Your review alludes to one of the problem I've always had with reparations - I have no confidence that they will actually wipe the slate clean.
We've had a bunch of programs intended to correct past racism and they never seem to do all that much. I think you could probably get support for some pretty massive reparation program if, in exchange, there was some agreement that no one could ever complaint about historic racism again, but the likely outcome is what you describe in the Kansas City schools or sub-prime loans, where there's a big effort undertaken, nothing is actually accomplished and people either ignore it, or even treat it as an example of further racism in their next book arguing for reparations.
Obviously it would never wipe the slate clean. Reparations advocates dont even input past remedial efforts (the past over half century of great society programs) into their calculus. They are ingrates looking for perpetual cash grabs
I started elementary school at the beginning of the 1970s in Dade County, Florida, which was then integrating its schools. My mom had just moved there from Maryland with four young children; I was the youngest. In first and third grades I attended Sunset Elementary, to which many black students were bused; in second grade I was myself bused to George Washington Carver.
It was a mixed experience for me. I had a wonderful first grade teacher who helped bring me out of terrible self-imposed isolation, and some of my new classmates were very nice. But some of them terrified me. (This did not, however, affect my attitudes; I was very much in favor of integration (to the extent an ignorant boy can be in favor of anything), and I thought the greatest scientists of all time were Albert Einstein and, naturally, George Washington Carver.)
The experiences of my older brother and sister in junior high were much worse than mine; they were beaten up and robbed repeatedly. My gentle, conventionally liberal mother was horrified to learn that black students had broken into a school library and (forgive me) ejaculated on the library books. (I wonder if that episode ever made it into any histories of integration in Florida.) By the beginning of my fourth grade year my mom had admitted defeat; we moved back to Maryland. We all attended integrated schools for the remainder of our educations, in Maryland and upstate South Carolina, and never had experiences like those in Dade County again. But we didn't forget, either; and Dade County probably affects my opinions more now than it did at the time.
For a child actually going to school with lower class blacks, the idea that they are oppressed can seem bizarre; Norman Podhoretz made that observation very pungently in a 1963 essay, https://www.commentary.org/articles/norman-podhoretz/my-negro-problem-and-ours/ .("A city boy’s world is contained within three or four square blocks, and in my world it was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around. The Negroes were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole they were better athletes. What could it mean, then, to say that they were badly off and that we were more fortunate?")
Whatever tricks real estate agents might pull, it seems obvious that blockbusting would never have worked -- white people could never have been persuaded to part with their most valuable assets, not to mention leave neighborhoods where they'd spent decades -- if they had not been genuinely terrified. I know why they were afraid.
It seems like there is a great book to be written about white flight from the perspective of the people who were fleeing. I don't think the works you cite in your fn 63 quite exhaust the topic. But I suspect that book will never be written.
Statements like "Costs will… be involved, and we should accept that those costs are part of our constitutional obligation" in Rothstein's book are enraging; whatever those costs are, he won't pay them. I was going to say that they will be paid by families like mine, but I'm not sure that's true. The country is very distant, politically and demographically, from the one I grew up in. My mother grew up in Queens, when most of the public school students in NYC were white. Now 16.2% are, compared to 16.3% of students described as English Language Learners. Whites are the 4th most common ethnic group, behind Hispanics, blacks and Asians. Integration is sort of a dead letter in NYC now, because there aren't many white kids to integrate with. https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/reports/doe-data-at-a-glance
I believe blockbusting is pretty well documented, but it also makes sense from a self-interested perspective, even if you are personally fine with integration. The motivation is that once the neighborhood integrates, property values will fall and you want to sell before that happens. This, of course, is a self-fulfilling fear, as the concern about property values falling causes property values to fall, the same way a bank run can occur due to fear of a bank run.
Of course blockbusting is well-documented, and the mechanism by which it operated is not difficult to understand. The question is why that mechanism was effective. If somebody came to me today and said "I'd like to buy your house, cash, for half its value" I'd tell him to go to hell. But in Chicago in 1962, a lot of people thought that sounded like a good deal, or at any rate a deal that they couldn't refuse. That was not because they were stupider than I am. Rather, the circumstances they were facing were very different than mine are today.
