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Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America: If you think that segregation in the US persisted mostly because of private discrimination, you are wrong; even if you don’t, you may be surprised by the pervasive involvement of federal, state and local governments in creating and maintaining segregation and the economic disenfranchisement of African-Americans. For example, World War II defense projects “played a particularly important role in segregating urban areas … where few African Americans had previously lived. In some cities, the government provided war housing only for whites, leaving African Americans in congested slums.” In 1960, Savannah evicted all white families from an integrated housing project, arguing that “whites could easily find homes elsewhere.” In Miami, “African Americans eligible for public housing were assigned to distinct projects while eligible whites were given vouchers for rentals of private apartments to subsidize their dispersal throughout the community. It was not until 1998 that civil rights groups won a requirement that vouchers be offered to African Americans as well—too late to reverse the city’s segregation.” And on and on. In St. Louis, as elsewhere, zoning boards made exceptions to residential neighborhood rules “to permit dangerous or polluting industry to locate in African American areas.” Or, if integration threatened, areas would be rezoned by localities or land condemned to prevent integrated areas from being built. The University of Chicago, supported by tax exemptions, engaged in an expensive, successful campaign to maintain segregation around its environs. In Houston, the famously “unzoned” city, city planners separated previously adjacent black and white schools to different sides of the city to make families choose “their” side.
Further afield, government supported private attempts to limit African-American incomes through racially segregated unions and otherwise. In 1942, the feds took over training agencies, “which generally refused to enroll African Americans in training for skilled work. [The federal agency’s] instructions to local offices advised that if a company failed to specify a racial exclusion in its request for workers, the office should solicit one.” Property taxes tend to be overassessed in black neighborhoods and underassessed in white ones, ensuring again that it’s expensive to be black.
Ending overt discrimination has come too late: the structural advantage that white families got from buying a suburban house for $8000 ($75,000 in today’s dollars) has become embedded in white wealth. Rothstein argues for generally progressive policies to start addressing these problems, but I liked his off-the-wall proposal that “the federal government should purchase the next 15 percent of houses that come up for sale in Levittown at today’s market rates (approximately $ 350,000). It should then resell the properties to qualified African-Americans for $75,000, the price (in today’s dollars) that their grandparents would have paid if permitted to do so.” The epilogue discusses various objections about white innocence and the admitted disruption that would take place if we tried to fix things—ending with the powerful point that creating the current segregation required a lot of social engineering, and it’s a bit rich (so to speak) to reject government intervention now to fix it.
Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia: Gessen tells a number of individual stories: Russians whose ambitions for change after Communism collapsed mostly were dashed. Realistic social science and public debate had been impossible under the Soviet regime, so people didn’t even know what other people thought—people didn’t even necessarily think of themselves as entitled to have opinions. Ethnic tensions had been suppressed, not overcome. Rather than eliminating the KGB entirely, Yeltsin divided it among the republics, allowing Russia to inherit a functioning secret police. The political disruptions, the coups and counter-coups, of the transition/dissolution became a warning that anything could happen in politics: “Looking at [the charred remains of the White House, burned in one of these disruptive events], one wanted to stay as far away from politics as possible.” Gessen also identifies a self-perception of Russia as a poor country; added to that, two-thirds of survey respondents in the new academic study of Russians thought they earned less than other people of comparable skill and experience, “a statistical impossibility that doomed Russians to jealousy.” Privatization and Ponzi schemes, often indistinguishable, thrived but only left criminals richer.
While Russians were tired of thinking of themselves as inferior, Gessen suggests, they didn’t have a positive national self-concept other than as what she dubs a “blank mirror of the hostile and violent regimes under which Russians had long lived”: open, simple, and patient (which is to say, tolerant of violence). A totalizing ethos of Russianness gained currency, along with a resurgence of contempt for the US, which Gessen attributes in part to “a sort of habitual insensitivity Russians as a society had developed in response to the wars, the terror, the violence, and poverty of its own twentieth century” and in part to a history of defining themselves specifically in opposition to Americans. Putin deliberately suppressed civil society to prevent dissension from effecting change, aided by “political technologists” who created faux opposition parties and positions giving an illusion of actual debate. The new government-funded groups “had training camps and cool T-shirts, and in some smaller cities they organized dances and other leisure activities where none had been available.” New rules required independent candidates—those not already members of Parliament—to submit two million voter signatures to be a candidate, with no more than 50,000 from any one region of the country. This made a joke of democracy, and everyone knew it—that was the point.
Meanwhile, trumped-up criminal charges as a means of control spread from a defined class of people who’d ventured into the public sphere (“entrepreneurs engaged in property disputes, select politicians (who were also, more often than not, entrepreneurs engaged in property disputes), and radical political activists”) but beyond, meaning that choosing to disengage from the state wasn’t sufficient protection. Criminalization became the means to protect children from abortion, from drugs, from pedophiles (conflated with homosexuals). Homosexuality was apparently the key to all the other prejudices: One lieutenant tells one of Massen’s subjects that an antisemitic book linking homosexuality and Judaism had been distributed to every soldier in his platoon. ussian nationalists could both praise the National Organization for Marriage in the US, claiming the moral leadership of European Christianity, and tout sexual liberalization as an aberration from outside. By the way, neo-Nazi Richard Spencer is married to a Russian woman who served as English translator and American popularizer for a Russian theorist of nationalism who’s heavily influenced Putin.
