by: Marceline Donaldson
and Rev. Dr. Robert A. Bennett
Segregated housing exists in these United States because the laws of the U. S. were very strong in insisting that blacks not be allowed to live in “white” neighborhoods. These are and were laws that were strongly and effectively enforced even into the 1960’s, 1970’s and beyond.
Today, we cover the fact that we have totally segregated neighborhoods by telling the lie over and over again that it is because blacks and other minorities are not able to afford to live in neighborhoods which are dubbed as white. That is as big a lie as has been told. It is one way structural racism is explained away so it can continue unabated. First comes the law and then as those laws are challenged and removed the structure remains in place because it is supported by universal fictions to maintain the separation of the races. In fact, neighborhoods are more segregated today than they were generations ago.
Structural/institutional racism is entrenched in these United States and shows no signs of giving way to a more equitable system. The legal structure put in place to keep slaves separate from their former masters has simply morphed into a culturally and societally and politically accepted set of rules which are, in actuality stronger than the laws. There were three white families living on my block as I grew up. What changed that was Eisenhower’s highway system which created ghettoes with all blacks living within and blacks not allowed to purchase homes without.
In New Orleans, one of those deep south cities with its share of black millionaires (unlike the more liberal north where there were none), an area known as “Sugar Hill” where blacks lived in beautiful homes was ripped through by Eisenhower’s genius idea, which had at its heart the maintenance of structural racism which was beginning to break in several areas. Ripped through by condemning some of the homes on “Sugar Hill” which were then torn down to make way for the new highway system.
North Claiborne Avenue had black and white owned businesses up and down the street. That also changed with this highway system into an all black area or white-absentee-owned businesses catering to blacks which are bars and funeral homes and little else with abandoned, junked cars where a boulevard of trees once stood.
All the creators of wealth in this country make sure blacks are not able to access those areas which create wealth and housing is at the top of the list.
A house in Roxbury, MA would appraise at more than ten times less than the identical house in the Back Bay, Beacon Hill or Harvard Square. If that is in the Brattle Street neighborhood of Harvard Square – where you will find only one or two blacks – it is more than 10 times less than and that in the shadow of Harvard University.
Proof of these laws and restrictions against blacks and other minorities living in certain areas of our American cities can be found all over the place – including in law courts. Legal documents had clauses in the deeds which said specifically that this home could not be sold to African Americans. Besides deeds having such restrictions, some areas – neighborhoods had legal restrictions against homes in those white neighborhoods being sold to blacks and other minorities.
Of the many ways blacks were oppressed with very limited abilities to accumulate wealth this is and was one of the largest and most widely used. The laws which maintained this limit on black wealth were sometimes viciously enforced.
Even into the 1960’s and beyond, if you lived in a white neighborhood and you were black you had to move into a black neighborhood. How did it happen that you were able to buy into a white neighborhood? You passed for white – you had white friends stand in for you so no one would know the house was being sold to blacks – and on and on the story goes.
We used to think realtors were responsible for this incredible separatism and segregation. Upon much research we discovered that was not true. It was the law.
As the segregation laws weakened, Blacks and other minorities began to be consigned more rigidly to particular areas and kept out of areas designated – albeit not in law or otherwise in writing – for whites only. Developers began to build homes in areas for blacks only – supposedly to form cohesive black communities which were and are considered ‘healthier’ places to raise children.
Those areas so designated as “white” are areas in which wealth via property ownership was very profitable. Homes purchased in those areas could increase in value dramatically and over a very short period of time. An African American family struggling to purchase a home in the areas informally designated as for blacks only generally struggled to pay off the mortgage and would have less equity at the end of paying off the mortgage than they had when they purchased the home. And this is not limited to the past. That structural racism still exists today in these United States.
As lawyers went to Court to knock down these laws, the cultural, societal and political change began to come to maintain the same structural racism formerly and formally protected by those laws. As the laws dropped, white society converted this legal separation into one maintained by lies.