The larger question is: does he think those costs will go away? Why? The simplest explanation is that blacks will be civilized by proximity to middle class whites, but he doesn't even bother to explicitly state that. Which makes sense, as implying that minorities are uncivilized is extremely offensive. Of course, that same reality makes it very difficult to actually do anything about it, so it's a pretty big deal that he just elides this.
Or maybe he just doesn't care and thinks those problems will continue into perpetuity. If so, why bother integrating then? Why should specifically uncivilized people be brought to live with civilized ones? So they can benefit from nicer things? I guess.
Anyways, civilized people in modern day, whatever their race, can make it to the middle class. I don't support laws preventing any of this from occurring. But it's not clear why we need to make a big deal about integration either.
"Perhaps most disconcerting for me is the point at which Rothstein claims that section 8 vouchers are not entitlements because funding is insufficient for every eligible family to receive a voucher, while tax deductions for homeowners are entitlements.32 If the government giving you free benefits is not an entitlement but the government taking less of your money in taxes is, the word “entitlement” has lost all meaning. His case would be stronger without this sort of rhetorical game."
I agree this is a rhetorical game, but I don't think it is as egregious as you imply. Entitlements have two properties: they are government programs that distribute cash to individuals and are provided to all eligible individuals, not subject to appropriations. Section 8 matches the first criteria and not the second, while tax credits for homeowners meet the second but not the first. So, it would be just as wrong to call Section 8 an entitlement and tax credits not.
Rothstein was also wrong and used "entitlement" incorrectly in that case, I think it's fair to take his meaning as written - there's an incongruence in section 8 not getting free stuff vs. homeowners who do. Tracing was right to point out the most obvious rejoinder, that giving away money requires money in the first place, not taxing as much requires no such thing.
"Most notable among them is the Kansas City school desegregation experiment"
I wasn't familiar with the Kansas City case - thanks for explaining it. I think the nearly contemporaneous case involving Hartford, CT is also worth mentioning. In 1989, several Hartford students sued the state (the case was known as Sheff v. O'Neill) for inequitable funding of majority-black school districts. In 1996, the state Supreme Court ruled that, aside from funding issues, educational inequity was caused by racial imbalances, and that black students in particular had a constitutional right to have a significant number of white students in their classes. Because of segregation in housing, it would be impossible to achieve the proper racial balance within existing school districts, so the ruling required the abolition of municipal school districts.
Politically, this was completely unsupportable, so the state, and the city of Hartford, started work on a solution that would, hopefully, address the issue. The ultimate solution was to spend a lot of state money to build magnet schools (there are currently 18, from elementary through high school), that would have slots allocated by lottery, half for white students from the suburbs, and half for black students from Hartford. In order to attract white students, the schools offer specialized programs, featuring emphasis on such areas as science and technology, health sciences, the arts, or specialized curricula like Montessori or International Baccalaureate. There was never a plan to allow enough slots in these schools to accommodate all, or even most, Hartford students.
The Hartford program is a very logical approach if the objective is defined as "put black students in the same classrooms with white students." But, it's very expensive and makes a mockery of the idea that every student should have equal educational opportunity. In practice, it has places for a small number of black students from one city, doing nothing to address educational inequities in other majority-black school districts. I haven't been able to find any attempt to measure whether the schools get better educational outcomes than the city schools left behind.
Another illustration of the limitations of using judges and constitutional reasoning to achieve a goal.
We'd love to know which law school you're attending, but if you don't want to share that information, will you at least disclose which quintile of U.S. News & World's rankings it is in?
Rothstein is admirably honest: he frames the issue as a constitutional one because his preferred policy prescriptions would lead to an increase of crime and disorder in the neighborhoods he wants to change
In his book locked up, professor john pfaff is similarly unhinged/admirably honest in admitting that releasing violent criminals will increase violent crime. He just think the harm from this crime increase will be swamped out by a gain in racial justice utils
"Is every well-intentioned policy doomed to failure?"
How to design government programs to actually achieve their goals should be a whole field of study. Public Choice theory has done a good job of pointing out failure modes, but why is no one trying to figure out how to overcome them?! Europe and Japan can build trains for a fraction of the cost we pay, so it's not impossible to do these things better
This is excellent and I'm not surprised it was part of your law course, just head and shoulders above substack quality which is already impressive. The topic is an area ripe for exploration due it's longstanding taboo nature.
I think the root cause of American (and western more broadly) housing problems is the expectation for prices to always go up. This is only possible via rampant NIMBYism. Instead of racial favoritism, get rid of NIMBYs.
