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Michael Meeropol: The Connection Between The Civil Rights Act And Trump’s Housing Discrimination

There is disgusting theme being bruited about from the Trump campaign that blames the   difficulties of low income African Americans in numerous inner-city neighborhoods on the Democratic Party.   Now I am no Democrat --- and I have not been averse to criticizing the policies of the Obama and (Bill) Clinton Administrations.  However, the idea that poverty among African Americans and crime in African American neighborhoods is the fault of the Democratic Party, just because the Mayors of many of the cities where these concentrated populations of people of color in poverty are Democrats is totally false.   Most of these cities have been starved for funds by State Legislatures and federal programs that would have reduced the economic hardships for these communities, the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, raising the minimum wage, rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure have been blocked by Republican governors and Congress.

There have been many policies pushed through by Democrats (with the help of liberal Republicans) that have immeasurably improved the lives of African Americans.  [The books written by Taylor Branch in his America in the King Years series – Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, At Canaan’s Edge (Simon and Shuster, 1988, 1998, 2006) chronicle the role of Democratic Party politicians in being dragged, often kicking and screaming, to support Civil Rights Legislation in the early 1960s.   There is no question that with the ascension of Lyndon Johnson to the Presidency, the teamwork between the movement spearheaded by SNCC and CORE with the public leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King and Johnson who used his skills to manipulate Congress was crucial to passing the two Civil Rights Acts and the Voting Rights Act.] Though both the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act relied on Republican support to break a Southern filibuster in the Senate, the long run impact was the fracturing of the so-called Roosevelt Coalition of the Democratic Party.  The Republican Party responded by embracing the white Southerners who deserted the Democratic Party en masse.   Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” and Ronald Reagan’s emphasis on “states’ rights” during his first election campaign were crucial to creating the belt southern of “red states.”   A notable “dog whistle” occurred when Reagan launched his 1980 Presidential campaign with a public event in Philadelphia, Mississippi the site of the abduction and later murders of three civil rights workers in 1964.   (It is not surprising that the only Democrats elected to the Presidency after the 1960s were Southern governors!)   Barack Obama made significant inroads into the newly “solid” Republican south in 2008 and since then, Republican governors and state legislatures (with a boost from the Supreme Court) have been hard at work figuring out ways to suppress the African American vote).

Other ways Democrats have helped improve things for African Americans include the various increases in the minimum wage, the very significant impact of the expansion of the earned income tax credit as part of Bill Clinton’s economic policy (passed without a single Republican vote in 1993)   And the most recent example was the  expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act which disproportionately benefited low income African Americans and would have applied nationwide if the Supreme Court hadn’t permitted states to refuse to implement the Medicaid expansion.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 is relevant today because of the sordid history of Donald Trump’s housing discrimination against African Americans.  On August 27, the New York Times published a story entitled  ‘No Vacancies’ for Blacks: How Donald Trump Got His Start, and Was First Accused of Bias”  It goes into great details about the evidence compiled by the Justice Department which sued his company in 1973.   There was a highly publicized suit against another landlord in New York City who publicly settled by signing a consent decree and held a press conference promising to take affirmative efforts to increase the number of black tenants in his buildings.   The Trump organization responded differently utilizing the lawyer Roy Cohn to file counter-suits.   After two years of vigorously fighting, he signing a consent decree.   Though he claimed it was a victory because he never admitted wrong-doing, that’s what ALL consent decrees do.   The goal is to change behavior, not to get an admission of guilt.  The information developed in this lawsuit and in other suits against other Trump properties indicates the typical pattern of landlords trying to keep their properties lily white --- patterns of discrimination that actually created what the sociologist Kenneth Clark labelled, the “Dark Ghetto.”  [If anyone wants details on how discrimination by real estate agents, banks and the federal government created the high concentration of blacks in inner city neighborhoods, the book AMERICAN APARTHEID by Douglass Massey and Nancy Denton remains the definitive work.]

What is particularly disgusting about the behavior revealed by the Justice Department investigations (buttressed by the careful work of black and white “testers” where a black couple would try to rent or buy a house and be told there was nothing available and then a white couple with the same statistics of income, etc. would go in and be shown something immediately) is that the individual engaging in the discriminatory behavior does not have to be a racist bigot him or herself.   It certainly helps if the individuals (like Trump and his father) believe that African Americans are more likely to be criminals and destroy the house values in the neighborhood, but even if they personally don’t think this way, all they have to do is believe that the majority of their WHITE customers believe this for the decision to engage in widespread discrimination to be a SOUND BUSINESS DECISION.   In other words, if you think your white customers are likely to be racists, then it makes sense not to offend them by permitting blacks to rent in your properties.

Readers might find it hard to believe, but there is a strain within economics that comes to the exact opposite conclusion.   Gary Becker and Milton Friedman argued that sound business decisions would lead to no discrimination because by discriminating, say in renting out your properties, you REDUCE the potential customer base and thus end up reducing your profits (you have to charge lower rates to entice only that sub-set of people you are willing to serve).   [If you are hiring and refuse to hire African Americans you have a smaller group to draw from and have to offer higher wages].   The flaw in this argument is that if there is a large enough group (whites) to get a substantial customer base AND if racism is alive and well so that an astute business owner might reasonably expect a significant percentage of the white customer base to oppose having to share the apartment (job, public accommodation) with blacks, then the SOUND BUSINESS DECISION is to cater to the racism in their white customer base.

When I was a college student travelling between Philadelphia and Washington DC, there was no interstate 95 – Instead, in Maryland there was Route 40.   I and a group of (white) classmates were in a restaurant when an integrated group was turned away and we immediately got into an angry confrontation with the owner for that behavior.  He argued that if he let blacks eat there he’d  lose his other customers.   It is that mind set, by the way, that justifies a law forcing non-discrimination in public accommodations because that removes the danger that a non-discriminating business will lose customers to other establishments. 

But back to Trump.   If Trump were really interested in showing empathy for African Americans, he could start by repudiating his and his father’s policies from the 1960s and 70s and come clean about the behavior his businesses engaged in.  Instead, as the NY Times article notes, he went out of his way to praise a worker from one of his Cincinnati businesses who was caught discriminating when two white testers were offered an apartment right after he turned down a black tester.  He allegedly called the white tester a “nigger lover,” and this is the guy Trump praised in his book The Art of the Deal.

I delivered this commentary before Trump put on his info-mercial with the black bishop over the Labor Day weekend.  I am very much looking forward to seeing the careful dance he engaged in.  It will be false as his denials of discrimination from back in the 1970s!

Michael Meeropol is professor emeritus of Economics at Western New England University. He is the author (with Howard Sherman) of Principles of Macroeconomics: Activist vs. Austerity Policies.

 
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

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