Today, we have Donald Trump and his people promulgating many lies which shock us when we hear such blatancy. What we do not admit to or hold up to learn from is that we have a historical structure from which this group has patterned itself probably because the lies of the past and into the present which are told to maintain a racist structure worked and work and have prolonged the life of that system by many decades. The lies told as our American Society changed over from being structured as a racist society by laws into one maintaining the structural racism set down by laws into one set in stone by lies.
Lies maintained and promulgated by the entire society without connecting the history which would have turned a bright light onto those lies showing the truth and what those lies were intended to and did create.
A very prevalent lie still told is that Blacks lived and live in “less than” neighborhoods because they could not afford to buy homes in white neighborhoods. Banks cooperated by red-lining and using other means, such as charging blacks exorbitant interest rates or forcing blacks and other minorities to get mortgages from institutions which preyed on them and waited for them to realize they were not getting anything better from the standard, acceptable banking institutions. This is one way blacks and other minorities were told they could not afford those neighborhoods deemed for whites only. In actual fact, blacks could not afford to live in those neighborhoods because generally they had to pay several hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of dollars monthly above that paid by whites for the same mortgage. Structural Racism. What they also were not told is that their credit worthiness had and has to be way above that expected from whites to whom larger mortgages and other credit instruments would be given.
The “for whites only” signs are no longer written into the deeds and maintained by the laws. They are far more effectively maintained. The institutions having to do with real estate – banks, insurance companies, real estate sales companies keep the lines of demarcation. They keep the structurally racist neighborhood configurations which also maintain racist schools; grocery stores; beauty salons; and so much more by lies structured into and accepted by this society. Ordinary services which whites have routinely and affordably have access to in white only neighborhoods were and are not available in black neighborhoods. The reasons for the lack of such in black neighborhoods were and are laid at the feet of the black victims in those neighborhoods who were and are scammed out of a decent living for which they worked hard. The lies so told very effectively structured into the system a “better than” education for whites in the white only neighborhoods and inferior to negative educational opportunities for the blacks and other minorities who were paying for the white only educational opportunities through their taxes. Diminished vocational opportunities were and are done through closing jobs to blacks and other minorities which were and are then only available to less qualified whites. Not having control of the way their taxes were and are used they had no control over the way their taxes are still used to subsidize such white only opportunities which permeates throughout this society and was justified by the lies describing blacks and other minorities as “less than” therefore not qualified for such higher levels of accomplishment and not worthy of monies being spent attempting to better their lot because their laziness and inability to further their lives and families does not justify the expenditure.
It is no secret that even labor unions were and some still are closed to blacks and other minorities and many jobs are available only to those with union membership. The examples are infinite.
When it was determined that the family living in a white neighborhood in Los Angeles were really black and only “passing” they – the whites in the family as well as the passæ blanc’s had to pack up and move. In many such cases either you moved or the police came along with court papers and they moved you not taking much care as to how your belongings were treated. The more upscale the neighborhood the more likely you would be immediately and quietly removed – for breaking the law. Since most didn’t want to face jail, they moved, eliminating the need for further legal interference.
Today, that can’t be done by law, however, it still exists. The kind of problems blacks and other minorities face living in white only neighborhoods are only limited by the imagination and resources of the whites who are threatened by the black and other minorities living in “their” neighborhoods.
Today, we try to make the case that the banks are responsible because of their horrible racist real estate lending practices which decree you will have a difficult to impossible time trying to get a mortgage in these white only areas. Banks, however, are only re-enforcing what has existed from the beginning. That does not justify their current practices – which are put in place because it is illegal to write into deeds the elimination of African Americans from being able to buy certain houses. In these cases it is not the law decreeing separate and unequal, it is the society re-enforcing and making possible the same results that would have come from those laws. Today’s institutional practices enforce such law through lies.
Cities – like the City of Cambridge – get involved by the way they handle real estate taxes and other issues around African Americans to insure in very polite under-the-radar ways their city remains strongly segregated and they have succeeded.
We cite Cambridge because some claim it is only those “unintelligent” blue collar and other such people without a Harvard, MIT, etc. education who do this. Some of the most racist real estate acts have happened in the shadow of these schools.
