How America's Realtors Repurposed Freedom to Defend Segregation - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...620709
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freedom ideology libertarian realtors choice discrimination history culture politics policy
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Conservatives in America have, in recent months, used the idea of freedom to argue against wearing masks, oppose vaccine mandates, and justify storming the Capitol. They routinely refer to themselves as “freedom-loving Americans.” Freedom, as a cause, today belongs almost entirely to the right.
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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.
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The conservative use of the idea of absolute freedom, of freedom as your personal property, to shift American politics to the right came shortly after King’s speech, and indeed was a direct reaction to his argument that one’s own freedom depended on everyone else’s
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conservative activists and business leaders designed an opposite idea of American freedom to protect their own interests
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Realtors had big incentives for maintaining segregation. Having invented it in the early 1900s as a marketing tool for selling homes, they had made segregation central to their business practices. They created racial covenants to exclude members of minority groups from new developments, existing neighborhoods, and entire cities and shaped federal redlining maps, all premised on the idea that anyone selling to minority families was destroying the future of all the neighbors.
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Despite the Supreme Court outlawing court enforcement of racial covenants in 1948, Realtors used racial steering—such as lying to minority prospective buyers that a home had just been sold and controlling newspaper real-estate listings—so effectively that by the early ’60s, Black Americans were excluded from 98 percent of new homes and 95 percent of neighborhoods.
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in asking voters to constitutionally authorize residential discrimination in Proposition 14, Realtors had a fundamental problem. How, at the height of the civil-rights movement, could they publicly campaign for sanctioning discrimination in California?
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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.
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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.
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The kit’s detailed scripts instructed Realtors to “focus on freedom” and avoid “discussion of emotionally charged subjects,” such as “inferiority of races.”
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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.
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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
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This was not always the case. In the early 1960s, civil-rights activists invoked freedom as the purpose of their struggle. Martin Luther King Jr. used the word equality once at the March on Washington, but he used the word freedom 20 times.
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Thus, the more disparate the issues on which this idea of freedom was invoked—abortion, guns, public schools, gender rights, campaign finance, climate change—the more powerful the message became.
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By making state bureaucrats the enemy, Realtors could be on the side of the underdog, the individual owner. Proposition 14, Realtors claimed, was not about race but about “the rights of the individual.”
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To discriminate simply means to choose, Realtors insisted. Freedom of choice required the right to discriminate.
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To be in favor of Proposition 14, to limit where millions of fellow Americans could live, did not mean that you were prejudiced but that you believed in individual freedom.
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Wilson cited Abraham Lincoln: “We are involved in a great battle for liberty and freedom. We have prepared a final resting place for the drive to destroy individual freedom.”
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King’s terms evoked his speech at the March on Washington, but he was now defending shared freedom not against southern diehards but against northern salesmen promoting color-blind “freedom of choice.”
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Proposition 14’s sweeping passage stunned politicians in both parties. The Realtors’ victory was overwhelming, with 65 percent of the total votes in favor, including 75 percent of the white vote and 80 percent of the white union vote.
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Color-blind freedom meant that government must be oblivious to, must forever allow, organized private discrimination.
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Reagan and other conservatives saw that the Realtors had zeroed in on something extremely powerful—something whose full force would not be limited to housing segregation but could be used on virtually any issue.
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Realtors had shown how conservatives could succeed. If this idea of freedom could triumph in California, it could work anywhere.
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though Realtors have disavowed their past arguments, the vision of freedom they created has had lasting effects on American politics as a whole.
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This vision of freedom proved so enduring because it solved three structural problems for American conservatism.
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First, Realtors used the language of individual freedom, of libertarianism, to justify its seeming opposite, community conformity.
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Here was a way to unite the two separate and competing strands of conservatism, to link libertarians and social conservatives in defense of American freedom—and create the way many, if not most, Americans understand freedom today.
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Reagan, running for governor, adopted the Realtors’ cause and their message as his own: “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so.”
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Second, by defining as freedom what government seemed to be taking away from “ordinary Americans,” Realtors helped create a polarizing, transcendent view of what was at stake in our politics
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This picture of government taking away your rights would provide a compelling reason, far beyond economics, for millions of union members, Catholics, and white Americans who had long been part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s coalition to see, in issue after issue, why they should define themselves as conservatives.
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Timeliest of all, the Realtors’ redefinition of freedom offered a common ideology for something new in modern America: a national conservative political party
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The Realtors’ color-blind freedom, which had proved so successful in California, could unite southerners, working-class northern Democrats, and conservative and moderate Republicans in a new national majority party—one very different from the Republican Party whose congressmen had voted 80 percent in favor of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
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Over time, the internal dynamics of a national conservative party would only push it further and further toward those who most ardently embraced the Realtors’ vision of freedom as the only meaning of American freedom. This dynamic has produced today’s Republican Party.
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Republican politicians now view every issue through this single lens: that American freedom means placing one’s own absolute rights over those of others.
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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.
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This idea of freedom is based on a technique that the Realtors perfected. They identified a single, narrow, obscure right, an owner’s right to choose a buyer—which Realtors themselves had restricted for decades with racial covenants—as American freedom itself.
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Elevating as absolute a right rarely mentioned before, so government cannot limit it or protect the rights of others, became the model for the conservative movement
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Everything that is not one of these carefully selected rights becomes, by definition, a privilege that government cannot protect, no matter how fundamental.
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Since January 6, two-thirds of Republicans—more than 40 percent of all Americans—now see voting not as a basic right, an essential part of our freedom, but as a privilege for those who deserve it.
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This picture of freedom has a purpose: to effectively prioritize the freedoms of certain Americans over the freedoms of others—without directly saying so