting of property within the white territory [specified] would be considered a reprehensible and unfriendly act.”

Brow-beating realtors and bribing black residents to leave didn’t work, so the neighborhood turned to government-enforced housing discrimination to get rid of the undesirables:

When black families continued renting and purchasing homes within Jackson Hill, whites adopted tactics common throughout the urban South and increasingly utilized in the urban North; in 1913 they proposed a city ordinance outlining racial residential segregation procedures.

At the risk of over-generalizing, I think this scenario raises a few interesting questions about libertarian and conservative thinking on race and discrimination. To a cosmopolitan libertarian, the idea that racism in the United States is the product of state-sanctioned discrimination is no doubt an attractive one: it puts the onus of Jim Crow on the state instead of civil society. In turn-of-the-century Atlanta, however, the chain of causation starts with individuals and private homeowner associations: the 1913 city ordinance segregating residential neighborhoods was preceded by private efforts to eject black residents and was the result of what, in retrospect, could plausibly be described as grassroots pressure. Kuznicki acknowledges that state discrimination doesn’t spring fully-formed from some deracinated political vacuum, but I was surprised by the intensity of racial animosity exhibited by white homeowners before the state officially endorsed housing segregation.

A few further questions: First, what if cash bribes and social pressures had been enough to segregate the Fourth Ward? Does a turn-of-the-century conservative/libertarian simply look the other way, perhaps frowning on Atlantans’ retrograde social habits but nonetheless allowing that they have the right to create lily-white neighborhoods through non-coercive means?

On the other hand, the Southern Spaces article suggests that integrated neighborhoods held up surprisingly well despite (or perhaps because of) social pressures. Black families wouldn’t be bribed into leaving their homes.  “Reprehensible and unfriendly” or not, Atlanta’s real estate developers continued to sell property to black families. You often hear that economic logic trumps the psychology of discrimination – perhaps there’s some truth to this after all.

(cross-posted from the United States of Jamerica)

Patterico, a conservative blogger, describes his “pontifications” as “harangues that make sense.”  Assuming the definition of sense has remained relatively constant, this can’t possibly be the case.  Especially when the blogger in question — in a post linked approvingly by America’s Worst Race Theorist — cites African-American discomfort with interracial marriage as a modern-day example of racism.

Ignoring the fact that it is completely ridiculous to cite a single news article as indicative of a larger trend of “Racist Black People Oppressing the White Man,” it is simply the case that black attitudes regarding interracial marriage make a lot of sense when considered in context (which I understand is a scary word for conservatives).  The simple fact is that in this culture, “blackness” is bad, and to be black and female is to be considered fundamentally problematic (see: most depictions of black women in media) and undesirable.  And the worry among a lot of black women is that black men who date “outside the race” have internalized this frame of black women as being undesirable.  Accordingly, many black women and black men feel uncomfortable when they see prominent black men dating white women, as they take it as an explicit rejection of their blackness (hence the fact that Michelle Obama bolstered Barack’s appeal among black voters – it convinced them that he wasn’t ashamed of his blackness).

To call this racist is, well, stupid.  It is no different than the in-group preference you see in any other racial or ethnic minority.  Indeed, it is best understood as another way to preserve cultural cohesion and push back against negative depictions of ones ethnic group.  Of course, seeing as how conservatives are constantly on the hunt for anything to deflect charges of racism onto minorities, it’s not really a shock that they would latch on to this as an “example” of racism.

*Now is probably a good time to add that I’ll be blogging at my own place more often. So if you’re remotely interested in reading what I have to say, you should probably head over there from time to time.

Reading Jason Kuznicki’s article in the latest issue of Cato Journal, I was struck by the similarities between his historical analysis and a post Jamelle wrote a few months ago. First, here’s Jamelle (emphasis mine):

For what it’s worth, I don’t expect that to change; if we acknowledge the federal government’s role in creating generational black poverty, then necessarily have to acknowledge the federal government’s equally direct role in building the wealth of middle-class white America. As Wright notes, the Homestead Acts, the New Deal and the G.I. Bill all but created the white middle-class.  To acknowledge that – to really, truly take it and its implications seriously – is to directly undermine the myth of self-reliance and independence that we cling to as Americans. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that a full public account and understanding of the government’s role in hampering black progress will probably put us on a path towards something approaching reparations*, which – as I’m sure you’ve noticed – aren’t terribly popular.

