Until Ta-Nehisi Coates published “The Case for Reparations” in 2014, many of us had never considered how redlining and coupled financial practices worked to keep marginalized Black families marginalized throughout the 20th century. Coates spelled it out in painstaking detail. Now illegal, it nonetheless persists today.
Gene Slater explains at The Atlantic how as late as the 1960s the real estate industry turned the concept of freedom into a tool for systemic discrimination. “Martin Luther King Jr. used the word equality once at the March on Washington, but he used the word freedom 20 times,” Slater writes. Now Realtors would.
After California passed a fair-housing law, Realtors fought to preserve redlining by asking voters in 1964 to approve “Proposition 14, prohibiting the state and any municipality from ever limiting residential discrimination in any way.” Not even in the Deep South did a state have such a provision in its constitution:
Victory would depend, realized Spike Wilson, the president of the California Real Estate Association, on convincing the large majority of white voters—who did not want to see themselves as racially prejudiced in any way—that the Realtors were campaigning not for discrimination but for American freedom. Realtors would need to secretly and systematically redefine American freedom as the freedom to discriminate—to challenge the idea at the heart of the civil-rights movement itself.
The first step was inventing what became known as “color-blind freedom” to justify discrimination. Per Wilson’s request, the national Realtors’ organization created a secret action kit to oppose fair housing everywhere. The kit’s detailed scripts instructed Realtors to “focus on freedom” and avoid “discussion of emotionally charged subjects,” such as “inferiority of races.” This kit, weighing a pound and a half and distributed to the local real-estate board in every American city, provided form speeches, Q&As, and press releases for their cause. Freedom, the kit explained, meant each owner’s right to discriminate, and Realtors were in favor of “freedom for all”: the equal rights of all owners to choose whom to sell to. Realtors claimed that they, unlike civil-rights advocates, were color-blind.
The key to color-blind freedom was what was left out. Wilson drafted a Property Owners’ Bill of Rights that Realtors advertised in newspapers nationwide, emphasizing owners’ absolute right to dispose of their property—never mentioning anyone’s right to buy or rent a home in the first place. The right to be treated equally, to not be discriminated against, to choose where to live, was not part of American freedom but a special privilege. Wilson therefore claimed that “militant minorities have organized and vocalized for equal rights until equal rights have become special privileges.” Color-blind freedom meant that government must be oblivious to, must forever allow, organized private discrimination.
And so on. Proposition 14 passed overwhelmingly after a well-funded campaign with freedom as its theme and government as its enemy. After the California Supreme Court ruled Proposition 14 unconstitutional in 1966, Ronald Reagan “adopted the Realtors’ cause and their message as his own.”
This idea of absolute individual rights was at the heart of how Realtors redefined American freedom. Freedom of choice was blazoned on L.A. freeway billboards. To discriminate simply means to choose, Realtors insisted. Freedom of choice required the right to discriminate
Slater explains, “Realtors had shown how conservatives could succeed. If this idea of freedom could triumph in California, it could work anywhere.” It would become the idea conservatives used to create a party “devoted to limiting federal regulation of business and civil rights” that could “unite southerners, working-class northern Democrats, and conservative and moderate Republicans in a new national majority party.”
Republican politicians now view every issue through this single lens: that American freedom means placing one’s own absolute rights over those of others. To go against that credo, to view freedom as belonging to the country itself and, as such, to everyone equally, threatens the party’s most basic tenet.
Decades after Proposition 14, e pluribus unum stands as “quaint” and “obsolete” among conservatives as Alberto Gonzales thought parts of the Geneva Conventions. This general-welfare-be-damned notion of “freedom for me and not for thee” now applies to virtually any conservative issue. It eventually underpinned the attack on the U.S. Capitol earlier this year.
This picture of freedom has a purpose: to effectively prioritize the freedoms of certain Americans over the freedoms of others—without directly saying so. By defining freedom as they did, Realtors did not have to say that it belonged more to some Americans than others. But it did—and it has ever since.
Freedom as bad faith. Which is why Republicans today rightly should be known as the BFP.
(h/t BF)