Belonging: A Culture of Place (11 page)

Unfortunately in recent years the building of exorbitantly priced homes has created segregated all white neighborhoods where the presence of people of color is often not welcomed and where there are residents who would not choose to live among black people in racially integrated subdivisions. Most, if not all, of these segregated white communities are new developments and sometimes potential homeowners must be vetted by associations and boards before they can purchase in these locations. This is a perfect setup for discrimination to occur. The underlying principle of many new housing developments, particularly those that are gated, is the notion of exclusion and exclusivity, keeping undesirable elements out, which frequently means people of the wrong class or color. Of course most of the residents in these communities will argue that their choice of housing is not influenced by racial prejudice, because they are not racists, but rather by a desire for comfort and safety.

Writing about the fact that most white people have been socialized to remain ignorant of the way racism affects their lives, the way they collude in maintaining racism and with it segregation. Peggy McIntosh contends: “As a white person, I realized I had been taught about racism as something which puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege which puts me at an advantage… In my class and place, I did not recognize myself as a racist because I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth.” The average white American never thinks about the issue of supporting racial discrimination when it comes to housing, never questions their choice to live in segregated white communities.

In the aftermath of sixties civil rights struggle there were liberal white and black individuals who expressed concern about segregation in housing and actively chose to try and create diverse and beloved communities. Focus on desegregation without anti-racist thought and behavior did not help create a safe context wherein bonding across racial difference could be seen as both necessary for progress and appealing. When I left my native place and the racial apartheid that characterized all arenas of social life, especially housing, I did not want to live in white neighborhoods, I wanted to live among diverse groups of people who were interested in creating anti-racist integrated environments. Migrating to the west coast, attending Stanford University, I found myself in an environment with like minded folks. The antiracist energy of the sixties had impacted all or us. We wanted to create communities of love and hope. Those feelings coincided with notions of living simply. Living off the land, living with less, was deemed vital to the survival of the planet. In those days most of us either lived in very small spaces or in big houses with lots of other people. In keeping with this spirit of democracy and anti-discrimination in housing, some folks were opposed to the idea of property ownership and private property. Yet all our counter culture lifestyles did not change the core of imperialist white supremacy capitalist patriarchy. Needless to say, the alternative values and habits of being cultivated during a period of national revolt against dominator thinking and dominator culture did not last.

While many sixties and seventies radicals and liberals maintained progressive anti-war sentiments and ideas about gender equality, they became more conventionally conservative around issues of housing and property. As this group of people aged, many inheriting property and wealth from the coffers of more conservative elders, they became more fiscally conservative. And when the issue was housing and real estate, patterns of discrimination and segregation were reinforced even though racial integration had become more of an accepted norm. Owning property during the real estate boom of the eighties and nineties was one of the quickest ways for individuals to acquire unearned profit and in some cases wealth. Groups of liberal and progressive whites who had been at one time pro-active in the struggle to create integrated housing became more comfortable with being in all white or predominately communities.

Living in major cities and watching gentrification in real estate, any observer could witness a process wherein groups of more liberal whites would purchase housing in neighborhoods that were peopled primarily or solely by people of color/black people. The “cool” white folks would declare their movement into these neighborhoods was a gesture of solidarity, of openness to diversity. Yet more often than not their presence usually raised prices and increased real estates taxes. Often they were coming from privileged classes. Rather than adding to diversity their presence usually pushed out the underprivileged colored folks. And even when poor people own property in areas that more affluent groups gentrify, the underprivileged are rarely able to sell their homes for big profits and move elsewhere. The rising cost of housing makes it impossible for them to reap rewards if they sell and simultaneously buy a better or even similar home to the one they would leave behind. No matter the income of people of color, especially black people, our growing presence in any neighborhood does not lead to any substantial increase in the value of property. While there are many places where an influx of black residents led to white flight, there is no case where the presence of those black newcomers led to a substantial increase in property value.

Neighborhoods in the various parts of the United States that I have called home often started out racially integrated, ethnically diverse, but as the presence of white newcomers from privileged classes increased they became whiter and whiter. When I moved to New York City I chose to live in the West Village because of its diversity of race, class, and sexual orientation. However as property values increased not only did the culture of privileged class wealthy whiteness become dominant, those of us deemed “different” were and are increasingly seen as undesirable interlopers. Covert expressions of white supremacy are difficult for most people to see. This seems to be especially the case when real estate is the issue. Individual white consumers who see themselves as anti-racist rarely question their choice to live in all white neighborhoods. They do not question why it is that they feel more comfortable living solely among other whites people, even if they do not have much in common. Most black people will justify their choice of segregated neighborhoods by calling attention to cheaper prices and or a refusal to live in fear, to live among folks who hate you and threaten to harm you.

Although I am happiest living in neighborhoods with diverse residents, I know that when anti-racist sentiments rule the day the color of one’s neighbors does not matter. In our Kentucky town growing up the intense racial apartheid and the fear it engendered among black folk, the fear that we would be harmed by whites if we ventured into their neighborhoods, led me to leave my native place. I did not want to live my life in that fear, my movement circumscribed, as well as all social relation, circumscribed by it. I did want to see every white person as a potential enemy. Living most of my life away from Kentucky in progressive states California and New York City, in neighborhoods where racial integration was the desired and accepted norm, I would return home and find the same old racist boundaries operating as though nothing had changed. And even when individual black folks ventured out of our segregated worlds into pre-dominantly white areas, they faced hostility and indifference from white neighbors. Tragically while certain social norms created by racism and white supremacy remained intact in Kentucky, they were slowly coming to be the norm in other places.

