Charity begins at home - or so the saying goes. During my (admittedly brief) life, I've learned that discrimination begins at home too. I'd like to think broad-based racism has been eradicated. I'd also like to think that I am open-minded enough not to discriminate against others for their immutable characteristics. I am ashamed to admit that I do not think I have reached that level of enlightenment. I would like to think, though, that even if a lingering discrimination (and judging by stereotypes) burns in flawed human beings like myself, the broad-based oppression of others has finally been eliminated. Recent times in my own neighborhood, my own home, have forced me to reconsider that notion. Structural oppression was not eliminated in the high days of the fifties and sixties. It lurks, subtly, in our everyday life.
My neighborhood used to be filled with white working class people. It is still working class, although the color of the neighborhood has begun to change. You may see that is a triumph for integration; in the end, blacks and other minorities were allowed to move into the neighborhood. However, the only motivation for that integration has been simple greed (or at least that's how the other members of the community view it). The structural discrimination of blacks and other minorities in real estate is surprisingly harsh and growing.
I once did not understand why New York City (and I imagine elsewhere) had grown so socially segregated. However, when 'colored folk' began to try to buy homes in my all-white working class neighborhood, I learned that, despite our society's progress, the white postal worker does not want the black postal worker to live next door to him. How do you a keep a neighborhood all-white? Simply tell your local real estate officer that he knows the type of person you are looking for and he will honor your agreement. But it is not only this individual racism that keeps a neighborhood all-white, it is the real estate business itself.
Let us say you are a fairly open-minded person. You give everyone a chance to prove if they deserve your respect, and you do not judge a person based upon some immutable characteristic. However, you have spent years (decades) fixing and improving your home; it is your investment and retirement plan. Now, imagine a black person moves onto your block. Instantly, your house has just dropped thousands of dollars of value. Is the person living next to you? Drop some more $$ signs. Now, you may have called upon people, as I have done, to act on principle and not on economic benefit - but you can understand the position of someone who does not want to lose fifty thousand dollars, especially if that money is what they plan to retire on. The real estate industry forces individuals to decide: money or principles. So, when you, the principled-seller (or greedy one, because generally minorities will pay more - or be forced to pay more - than whites to enter the neighborhood), expect daily phone calls, neighborly visits, and disgusted glances from people you have spent decades living around.
The real estate broker will claim that the value of a house drops when minorities move into a neighborhood (or even a block) because as soon as there are minorities on the block, no self-respecting white person will move there, thus lowering demand. As white flight occurs and people sell to get out before the value of their house drops more, they bring up supply and, naturally, the prices drop further. Poorer folk move in, bringing all the troubles they do, and property value decreases more, due to the decrease in living conditions and increase in crime. Before you know it, the last white people die or leave and the neighborhood becomes an all-Black or all-Hispanic one and is generally poverty-ridden. An integrated neighborhood has a shelf life of, at most, a few decades before the forces drive it to one color or the other. Try to convince someone to remain in the neighborhood at any stage during this process, and you ask that person to sacrifice a lot (living with depreciating property values or increases in crime) for their principles. And let's not forget that minorities are not immune to racism is either. Being the last white person on the block is really to be the last Mohegan; do not expect your neighbors to be welcoming or even cordial.
Anyone who would make such sacrifices in the name of principle is a true hero in my eyes. But you can not expect everyone to be heroes, even if you wish they all were and knew that the whole chain of events would not occur if they were heroes to begin with. If you cannot expect the individuals to change too much at the moment, then how can you stop this blatant discrimination other than by teaching children (and trying to re-teach adults) that this behavior is not acceptable? The only way you can change the sequence of events is by striking at the very institution of the real estate business.
We thought institutional racism had been entirely extinguished in our society. If one of the basic structures of our society, housing, can be tainted by racism, I can only wonder at the other structures of our society. Many wonder why we still need civil-rights activists. I'm beginning to wonder why there are not more.