SUNDOWN TOWNS HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT?

Possibly.  That's a review of a recent book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.  Once upon a time, communities, particularly small towns and tony suburbs, were explicitly segregated, or sundown towns.  But it's possible to accomplish the same outcomes, without violating the civil rights laws, by careful curating of the in-migrants, as Charles Haywood suggests is standard in Oak Park, Illinois.

When I arrived, my “advisor” gave me a sheet that said, in deliberately obscurantist legalese, “We will give you listings on the basis of your race.” This blatantly illegal practice (not made legal by disclosure, either) took me aback. Why, I thought, would they do that? It did not take long for me to figure out: They wanted, and still today want, to prevent black people from clustering there (shades of the M. Night Shyamalan movie The Village), which could attract more black people who might thereby start to view Oak Park as welcoming to African Americans. So they scatter black people among white people, and they try to locate white people among black people already living in Oak Park, both to prevent clustering that might attract more black people.

Or to prevent a population mix from reaching a tipping point: the multicultural makeup that is an unstable equilibrium being hard to establish in the first place, let alone to maintain?

Non-black people (me, for example) tend to think of housing discrimination as something in the past, engineered mostly by individuals in their private capacities, though with effects in the current day. It’s more convenient to think that way, after all. Just as importantly, we tend to think that if, in some cases, the government did engage in segregation (de jure), it doesn’t anymore, so there’s little to talk about. Plus we conclude that by now the effects of private and government actions are impossible to separate. Rothstein rejects all these explanations, or rather, claims they obscure more than clarify. First, there was, until relatively recently, vastly more de jure segregation than most people are aware. Second, even if legal segregation is now gone, what we think of as de facto segregation was primarily driven by earlier de jure segregation—and therefore the government, not private choice, is almost exclusively responsible for present-day patterns of segregation, as well as the consequent multiple negative effects on African Americans in the present day. Third, because it was our government, we are all responsible for finding a solution.

Alas, though, relying on government brings in the dual burdens of enforcement and one-policy-fits all, which is likely to preclude curating incoming populations in such a way as to create stable integrated patterns ... imagine the kind of contortions that create a freshman class, applied nation-wide.