We, the Donaldson-Bennett’s, are an example of such. Living in an area for 39 years, not one African American family has purchased a home in that area since we moved in. Many people thought our home was owned by Harvard. it is the only way they could accept our living in this neighborhood. When we put our home up for sale because we were just tired of what we had been experiencing for some 38 plus years, we had visits from neighbors who questioned our right to sell a house they claimed we did not own – that Harvard owned. We live in a home appraising at approximately $5 million on which we owe not even a tenth of that. To get the mortgage we now hold, we had to pay some 6% interest in an era when 2 and 3% interest was normal.
This is a study in extreme racism. We have all of the current requirements for success – a Harvard doctorate (PhD), Harvard Business School, Boston University Masters, etc. etc. etc. But we lack the whiteness required by this neighborhood and those who hold up living in this neighborhood as proof of their superiority. It has been quite a ride.
The last time we put our house up for sale, the Wall Street Journal published some unbelievable letters describing the house we were selling. Those letters are republished in this article.
We think it was no coincidence that the problems we had with the police coming to our home trying to shove Robert into a psych ward for no reason and when that didn’t work trying to accuse Marceline of abusing the man she has been successfully married to for 37 years – also with no proof – and moving on to the Probate Court system blatantly denying us of any and all legal rights, winding up with MGH draining our insurance of almost $200,000 with no medical reasons for having done so and with MGH knowing they had no medical reason for such and knowingly allowing physicians to force Robert to take medicines he did not want such as anti-psychotics which is something that violates the laws of Massachusetts plus so much more – we believe what happened to us is criminal. Our choice is to spend the last years of our lives in court fighting this or to let it go. We haven’t yet decided which road to take, especially since the attorney we hired was more interested in her political future than the case she took and did nothing about except concentrate on how to sell us out, but told us all the stories of what she was doing and going to do working along with Attorney Sullivan who never materialized, but is working hard for Weinstein – an accused abuser and assaulter of women. It is viciously bizarre. But then also bizarre is an African American couple having gained wealth into seven figures through the purchase of their home in an all white ‘closed’ neighborhood. The harassment visited on us for all of the years we have lived in this home defies belief.
In California, adjacent to areas selling into the millions which were selling in the hundreds of thousands just 20 years ago, African Americans are finding their beautiful suburban area homes newly built some 20 years ago and sold to mostly professional blacks and adjacent to those homes for whites only with their substantial increase in value, are now selling for half of their purchase price. What makes that difference? The quality of the homes are the same. The neighborhoods are still beautiful. What caused that difference where blacks who sell today have to take a 50% drop in their wealth while whites in the same general neighborhood and over the same time frame have seen a 150% and more jump in their wealth? Structural Racism.
What do we conclude?
Generational wealth needs to be put front and center because as blacks and other minorities gain in financial strength and are super concerned about leaving wealth to their children for their benefit, that generational wealth is being taken by others to make sure that potential increase of strength amongst blacks and other minorities is destroyed before it can work its magic. Millions have been lost and more about to be put through the shredder.
The minority elderly are being abused to take away their wealth making sure it does not move on to the next generation for which it was intended. Structures are being put into place swiftly to aid and abet that and we are all ignorant to that fact. We are blinded by what we do not want to see or acknowledge as true.
On the bones of that racist real estate structure deep seated in these United States rests the segregated educational system; the jobs structure; the social structure leading to the cultural foundation which rests on and will continue as a white northern European Racist Christian culture kept in place through the lies that have been told and accepted across generations.
As blacks and other minorities achieve, lies develop to block that achievement and postpone any possibility of equality surfacing in this society for many more years to come. AND did anyone think the achievements of the last Civil Rights Movement would be challenged and turned back?
And where do you stand? White? Are you activist or do you see your future in acceptance and quiet help to promote the lies so you and yours will have an easier time in this life raping others for your own advantage. Blacks and other minorities? Acceptance because something is better than nothing and you were raised on “go along to get along” and life will be easier. Not worrying about what has been taken away from you, but living on what others have torn away from white society which you can sit quietly by expecting whites to appear to tear such away from them to give to you as the exceptional minority who they can control who will help them promote and spread the lies? Today’s version of Step-in’ Fletcher?
