Testifying before Congress on Wednesday, President Trump’s erstwhile lawyer Michael Cohen described the president as a “racist” and recounted anti-black statements made by Trump. In one of these statements, made while the two men drove through “a struggling neighborhood in Chicago,” according to Cohen, “[Trump] commented that only black people could live that way.”
Trump has made it clear time and again that he is not a student of history. If he were, he would understand that the primary reason African American “ghettos” exist is that black people have been excluded from other housing by law and custom, not because they don’t desire better. So often our debates about race and racism focus on overt bigotry, not the lurking legal provisions and cultural practices that are often referred to as structural discrimination. But the common practice of housing discrimination — which Trump and his father engaged in for years, according to a 1973 lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice and settled in 1975 — exposes these customs and their pernicious impact. At a moment when it has become clear that the racism so central to the nation’s history is not in fact behind us, the long history of housing discrimination is essential to understanding how we got here.
Trump’s statement suggests that African Americans prefer to live separately from other groups and that they are comfortable living in conditions that other people would consider uninhabitable. While some black people have moved to all-black communities, viewing separatism as the best way to insulate themselves from discrimination, we should view inner-city “ghettos” as products and sites of discrimination, rather than shields from it.
Various policies dating back a century or more helped create impoverished, poorly maintained majority-black neighborhoods within America’s cities. Take segregation ordinances: Beginning in 1910, a number of Southern cities began enacting ordinances excluding African Americans from owning property or residing in white neighborhoods. Called the “Baltimore idea” after the first city in the region to pass such a law, these laws were meant to stop “race friction” (generally the harassment of black newcomers) and protect the value of property owned by middle-class whites. Property values were jeopardized when white homeowners sold their property below market value in response to black people purchasing houses in their neighborhoods.
Even Booker T. Washington — known for accepting the segregation of public accommodations — denounced these laws. In a 1915 article, he explained his opposition to residential segregation laws, which were enacted in Richmond, Winston-Salem, Atlanta, Louisville, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, New Orleans and other cities after Baltimore. Such ordinances meant that African Americans would “receive inferior accommodations,” according to Washington. “If the Negro is segregated, it will probably mean that the sewerage in his part of the city will be inferior; that the streets and sidewalks will be neglected, that the street lighting will be poor; that his section of the city will not be kept in order by the police and other authorities.”
The Baltimore Afro-American reported that landlords kept the houses rented to African Americans, which were rented for more than white people would have paid for them, in poor repair: “Bad bathrooms, broken bells, ceilings falling down and other evidences of need of repairs are to be seen.” Landlords were able to charge more for badly maintained apartments because black tenants in segregated neighborhoods had nowhere else to live legally.
In 1917, the Supreme Court declared laws requiring segregated neighborhoods unconstitutional in Buchanan v. Warley. The decision, however, hardly set back the project of keeping African Americans out of white neighborhoods.
Once these ordinances were no longer legally possible, the real estate industry simply conspired to recreate their effects through other methods, including restrictive covenants. One such covenant, added to deeds in a development in the suburbs of Raleigh, N.C., required that “no land in Longview Gardens shall ever be sold, transferred, conveyed, mortgaged, or leased to, or occupied (servants excepted) by any person who is not wholly Caucasian.” In 1948, the Supreme Court again stepped in, declaring these covenants unenforceable in Shelley v. Kraemer.
But this too failed to stop forced residential segregation.
A New Deal program provided another example of a policy that worked to segregate cities for decades: redlining. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), enacted during President Franklin Roosevelt’s first 100 days, hired workers to appraise neighborhoods; it then gave out loans based on its assessment of credit risk. Among the factors used to determine risk: the race of the neighborhood’s residents.
While the agency helped many white people buy and refinance homes, HOLC assessed neighborhoods occupied by African Americans as “declining” and “hazardous” (regardless of the economic circumstances of the African American residents), making it much harder for people in these neighborhoods to qualify for loans. Neighborhoods occupied by African Americans received poor assessments even if these neighborhoods were majority-white, thus encouraging whites to exclude black people from their neighborhoods.
Redlining wasn’t a relic of the 1930s either. This practice was part of federal housing policies for decades, extending at least through 1977, when the Community Reinvestment Act was passed to end redlining.
This legal discrimination had profound effects on African American communities, leaving generations trapped in poor housing and building the racial wealth gap. Paying high rents for substandard housing, ineligible for government-backed loans that would have allowed them to purchase real estate at low interest rates (which left predatory loans as their only option for borrowing), generations of African Americans found it difficult to build wealth. The result was that they rarely left inheritances to their descendants. Meanwhile, white Americans benefited from the same policies that hurt African Americans, as housing became a source of inheritable, intergenerational wealth. Trump’s own life illustrates the importance of such inheritance; the enormous wealth the president inherited from his father provided him with numerous opportunities and privileges.
These racial wealth disparities have extended to the present day.
The president’s ignorance of the history of the nation he leads allows him to blithely dismiss the present-day problems of its people. Because he does not understand that today’s neighborhoods have been shaped by the consequences of unfair policies, as well as by acts of discrimination by individuals like his father, who only rented apartments to African Americans after they filed complaints, he blames the people who live in these neighborhoods for their inability to move out.
The president’s two years in office have illustrated the problems that stem from a lack of historical thinking. From his failure to comprehend the importance of our political and military alliances, to his unawareness of the nation’s actual relationship with immigration, to his willful ignorance about racial discrimination and exploitation, Trump has shown us just how essential it is to learn from history — and how steep a price we pay when we refuse to do so.