By Thomas Oppenheimer, Esquire
The Dunbar Community League published a “Sociological Survey of the Negro Population of Springfield, Mass.,” edited by William N. DeBerry, in 1940. It reports that “Springfield Negroes are the victims of a restricted form of race prejudice which operates against them chiefly in industry and in their efforts to rent or purchase homes in certain localities.” This present article speaks to housing segregation, and, more generally, to the racial wealth gap between those affected and white America.
DeBerry sets out specifically the street boundaries of each section of Springfield where Blacks resided at the time. Blacks lived throughout the City, except no Blacks resided south of Allen or east of Parker. Imagine a backwards L encompassing virtually all of the City east of Parker and south of Allen, and that is what it looked like. Moreover, those all white parts of the City abutted Wilbraham on the east and Longmeadow and East Longmeadow on the south, creating a much expanded all white zone.
A more recent study – “4 Cities Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice” – prepared by the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, for Chicopee, Holyoke, Springfield and Westfield, in 2020, reports that the “region has notable patterns of segregation between Black and White residents.” We are still a segregated city.
How did this come about? Probably redlining, steering, blockbusting, predatory lending practices, exclusionary zoning, and perhaps racially restrictive covenants. What we do know is the house values in Black neighborhoods are artificially deflated and those in white neighborhoods artificially inflated because of segregation. And we know that Black families’ lack of wealth has been a major obstacle to home buying.
Currently there has been a great deal of discussion and writing on the racial wealth gap. Nikole Hannah-Jones, in her New York Times piece of June 30, 2020, remarks that fifty years since the freedom struggles brought about the end of legal discrimination, “so much of what makes black lives hard, what takes black lives earlier, what causes black Americans to be vulnerable to the type of surveillance and policing that killed Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, what steals opportunities, is the lack of wealth that has been a defining feature of black life since the end of slavery.”
She goes on in greater detail: “Wealth, not income, is the means to security in America. Wealth – assets and investments minus debt – is what enables you to buy homes in safer neighborhoods with better amenities and better-funded schools. It is what enables you to send your children to college without saddling them with tens of thousands of dollars of debt and what provides you money to put a down payment on a house. It is what prevents family emergencies or unexpected job losses from turning into catastrophes that leave you homeless and destitute ……”
She points out that you do not have to have laws enforcing segregated housing and schools when white Americans, “using their generational wealth and higher income, can simply buy their way into expensive enclaves.” We can certainly see the racial wealth gap demonstrated by affluent towns bordering Springfield. Single family zoning in all or parts of these towns has no doubt been an essential aspect of this.
Moreover, Black Americans with higher incomes are often unable to come up with a down payment to buy in more affluent neighborhoods because their families have not been able to build wealth, while white Americans with lower incomes often use family wealth to do so.
A 2019 Yale study called “The Misperceptions of Racial Economic Inequality” reported that Americans believe that Black households hold $90 in wealth for every $100 held by white households. The actual amount is $10. Jones summarizes as follows:
“… none of the actions we are told black people must take if they want to “lift themselves” out of poverty and gain financial stability – [such as] marrying, getting educated, saving more, owning a home – can mitigate 400 years of racialized plundering. Wealth begets wealth, and white Americans have had centuries of government assistance to accumulate wealth, while the government has for the vast history of this Country worked against black Americans doing the same.”
James Baldwin said, “To accept one’s past – one’s history – is not the same as drowning with it; it is learning how to use it.” I think that means for all of us that in order to move ahead, we must first understand our history, which is vast and complicated, with vastly different but related Black and white experiences, where racism and white supremacy and white privilege are the other sides of slavery, racialized plunder, oppression and poverty. There are ways I think in which truth telling and finding common meanings in our history can be a first step toward racial healing and reconciliation, which at the same time and through this process discovers what will be necessary to repay the debt owed for the centuries of racialized plundering.
The Germans have a long compound multisyllabic word for it – vergangenheitsbewaltigung – which means to “work off the past,” that is, work off the horror, shame, theft, death and devastation of its Holocaust past. In practice, beyond their original act of reparations, they have incorporated the past into the present in manifold ways which constantly remind them of the shame and inhumanity of that past. We are now learning we must do the same. Perhaps that is what Baldwin meant. ■