> houses are pretty much the only physical good that are expected to 1) appreciate in value, and 2) be used all the time. Oil paintings and Faberge eggs appreciate in value, but they’re put behind glass cases so that they remain in the exact same state they were in when purchased. Tellingly, they appreciate in value not because they’re useful but because they’re rare.
As a sequel to this essay, consider reviewing Mehrsa Baradaran's The Color of Money. Released the same year as Rothstein's book and also got a bump in sales in 2020. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that one.
There was forced busing in Los Angeles, I think in the early 1970s. I was a kid so I don't remember much (I wasn't involved, but my brother was). It didn't last.
“Redlining is one of those terms in the modern political lexicon that is just complex enough to elude everyday common understanding, while raising the specter of grand structural forces that control everything. But it’s by no means obvious how the government marking an area in red on a map would promptly turn a thriving community into a social hellscape that would continue for decades after the policy was ended.”
“If the redlining maps were based on race alone, we would expect the black neighborhoods and their occupants to have better economic characteristics than their white counterparts at the time. But a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds the exact opposite. Redlined areas with a predominantly white population had better economic characteristics than redlined areas with above-average shares of black residents—“the opposite of what would be expected if Black neighborhoods had been targeted for the lowest security grade because of race.” Moreover, a full 85 percent of households in redlined areas were occupied by whites, while data from the 1930 census showed that black households were concentrated in distressed areas years before the HOLC drew up those maps. This is not to justify the practice itself, nor to elide the fact that many industrious black families were prohibited from better neighborhoods because their race was used as a proxy. This is a causal, not a moral analysis. Redlining was not mostly about race.”
Your review alludes to one of the problem I've always had with reparations - I have no confidence that they will actually wipe the slate clean.
We've had a bunch of programs intended to correct past racism and they never seem to do all that much. I think you could probably get support for some pretty massive reparation program if, in exchange, there was some agreement that no one could ever complaint about historic racism again, but the likely outcome is what you describe in the Kansas City schools or sub-prime loans, where there's a big effort undertaken, nothing is actually accomplished and people either ignore it, or even treat it as an example of further racism in their next book arguing for reparations.
Obviously it would never wipe the slate clean. Reparations advocates dont even input past remedial efforts (the past over half century of great society programs) into their calculus. They are ingrates looking for perpetual cash grabs
Yes. Until the liberal elite actually want to wipe the slate clean, it cannot happen. So far they don't.
This observation has occurred to some on the right: https://www.waltbismarck.com/p/the-pro-white-case-for-reparations
Thanks. This one is a bit personal.
I started elementary school at the beginning of the 1970s in Dade County, Florida, which was then integrating its schools. My mom had just moved there from Maryland with four young children; I was the youngest. In first and third grades I attended Sunset Elementary, to which many black students were bused; in second grade I was myself bused to George Washington Carver.
It was a mixed experience for me. I had a wonderful first grade teacher who helped bring me out of terrible self-imposed isolation, and some of my new classmates were very nice. But some of them terrified me. (This did not, however, affect my attitudes; I was very much in favor of integration (to the extent an ignorant boy can be in favor of anything), and I thought the greatest scientists of all time were Albert Einstein and, naturally, George Washington Carver.)
The experiences of my older brother and sister in junior high were much worse than mine; they were beaten up and robbed repeatedly. My gentle, conventionally liberal mother was horrified to learn that black students had broken into a school library and (forgive me) ejaculated on the library books. (I wonder if that episode ever made it into any histories of integration in Florida.) By the beginning of my fourth grade year my mom had admitted defeat; we moved back to Maryland. We all attended integrated schools for the remainder of our educations, in Maryland and upstate South Carolina, and never had experiences like those in Dade County again. But we didn't forget, either; and Dade County probably affects my opinions more now than it did at the time.
For a child actually going to school with lower class blacks, the idea that they are oppressed can seem bizarre; Norman Podhoretz made that observation very pungently in a 1963 essay, https://www.commentary.org/articles/norman-podhoretz/my-negro-problem-and-ours/ .("A city boy’s world is contained within three or four square blocks, and in my world it was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around. The Negroes were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole they were better athletes. What could it mean, then, to say that they were badly off and that we were more fortunate?")