And here’s Kuznicki on the New Deal-era Federal Housing Administration (from pg. 443 – emphasis mine):

One of the most egregious examples of the federalization of Jim Crow came in the form of the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA was created in 1934 to extend loans to relatively risky home buyers otherwise unable to obtain them. One way it sought to preserve these home buyers’ investments was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the racially restrictive covenant. The FHA explicitly recommended restrictive covenants and even insisted on them, with the announced goal of protecting the property values of FHA mortgages (Massey2007: 60–61).
The FHA also appears to have pioneered the practice of “redlining”— that is, of establishing areas into which blacks and whites are sorted when they enter the housing market, with the intent of producing segregated neighborhoods. Indeed, the red lines referenced in the term were first drawn on FHA maps. They demarcated heavily black neighborhoods, which could not receive FHA loans at all (Roediger 2005: 226–27). Even the incomes of the would-be homeowners were irrelevant (Massey 2007: 60). Historian David Roediger describes the FHA as “the open incarnation of the New Deal alliance between white supremacist southern Democrats and northern segregationist forces, in this case realtors, bankers, and white urban and suburban home owners,” whose “largesse” was “racially targeted” (Roediger 2005: 228).

Demographers continue to dispute the extent and even the existence of redlining among private real estate agents, with at least two recent studies concluding that race has not been a significant factor in the private market for homes (Holmes and Horvitz 1994, Klein and Grace 2001). The clearest form of redlining remains the eponymous redlining of the FHA. Although these practices clearly cannot explain the entire gap between black and white wealth accumulation, no one disputes that in the decades following the New Deal, home equity became the largest source of wealth for the American middle class. However, black homeownership has lagged behind, even controlling for income. Given that homeownership has been one of the key avenues of wealth appreciation for the middle class, any intervention discouraging it will likely have had disproportionate effects on wealth (Hilber and Liu 2008, Charles and Hurst 2002).

Kuznicki also highlights an interesting distinction between welfare programs that emphasize capital accumulation and eventual self-sufficiency (like the Federal Housing Administration, which provided loans to low-income homebuyers, or the GI Bill, which funded millions of Americans’ college education) and welfare programs aimed at addressing immediate material needs (food stamps, for example, or rent subsidization). This distinction is significant because many of the New Deal’s racially-segregated programs fell into the former category, whereas later, race-neutral welfare policies weren’t geared towards wealth accumulation. In short, both Kuznicki and Jamelle argue that Black Americans were frozen out of a system that helped create the American middle class. By the time segregation ended, our approach to social welfare already shifted to a needs-based system that was less equipped to encourage social mobility.

I mention this not because the story of institutionalized discrimination is particularly pleasant, but because it has real relevance to how we view the current debate over homeownership and the housing crisis. The Community Reinvestment Act and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s much-maligned loans to low-income homebuyers were widely criticized on the right for inflating the housing bubble. Given that I can barely balance a checkbook, I’m in no position to determine the accuracy of these claims.  But before condemning government-subsidized loans to low-income homebuyers, the CRA’s history is worth taking into account. The CRA was originally conceived ” . . . to reverse years of redlining and other restrictive banking practices that locked the poor, and especially minorities, out of homeownership and the tax breaks and wealth creation it affords.” In other words, it was an attempt to address racial disparities that were originally widened (if not created) by government programs like the Federal Housing Administration.

One of Kuznicki’s broader arguments is that the United States government was never “race neutral” – before the Civil Rights Movement, discrimination was not just social custom, it was rigorously enforced at both the state and federal levels. As a result, he argues that the comparatively limited state interventions sanctioned by the Civil Rights Act were justified by a legacy of institutionalized racism. My question, then, is simple: Does Kuznicki’s logic also apply to social welfare programs aimed at promoting wealth accumulation? To return to the Federal Housing Administration, Black Americans were systematically excluded from a program that had a great deal to do with promoting homeownership and the subsequent growth of the American middle class.  So if the Civil Rights Act was aimed at rectifying the lingering impact of racist social policies, are programs like the CRA and other minority homeownership initiatives a justifiable response to state-sanctioned economic discrimination?

