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Racism as a Business Model
See Sunday's Commentariat for context.
The summer of 1963, after my freshman year in college, I worked as a secretary for an Orlando-based real estate developer. One of his developments was a single-family-home neighborhood on Florida's East Coast. A black high-school principal & his black schoolteacher wife sought to buy a house in that neighborhood. My boss refused to sign a contract with them, even though they were financially-qualified to purchase the house. The couple filed a complaint, & there was a hearing in Orlando (I don't recall what government body held the hearing).
I asked my boss for time off to go to the hearing, and I told him I was on the family's side, not his. He gave me the time off, and I think he even paid me for it. At a break in the hearing, I chatted with the couple, & my boss came up & joined us. It was a courteous conversation, centered on small-talk.
The judge or arbiter who presided over the hearing ruled for the couple, and they bought the house. I left for college shortly thereafter, so I'm not sure if their purchase caused any problems for my boss. But I am sure the black family did not ruin his business because he kept at it till he died decades later.
The peculiar thing about it, to me, was that my boss was not a racist. He was Jewish, so no doubt a victim of discrimination himself, and -- like me -- he was not a native Southerner. He actually sympathized with the family, but he didn't want them living in his housing development because he calculated that their presence would be bad for business. Racist discrimination was a business model for my boss, not an ideology.
You might think it makes no difference why a businessperson discriminates against some group when the effect is the same whether or not the businessperson is a bigot. But I say it does. My old boss rejected the couple as clients, but it was clear to me he did not reject them as people. He didn't think, as Donald Trump would put it, "No human being would want to live next-door to you." Rather, my boss thought, "Many of my potential buyers are white racists, and white racists will not want to live next-door to you."
Do I think my boss should have accepted the couple's contract from the get-go? Yes, of course. In fact, the story made the Orlando Sentinel, so my boss's business decision to discriminate brought attention to the matter. He made a bad decision.
One might forgive Donald Trump for supporting a racist business model in the 1960s, especially since it was his father, not he, who called the shots. But being a racist then & forever afterwards is unforgivable.
As Jonathan Chait suggests, no racist is qualified to be president. As Chait points out, Trump's racism has made him not-president.
Also see contributors' comments below. They're mighty smart.
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Reader Comments (12)
Racism as a business model––interesting story. I'm wondering, though, if your boss had felt strongly about racial equality he would have let this black family buy the house at the get-go and taken the chance that white buyers would not shy away. He might not have been a racist but by his actions he was promoting it which if I'm not mistaken was your point.
And Chait chants what needs to be in huge capitol letters so Fatty can read it on a banner flying over the White House:
NO RACIST IS QUALIFIED TO BE PRESIDENT–-WE'RE LOOKING AT YOU DJT!
P.S. I just recalled another builder of mass production housing projects: William J. Levitt who built all those suburban houses which changed American society; the up and coming whites left the cities to those of slender means and different color skins. It also temporarily interrupted the progress women had been making in the work place leaving them, at least for awhile, isolated in a world of other mothers, children and station wagons.
In those Levitt towns there were two big rules: One for construction and one for inhabitants:
*NO UNIONS
*NO BLACKS ALLOWED
The penultimate paragraph says it all. The Trumps had a racist business model (so did a lot of others back then) but they were also card carrying racists. Trump won’t ever change. Someone who says things like “The blacks like me” is clearly a racist. Seeing ethnic groups as a single block, and ascribing the same characteristics to the entire group (“the Irish are drunks”) is bigotry no matter how you spin it, like assigning African nations to the category of “shithole countries”. But this is what we have in the White House now. A racist asshole who appeals to other racist assholes and a party and media outlets happy to go along for the ride.
@PD Pepe: I suspect a majority of white Americans back in the day were not openly racist -- that is, they held no animosity toward people of color -- but they were certainly racist in the sense that they "otherized" non-whites and non-Christians. A close relative of mine, when speaking of a cousin of ours, always prefaced her remarks with, "He's Jewish, you know." She liked the guy, but she still otherized him until I asked her to cut it out. I'm sure she didn't realize what she was doing. And you can bet, even tho she quit with the "He's Jewish, you know" preface, she still thought it.
Moreover, like my boss, white Americans worried a lot about how their own personal economic status might be affected by the civil rights movement, and that worry fed their racist views. I admired the white people who were willing to take the risk of some possible economic hardship in order to advance equality for all. And the fact that I admired them suggests that there were too few such people.
Think of all the non-Methodist people who even today would be happy to go to a wedding in a Methodist church, but would think twice about going to a wedding in a black Methodist church. Or all the non-ethnic-Germans who would have fun at an Oktoberfest but somehow never go to a Martin Luther King Day celebration. I was proud of my community here in the North Country this month when there was standing-room-only for a reading of Frederick Douglass's speech "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro." As Donald Trump would say, "Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice."
@PD Pepe: And thanks for reminding us of the Levittowns. Here a great article from the NYT (from 1997 -- the 50th anniversary of the first Levittown) about racial discrimination in Leavittowns. The story pretty much jibes with what I wrote above.
