Christina and I chose to name this gallery “De Facto” to illuminate the real human experiences that define our lives when de jure institutions and laws sometimes dictate otherwise. The 14th Amendment tells us that we are guaranteed equal protection under the law, the promise of equity, fairness, and zero tolerance of discrimination. But that xenophobic, racist slur hurled at you in the Costco parking lot in the midst of the COVID pandemic tells us otherwise. The refusal of President Trump to refer to COVID-19 not as “coronavirus” but as the “Chinese virus” tells us otherwise. That is the de facto experience.
But in all the ways we say cite our de facto experience with discrimination, sometimes we fail to hold the government accountable for explicitly de jure policies that create the inequities we see today. In The Color of the Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein meticulously and rigorously details the historical de jure policies that created the racial identities and compositions of metropolitan and suburban areas today. He holds that it was not only de facto relations with race and individual prejudices that cultivated a hostile environment for Black people living in America but only that in conjunction with explicit laws, covenants, court rulings, and beyond could we have segregated America in the 20th century, with ramifications today, well into the 21st century.
In my junior year United States history class, the narrative was that the executive and legislative houses did not create nor enforce explicit segregationist policies. Some Americans were just blatantly racist and segregationist, and this is why it took us until the Civil Rights Movement to mobilize for change. But the people in office, our elected officials, most certainly were not, dare I say, racist or segregationist. Mostly it was our courts, the people expected to interpret the Constitution but not to involve themselves with the politics of it all, that dropped the ball— i.e. Plessy V. Ferguson… right?
But what happens when you learn that President Wilson segregated federal offices. That President FDR refused to extend the benefits of the New Deal such as minimum wages and bargaining power to African-American laborers. That the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), though with glowing and rapturous reviews in my history textbook, segregated its workers on the job and in housing, in some states denying African-Americans opportunities under the pretext that this work was for whites only.
Your idealist image of the land of the free is shattered. And you can’t absolve them just because you’re “using today’s standards to measure yesterday’s leaders.” No—the concept that all humans are born free and equal and deserving of opportunity is not novel, and we can’t pretend that it is.
You realize that maybe your curriculum isn’t as well-rounded as advertised. That you now have an obligation to fill in these gaps through reading on your own.
Ultimately, this book was a wake-up call. It demonstrated to me and to countless other readers that the onus of our racially segregated living landscape today is not on African-Americans wanting to live among each other in a community, or immigration and settling patterns of minorities, or individual bigotry, but rather explicit legislation by government and rulings by the courts to segregate our cities and suburbs.
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