I only ask because Kuznicki’s article – which is worth reading in full – is a real challenge to  conservatives and libertarians who are generally suspicious of just about anything subsidized by the federal government. I admit I haven’t quite made up my own mind on the issue, but I’d be interested to hear other small government sympathizers on the policy implications of these lingering economic disparities.

I know this article on race and progressive cities has taken a lot of criticism, but its central observation – that liberal policies and homogeneous cities are closely correlated – seems pretty intuitive. Progressives frequently argue that American hostility to redistribution stems from lingering racial anxiety. Conservatives are less eager to blame our welfare policies on straightforward racism, but many will argue that Scandinavian-style social democracy won’t work in the United States because we lack similar levels of cultural homogeneity. Either way, there seems to be a universal consensus that people from similar backgrounds are more amenable to redistributive policies.

So is it really surprising that small, predominantly white cities like Portland or Denver are more liberal than their larger, ethnically diverse counterparts? Or does this observation confirm something we’ve already suspected? It makes intuitive sense that progressive policies like zoning restrictions or environmental regulations rest on some sort of shared consensus about what constitutes “the good life.” And cities like Portland are not only more homogeneous than New York or DC or Cleveland; their reputation as liberal havens also attracts a greater number of people predisposed to support progressive policies. Voluntary self-segregation is a depressing prospect, but I don’t think that the rise of The Progressive White City should shock anyone.

With all of the talk about some of the questionable messaging coming out of the 9/12 tea party protest, Rush Limbaugh’s commentary about the Belleville High School bus incident, and Jimmy Carter’s condemnation of the most vitriolic of criticism of President Obama, it has become more than evident that we are not in the midst of post-racial era of American politics. If that’s the case, how then do we have a constructive discussion about the interaction of race and politics in American life?

On Friday I explored that question with Reihan Salam and the League’s own Jamelle Bouie. Check out the audio below the fold. [Read more →]

I had the privilege of chatting with Joe Carter and John Schwenkler on their respective takes (linked to by their names) on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., the state and role of policing in America, and its corresponding relationship to communities everywhere. It goes without saying that both Joe and John are sharp guys, so the conversation was pretty engaging (my bad joke at the end not withstanding).

Check out the audio after the jump. [Read more →]

Here’s a smart take on race and policing.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing on conservatism:

But if you are the slave, that essentially conservative approach will always privilege your master over you. Conservatism, with its belief in institutions, traditions, and the past, will seemingly always privilege (perhaps inadvertently) the powerful over the powerless. Institutions, traditions and the past belong to those with power. Privileging them, privileges their agents.

I suppose this is true, but that’s rather like saying that modern liberalism, with its faith in scientific management, progress, and the future will always privilege forward-looking ideas that, in retrospect, frequently seem silly and counter-productive. Does the American Left’s transitory infatuation with the Soviet Union disprove every subsequent argument put forward by progressive leaders? I think not, which is also why I believe it’s OK to admit that your assumptions – whatever they may be – are going to be wrong sometimes.

I think it’s quite possible to argue that there were no good conservative answers to slavery or Jim Crow. But I don’t think this invalidates every conservative insight into the nature of our politics and culture. If anything, it’s a simple acknowledgment that some problems really do transcend rote ideological responses, and that no interpretive framework can provide a universal set of predictive guidelines for dealing with every possible eventuality.

All of which is to say that you should read William Brafford on political traditions, which remains one of my favorite posts from the League to this day:

I use “ideology” as a pejorative. We all need some kind of framework for interpreting the world around us and for guessing at the consequences of our actions, and we need to acquire these frameworks from those who came before, even if we modify them in the process of application. Such a framework I prefer to call a tradition. The key feature of a vibrant tradition is its continued grappling with its own internal problems and contradictions. Traditions always change and grow over time. A tradition that ceases to do this is a dead tradition, and a tradition that is dead or near death I will call an ideology.

Undue confidence is one of the vices that can be found on either side of the virtue of proper confidence. On the other side, there’s indecision. The politically indecisive person is the one who is paralyzed by a complete inability to make decisions in light of limited knowledge of consequences. The virtue is proper confidence, which, when coupled with political courage, is the disposition to take stances on what one believes to be right while watching for signs that one may in truth be wrong.