Whatever tricks real estate agents might pull, it seems obvious that blockbusting would never have worked -- white people could never have been persuaded to part with their most valuable assets, not to mention leave neighborhoods where they'd spent decades -- if they had not been genuinely terrified. I know why they were afraid.
It seems like there is a great book to be written about white flight from the perspective of the people who were fleeing. I don't think the works you cite in your fn 63 quite exhaust the topic. But I suspect that book will never be written.
Statements like "Costs will… be involved, and we should accept that those costs are part of our constitutional obligation" in Rothstein's book are enraging; whatever those costs are, he won't pay them. I was going to say that they will be paid by families like mine, but I'm not sure that's true. The country is very distant, politically and demographically, from the one I grew up in. My mother grew up in Queens, when most of the public school students in NYC were white. Now 16.2% are, compared to 16.3% of students described as English Language Learners. Whites are the 4th most common ethnic group, behind Hispanics, blacks and Asians. Integration is sort of a dead letter in NYC now, because there aren't many white kids to integrate with. https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/reports/doe-data-at-a-glance
I believe blockbusting is pretty well documented, but it also makes sense from a self-interested perspective, even if you are personally fine with integration. The motivation is that once the neighborhood integrates, property values will fall and you want to sell before that happens. This, of course, is a self-fulfilling fear, as the concern about property values falling causes property values to fall, the same way a bank run can occur due to fear of a bank run.
Of course blockbusting is well-documented, and the mechanism by which it operated is not difficult to understand. The question is why that mechanism was effective. If somebody came to me today and said "I'd like to buy your house, cash, for half its value" I'd tell him to go to hell. But in Chicago in 1962, a lot of people thought that sounded like a good deal, or at any rate a deal that they couldn't refuse. That was not because they were stupider than I am. Rather, the circumstances they were facing were very different than mine are today.
The larger question is: does he think those costs will go away? Why? The simplest explanation is that blacks will be civilized by proximity to middle class whites, but he doesn't even bother to explicitly state that. Which makes sense, as implying that minorities are uncivilized is extremely offensive. Of course, that same reality makes it very difficult to actually do anything about it, so it's a pretty big deal that he just elides this.
Or maybe he just doesn't care and thinks those problems will continue into perpetuity. If so, why bother integrating then? Why should specifically uncivilized people be brought to live with civilized ones? So they can benefit from nicer things? I guess.
Anyways, civilized people in modern day, whatever their race, can make it to the middle class. I don't support laws preventing any of this from occurring. But it's not clear why we need to make a big deal about integration either.
"Perhaps most disconcerting for me is the point at which Rothstein claims that section 8 vouchers are not entitlements because funding is insufficient for every eligible family to receive a voucher, while tax deductions for homeowners are entitlements.32 If the government giving you free benefits is not an entitlement but the government taking less of your money in taxes is, the word “entitlement” has lost all meaning. His case would be stronger without this sort of rhetorical game."
I agree this is a rhetorical game, but I don't think it is as egregious as you imply. Entitlements have two properties: they are government programs that distribute cash to individuals and are provided to all eligible individuals, not subject to appropriations. Section 8 matches the first criteria and not the second, while tax credits for homeowners meet the second but not the first. So, it would be just as wrong to call Section 8 an entitlement and tax credits not.
Rothstein was also wrong and used "entitlement" incorrectly in that case, I think it's fair to take his meaning as written - there's an incongruence in section 8 not getting free stuff vs. homeowners who do. Tracing was right to point out the most obvious rejoinder, that giving away money requires money in the first place, not taxing as much requires no such thing.
Came here to say the same. Entitlement has a legal meaning that applies here
"Most notable among them is the Kansas City school desegregation experiment"
I wasn't familiar with the Kansas City case - thanks for explaining it. I think the nearly contemporaneous case involving Hartford, CT is also worth mentioning. In 1989, several Hartford students sued the state (the case was known as Sheff v. O'Neill) for inequitable funding of majority-black school districts. In 1996, the state Supreme Court ruled that, aside from funding issues, educational inequity was caused by racial imbalances, and that black students in particular had a constitutional right to have a significant number of white students in their classes. Because of segregation in housing, it would be impossible to achieve the proper racial balance within existing school districts, so the ruling required the abolition of municipal school districts.