Putin constantly connected the idea of political protest to sexual perversion, for example “joking” that he thought that white-ribbon-wearing protestors had pinned condoms to their jackets and referring to US imperialism with a term that translates as “they had everyone up the ass,” which could keep a Freudian busy for a while. And of course the classic move: the government blames protest on paid outside agitators (from the US), because that’s how it gets its own business done. Censorship, both of books and of increasingly risky public gatherings, increased due to vague laws that could be enforced at will. The contrast between “traditional values” and “foreign influence” allowed the regime to purport to act in the name of a real ideology, rather than in service of the constant churn that makes totalitarianism hard to fight. “[A] constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense that they could control anything themselves.”
Further afield, government supported private attempts to limit African-American incomes through racially segregated unions and otherwise. In 1942, the feds took over training agencies, “which generally refused to enroll African Americans in training for skilled work. [The federal agency’s] instructions to local offices advised that if a company failed to specify a racial exclusion in its request for workers, the office should solicit one.” Property taxes tend to be overassessed in black neighborhoods and underassessed in white ones, ensuring again that it’s expensive to be black.
Ending overt discrimination has come too late: the structural advantage that white families got from buying a suburban house for $8000 ($75,000 in today’s dollars) has become embedded in white wealth. Rothstein argues for generally progressive policies to start addressing these problems, but I liked his off-the-wall proposal that “the federal government should purchase the next 15 percent of houses that come up for sale in Levittown at today’s market rates (approximately $ 350,000). It should then resell the properties to qualified African-Americans for $75,000, the price (in today’s dollars) that their grandparents would have paid if permitted to do so.” The epilogue discusses various objections about white innocence and the admitted disruption that would take place if we tried to fix things—ending with the powerful point that creating the current segregation required a lot of social engineering, and it’s a bit rich (so to speak) to reject government intervention now to fix it.
Masha Gessen, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia: Gessen tells a number of individual stories: Russians whose ambitions for change after Communism collapsed mostly were dashed. Realistic social science and public debate had been impossible under the Soviet regime, so people didn’t even know what other people thought—people didn’t even necessarily think of themselves as entitled to have opinions. Ethnic tensions had been suppressed, not overcome. Rather than eliminating the KGB entirely, Yeltsin divided it among the republics, allowing Russia to inherit a functioning secret police. The political disruptions, the coups and counter-coups, of the transition/dissolution became a warning that anything could happen in politics: “Looking at [the charred remains of the White House, burned in one of these disruptive events], one wanted to stay as far away from politics as possible.” Gessen also identifies a self-perception of Russia as a poor country; added to that, two-thirds of survey respondents in the new academic study of Russians thought they earned less than other people of comparable skill and experience, “a statistical impossibility that doomed Russians to jealousy.” Privatization and Ponzi schemes, often indistinguishable, thrived but only left criminals richer.
While Russians were tired of thinking of themselves as inferior, Gessen suggests, they didn’t have a positive national self-concept other than as what she dubs a “blank mirror of the hostile and violent regimes under which Russians had long lived”: open, simple, and patient (which is to say, tolerant of violence). A totalizing ethos of Russianness gained currency, along with a resurgence of contempt for the US, which Gessen attributes in part to “a sort of habitual insensitivity Russians as a society had developed in response to the wars, the terror, the violence, and poverty of its own twentieth century” and in part to a history of defining themselves specifically in opposition to Americans. Putin deliberately suppressed civil society to prevent dissension from effecting change, aided by “political technologists” who created faux opposition parties and positions giving an illusion of actual debate. The new government-funded groups “had training camps and cool T-shirts, and in some smaller cities they organized dances and other leisure activities where none had been available.” New rules required independent candidates—those not already members of Parliament—to submit two million voter signatures to be a candidate, with no more than 50,000 from any one region of the country. This made a joke of democracy, and everyone knew it—that was the point.
Meanwhile, trumped-up criminal charges as a means of control spread from a defined class of people who’d ventured into the public sphere (“entrepreneurs engaged in property disputes, select politicians (who were also, more often than not, entrepreneurs engaged in property disputes), and radical political activists”) but beyond, meaning that choosing to disengage from the state wasn’t sufficient protection. Criminalization became the means to protect children from abortion, from drugs, from pedophiles (conflated with homosexuals). Homosexuality was apparently the key to all the other prejudices: One lieutenant tells one of Massen’s subjects that an antisemitic book linking homosexuality and Judaism had been distributed to every soldier in his platoon. ussian nationalists could both praise the National Organization for Marriage in the US, claiming the moral leadership of European Christianity, and tout sexual liberalization as an aberration from outside. By the way, neo-Nazi Richard Spencer is married to a Russian woman who served as English translator and American popularizer for a Russian theorist of nationalism who’s heavily influenced Putin.
Putin constantly connected the idea of political protest to sexual perversion, for example “joking” that he thought that white-ribbon-wearing protestors had pinned condoms to their jackets and referring to US imperialism with a term that translates as “they had everyone up the ass,” which could keep a Freudian busy for a while. And of course the classic move: the government blames protest on paid outside agitators (from the US), because that’s how it gets its own business done. Censorship, both of books and of increasingly risky public gatherings, increased due to vague laws that could be enforced at will. The contrast between “traditional values” and “foreign influence” allowed the regime to purport to act in the name of a real ideology, rather than in service of the constant churn that makes totalitarianism hard to fight. “[A] constant state of low-level dread made people easy to control, because it robbed them of the sense that they could control anything themselves.”
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