While segregation is no longer a legally imposed norm anywhere, in most places separatism is the unspoken but accepted rule. And since many black people self-segregate, they unwittingly collude with racist whites in maintaining racial segregation in housing. Speaking about the need for citizens of this nation to continue to see segregation as a political issue that must be fully addressed if racism is ever to truly end in 1995, Colin Powell made this insightful comment: “We are a nation of unlimited opportunity and serious unresolved social ills; and we are all in it together. Racial resegregation can only lead to social disintegration. Far better to resume the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr.: to build a nation where whites and blacks sit side by side at the table of brotherhood.” Liberal identify politics, though often formed to serve as a basis for civil rights organization and protest, brought with it an emphasis on maintaining allegiance to one’s own racial, ethnic, or social group that was at times more akin to white supremacist thinking about staying with one’s own group. It created a paradox with people of color on one hand insisting that it was vital that racism end and on the other insisting on the primacy of allegiance to one’s race. To a grave extent people of color who self-segregate are in collusion with the very forces of racism and white supremacy they claim they would like to see come to an end. Racism will never end as long as the color of anyone’s skin is the foundation of their identity.

When we bond on the basis of shared anti-racism, skin color is placed in its proper perspective. It becomes simply another aspect of a person’s identity not the only important aspect. Like all black people raised in a segregated world who have experienced racist assault, however relative, for the first thirty years of my life I was more comfortable in settings where black people were in the majority. As I learned more about the structure of racism and white supremacy, I challenged myself to critically examine notions that I was “safer” in all black settings, more understood or automatically shared a common sensibility. I wanted to have congruency between my anti-racist belief that to end racism we would all need to stop overvaluing race and the actions I might take regarding race in everyday life. I had to acknowledge that being among black people victimized by internalized racism could be just as dangerous as being among racist whites. I had to acknowledge that the ideal experience was to live among groups of people committed to living an anti-racist life. When being militantly anti-racist is a basis for bonding we are constantly called to look beyond skin color and acknowledge the content of our character.

Choosing to return to my native place, to come home to Kentucky, led me to examine anew my commitment to ending racism. The choice to return to Kentucky was never a consideration for me until I came to give a lecture at Berea College. Certainly, I have never felt and to this day do not feel that I could return to my hometown because so much racial segregation and racial separatism remains the norm there. Ironically, even though I grew up less than four hours away from Berea, Kentucky, I had never heard about the place or its history. More than ten year ago the women’s studies program here invited me to come and lecture. When I accepted the invitation, I was sent information about the college and its history. Here was a town in the South, in Kentucky, that was designed around the principles of anti-racism. And that design was made manifest in 1855. The visionary founder of both the town and college, John Fee, was a white male abolitionist Christian who wholeheartedly believed that “we are all people of one blood.” Long before it was “cool” to talk about race as a social construct, long before it was scientifically proven that there really is no genetic basis for racial difference, long before public knowledge of organ transplants showed the public that the internal workings of the human body are fundamentally the same irrespective of race, long before Martin Luther King preached the importance of building beloved community, Fee and his supporters were doing just that, creating an anti-racist utopian environment where white and black people could live together in peace and harmony.

Awed by Berea’s history, by the prophetic vision of John Fee, a vision that with the heartfelt cooperation of like minded folk he was able to realize, I wanted to participate in the contemporary maintaining of his radical legacy Like many people before me, I was awed by the fact that Fee created a need based college with no tuition, where black and white, women and men, could come together as equals and learn and live together both at the college and beyond in community. The anti-racist credo that was both the philosophical and spiritual foundation “we are all people of one blood” serves as a constant reminder of this legacy. Tragically, Fee’s vision worked so well that white supremacist politicians intervened, making it legally impossible for the college to continue its interracial project. For many years on into the age of civil rights the anti-racist progressive vision of beloved community was suppressed in Berea. But the power of that radical vision was sustained and like a seed planted in the earth it continues to bear fruit despite the years in which that vision was betrayed and undermined. As a consequence the radical legacy of anti-racist beloved community is not nearly as fully realized as it was in Fee’s time today yet there are still enough people who remained committed to ending racism and creating beloved community to provide a sustaining home.

Coming to lecture at Berea College years ago, I was impressed with both the college and the town. Again like others before me, I wanted to come and work at the college and made that desire known. When I first lectured at the college, I spoke openly about the intense racial apartheid that was part of my Kentucky childhood. I talked about the relationship between racism and real estate, calling attention to the fact that to this day many racist white folks will not sell land to black folks, even if those folks have been workers on the land for generations. I called attention to the fact that white people from all over the nation purchase land in Kentucky and do not face the discrimination that still excludes many black Kentucky folks from land ownership. During that lecture I confessed that the persistence of cruel racist practices in everyday life made it impossible for me to imagine living in Kentucky. At that time my audience was largely made up of progressive people they were eager to call attention to the reality that Berea had a different history from the one I was speaking about. And certainly the people I met during my first visit, most of whom were white, seemed as committed to the creation of beloved community as John Fee had been. During that very first visit I decided to come home to Kentucky, now that I had found a progressive place in my home state.