The New York Times, January 20, 2020: The Neighborhoods We Will Not Share
In the mid-20th century, federal, state and local governments pursued explicit racial policies to create, enforce and sustain residential segregation. The policies were so powerful that, as a result, even today Blacks and Whites rarely live in the same communities and have little interracial contact or friendships outside the workplace.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order prohibiting federal agencies from continuing to promote housing segregation. In 1968, in the wake of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act, which made racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing unlawful for private actors as well as government.
But the Fair Housing Act was inadequate to undo the damage our government had previously wrought. Even if federal, state and local officials, along with banks, insurance companies and real estate brokers, no longer intend to discriminate by race, their policies can sometimes have that effect, reinforcing and perpetuating segregation.
Since the very first days of the Fair Housing Act, all 11 of the federal appeals courts that have considered the question — and, more recently, the Supreme Court, in Texas v. Inclusive Communities Project, have said the act prohibits not only intentional segregation, but also policies and practices whose effect is to discriminate for no defensible reason, even if there is no evidence of a racial motive. Lawyers describe such actions as having a “disparate impact” on minorities.
Now, however, the Trump administration is about to put into effect procedures to make it virtually impossible to prove disparate impact, no matter how egregious a discriminatory policy or practice may be.