Very interesting nuances of discrimination and racism, thanks @Marie.
Slightly off topic, but I wonder to what extent Dotard's racist views permeate his inner circle. Since he's such an egomaniac and always points to his "pea brain" as the source of all greatness that flows from him, he's taken all of the air in the racist White House debate. Bannon and Stephen Miller got some ink, but what about Kellyanne Conjob? Javanka? Melanie? Parscale?
Javanka and Kellyanne Conjob in particular need a serious grilling about all of the racism coming from their top guy. They are his "closest advisors", right? If they actually do anything in the White House, it's "advising" and "strategizing", I'd imagine. Kellyanne Conjob is a life-long Republican communications strategist and pollster. She has to be on board with the overarching "white nationalism" shtick they're setting up. She's obviously a despicable human being, but is she also a POS racist? Surely Ivanka & Jared would be the type to pull their kids from a school if it wasn't lily white enough. How deep does their racial animus go?
We'll never know the answers cause their now as shameless as Agent Orange, but that they stick besides him as he lowers himself further into the manure pits, with nary a peep of consternation, the whole White House inner circle needs to get a giant "R" tattooed on their foreheads à la Inglorious Bastards style so they can live with their shame for the rest of their empty days on Earth.
"The Color of Law" is a recent book (2017?)
https://books.google.com/books?id=SdtDDQAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
which shows how segregation is rooted in real estate and property values. People like Bea's boss may not have been racists themselves but may have felt that they had an obligation to protect investors and property buyers -- and selling to a black family would hurt those interests. If you read the book you can see that a lot of people do racist things because they expect other people will do racist things, and they all believe it is not racism just prudence.
The author of the book wrote it after a Roberts court decision that sought to explain segregation patterns as the effects of individual choices of free association, which the government should not seek to control. The author shows that the US government and state and local governments have deliberately and specifically written laws and policies which require segregation to protect white peoples' property values and social separation. The author intends that the next time a SC justice writes an opinion claiming that housing segregation results from free association he/she won't be able to claim ignorance -- they'll just be ignoring facts and history.
I suspect there's a critical mass element at work too.
For most, some sensitivity to "otherness" is always present or lurking just below the surface, and for many it is only when the number of "others" gets to the point that "they" seem threatening to an established way of life that the dominant culture's behavior becomes overtly racist.
I know in the small rural and very white town I grew up in, other than in language which is now embarrassing to recall, in its commonly understood form racism did not exist. That is not to say folks did not make class and religious distinctions, because they did. The small town and the small mind lived in tandem.
When one black family made its appearance around 1960 and joined our church, that family was welcomed into the parish, even treated with a kind of fond indulgence.
But that was just one family and for people outside that limited church community, even one family was too much.
While there were exceptions, generally speaking the tarheels who worked the nearby woods had not left their culture behind in their diaspora, and the overtly racist elements of that culture certainly left its imprint on my early years.
The challenge is what it always is: the head and the goodness the heart is capable of must overcome our baser behaviors, and as history and our Pretender's tweets prove, that is not always easily achieved.
Safari asks, "How far does their racist animus go?"
Is getting an Aryan dog for their daughter's birthday far enough?
For some reason I can't imagine she would ever stoop to picking up her dog's steaming-hot turds even with her hand wrapped in a plastic bag. I guess the "help" will have to do it.
Many thanks for this link, unwashed, and your commentary.
Savoring the twitter feedback.
Regarding the patriot Donny bone spurs and 9/11:
Lawyers of the victims of 9/11, who have been seeking damages against Saudi Arabia, were given an interesting offer by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, who said that he would tell the whole story if they drop the death penalty. Reporters question whether Trump would allow the testimony given his close ties with members of the Saudi leadership.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/07/accused-911-mastermind-open-testimony-saudi-arabia-190729231512390.html
Perhaps Khalid is just finished. He's mastered surviving the waterboard treatment (183 times). Could this trigger a Saudi bone saw death by confession if he were deposed? Probably not. Anything he says, regardless of corroborating facts, will be discredited. Now that Trump is in bed with MBS, any testimony will be considered politically motivated to embarrass Trump. 9/11 families will not get closure - Saudis get US nuclear technology. What could go wrong?
"For all the hacking going on," there is still no evidence that it was being done by Russians, and also none that shows conclusively that it was being done by Russian government entities. Mueller did not look for any evidence, he took the Crowdstrike report as the definitive conclusion, despite the lack of independent verification. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but I know I could buy software tools that would let me hack into many computers and leave "evidence" that I was a Rumanian doing it from Nebraska. Heck, I could download a whole library of tools from Wikileaks (OK, I haven't checked lately, but I could have five or six years ago).
Given Trump's razor thin victories in three key states, and that Hillary's campaign spent $1,000,000,000 while the total ad buy from Internet Research Agency was $100,000, and much of that was after the election, whoever is the Democratic nominee this year better get one of their donors (Steyer?) to hire some people from IRA and pay for H1B visas for them to work in support of the Democrats.