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I noticed the racial and economic segregation in our community when we drove on Snelling Avenue on our way home from Birmingham. At Summit Avenue I saw white college students jogging past enormous houses. Just a few miles north, a group of African-American women carried groceries onto a bus that stopped near the faded green Rainbow Foods building in the Midway area. Hamline’s campus looked like a park - daffodils and all, at the time - next to billboards and rundown shops. We dropped the van off at the
Ford dealership just past Byerly’s in Roseville. I couldn’t help but notice that all the customers at the Ford dealership were white.

There is no question that our community is segregated. The question is this: Why does it matter?
Hamline sophomore Mike Pesko, who grew up in a predominantly white town adjacent to a Native
American reservation, said segregation greatly affected him.

“I realized only after coming to Hamline what I had been missing in terms of the richness of racial and ethnic diversity,” he said. “I wish that I had more experience with it [before college], because I think it would have made me a better student, Christian, and person.”

Hamline junior Chee Yang grew up in a San Diego neighborhood that was primarily Hmong.

“When my dad sent me to a new school just four miles away,” she said, “I was the only Hmong student there, and my white classmates asked what I was. They didn’t know about Hmong people, and they didn’t know that there was a whole school of Hmong students just four miles away.

"I think our culture makes you feel segregated in yourself, and this makes it difficult to get along with people from other cultures.”

Powell argues in his 2002 article “On Race and Space” that “the effect [of segregation] has been to lock people who are not white out of access to opportunity ... sprawl is the new face of Jim Crow.” A person’s access to jobs, education, and health care is tied directly to where they live, he says.

But doesn’t everyone have equal access to housing, regardless of their race? Perhaps history is a good place to turn for an answer.

The 2003 PBS video Race: The Power of an Illusion explains how housing policy took shape in the United
States. After WWII, soldiers returned home to a housing crisis. The United States Federal Housing
Administration (FHA) responded by creating a loan system that made it possible for average citizens to own homes. New communities sprang up on the outskirts of cities - suburbs - and tax dollars helped make the single-family home a mass-produced consumer item.

The FDA, however, excluded the 10 million black GIs who fought in segregated regiments from living in these new suburban communities. One black couple interviewed in the video said they were told by a real estate agent, “Listen, it’s not me, but the owners of this development have not, as yet, decided to sell these homes to Negroes.” This statement seems to be an act of individual racism; in reality, however, the development owner’s decision was tied to government policy.

The FHA had created an appraisal system where race was as much a factor in assessment as the condition of the property. Across the United States, 239 cities were evaluated and given a color-coded rating - white communities were given the highest rating (green), while non-white communities were given the lowest rating (red). This became known as “red-lining.”

The FHA red-lining discouraged private banks from investing in non-white communities, the video explains, and between 1934 and 1962, the FHA underwrote $120 billion in new housing. Less than two percent went to non-whites. The FHA policies left people of color, including veterans, to live in cities where urban renewal programs concentrated poverty into self-perpetuating vertical ghettos.

White suburbia was essentially created by the United States government. In the video, a resident of the new suburban community said, “We were an all-white community, and I think it’s an unrealistic world. I think there is something sterile about everyone being on the same economic level and everyone being the same color.”

The artificial world didn’t last long.

In 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act, ending red-lining and making it possible for non-whites to move into the suburbs. As non-whites moved in, real estate agents played on the racial fears of white residents and offered them cash to move out. Many did, leaving neighborhoods vacant with few potential buyers. The value of these suburban homes dropped. While the homes and rental units of non-whites decreased in value, the value of homes in white communities increased. This has enormous impact on income disparities between whites and non-whites today, because the majority of Americans hold most of their wealth in home equity; in other words, we “live in our savings banks.”

Many parents of white Hamline students, like mine, have used home equity to save up for retirement and to finance their children’s educations. Thus, it appears as if our parents' financial success is a result only of their hard work. However, as author Beverly Daniel Tatum says in the PBS video, wealth was made more available to non-whites as a direct result of the government’s racist policies.

“To a child, it looks like my father worked hard and bought a house and managed it to finance my education, so why didn’t your father do that?” she said. “Well, there are good reasons if your father was Black, Latino, or Native American.”

We continue today to live with the consequences of the racist FHA policies, which means that many whites have the unearned, unasked-for privilege of housing equity. At the same time, we continue to create a new history of “white flight.” White Bear Lake and Edina were once outer-ring suburbs; now cities farther from the metro area, such as Lino Lakes and Belle Plaine, have taken their place.

And as driving becomes a burden for suburban dwellers, some are moving back into the cities, raising the value of urban homes and making them unaffordable for the people of color and poor whites who have been forced to live in the dying core for the past 40 years.

Racial discrimination is playing out in rental housing too. Edward Goetz’s 2002 study of rental application fees in Minnesota determined that white households averaged $60 in fees, while non-white households averaged $236. Homelessness also disproportionately affects people of color, and it is tied to the lack of affordable homes in areas where jobs are abundant and quality education is available. While blacks make up only three percent of the adult population in Minnesota, 40 percent of homeless adults are black.
Native Americans and Latinos are also disproportionately represented in the homeless population.

Now I understand the wisdom of the elderly civil rights activist. Our generation must step up to the plate and fight against the racial and economic segregation that plagues our cities. Here are a few ideas for action:

• Watch the three-part video series Race: The Power of an Illusion, available in Bush Library.

• Attend Homeless on the Hill and the Housing Lobby Day, March 9 and 10 at the MN State Capitol.

• Visit the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Race and Poverty web site at www.umn.edu/irp

• Create a scholarship for students whose parents cannot take out a home equity loan to pay for tuition.

• Be aware of where you choose to live: Are you perpetuating urban sprawl?

• Educate policy-makers about this issue.