Politically, this was completely unsupportable, so the state, and the city of Hartford, started work on a solution that would, hopefully, address the issue. The ultimate solution was to spend a lot of state money to build magnet schools (there are currently 18, from elementary through high school), that would have slots allocated by lottery, half for white students from the suburbs, and half for black students from Hartford. In order to attract white students, the schools offer specialized programs, featuring emphasis on such areas as science and technology, health sciences, the arts, or specialized curricula like Montessori or International Baccalaureate. There was never a plan to allow enough slots in these schools to accommodate all, or even most, Hartford students.
The Hartford program is a very logical approach if the objective is defined as "put black students in the same classrooms with white students." But, it's very expensive and makes a mockery of the idea that every student should have equal educational opportunity. In practice, it has places for a small number of black students from one city, doing nothing to address educational inequities in other majority-black school districts. I haven't been able to find any attempt to measure whether the schools get better educational outcomes than the city schools left behind.
Another illustration of the limitations of using judges and constitutional reasoning to achieve a goal.
We'd love to know which law school you're attending, but if you don't want to share that information, will you at least disclose which quintile of U.S. News & World's rankings it is in?
I'm at Temple.
Thanks!
I would be interested in a more substantive recounting of the full course.
Seconded! I've caught a few of Trace's comments on it via Twitter but a more cohesive overview would be appreciated.
Rothstein is admirably honest: he frames the issue as a constitutional one because his preferred policy prescriptions would lead to an increase of crime and disorder in the neighborhoods he wants to change
In his book locked up, professor john pfaff is similarly unhinged/admirably honest in admitting that releasing violent criminals will increase violent crime. He just think the harm from this crime increase will be swamped out by a gain in racial justice utils
"Is every well-intentioned policy doomed to failure?"
How to design government programs to actually achieve their goals should be a whole field of study. Public Choice theory has done a good job of pointing out failure modes, but why is no one trying to figure out how to overcome them?! Europe and Japan can build trains for a fraction of the cost we pay, so it's not impossible to do these things better
I always enjoy your writing. Would you publish more of your school essays here?
I find this essay terribly unsettling. Than you.
This is excellent and I'm not surprised it was part of your law course, just head and shoulders above substack quality which is already impressive. The topic is an area ripe for exploration due it's longstanding taboo nature.
I think the root cause of American (and western more broadly) housing problems is the expectation for prices to always go up. This is only possible via rampant NIMBYism. Instead of racial favoritism, get rid of NIMBYs.
Good writeup on the subject:
https://goodreason.substack.com/p/maybe-treating-housing-as-an-investment
> houses are pretty much the only physical good that are expected to 1) appreciate in value, and 2) be used all the time. Oil paintings and Faberge eggs appreciate in value, but they’re put behind glass cases so that they remain in the exact same state they were in when purchased. Tellingly, they appreciate in value not because they’re useful but because they’re rare.
As a sequel to this essay, consider reviewing Mehrsa Baradaran's The Color of Money. Released the same year as Rothstein's book and also got a bump in sales in 2020. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on that one.
There was forced busing in Los Angeles, I think in the early 1970s. I was a kid so I don't remember much (I wasn't involved, but my brother was). It didn't last.
Read The Color of Law some years ago, and found it informative. This excellent reviews adds a lot more context, thank you.
“Redlining is one of those terms in the modern political lexicon that is just complex enough to elude everyday common understanding, while raising the specter of grand structural forces that control everything. But it’s by no means obvious how the government marking an area in red on a map would promptly turn a thriving community into a social hellscape that would continue for decades after the policy was ended.”
“If the redlining maps were based on race alone, we would expect the black neighborhoods and their occupants to have better economic characteristics than their white counterparts at the time. But a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds the exact opposite. Redlined areas with a predominantly white population had better economic characteristics than redlined areas with above-average shares of black residents—“the opposite of what would be expected if Black neighborhoods had been targeted for the lowest security grade because of race.” Moreover, a full 85 percent of households in redlined areas were occupied by whites, while data from the 1930 census showed that black households were concentrated in distressed areas years before the HOLC drew up those maps. This is not to justify the practice itself, nor to elide the fact that many industrious black families were prohibited from better neighborhoods because their race was used as a proxy. This is a causal, not a moral analysis. Redlining was not mostly about race.”
https://quillette.com/2021/07/17/historical-racism-is-not-the-singular-cause-of-racial-disparity/