A Knee on All Our Necks

My son Peter Anderson posted this on Facebook today. 

“You’d better not be lying to me, young man. If you’re lying, and our dogs catch a whiff of your scent, they’ll track you down and chew you up real good.”

That is a snippet from the first real world interaction I remember having with a police officer. I was fourteen years old, walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood to meet up with a friend, when two police cruisers turned the corner and hemmed me in. After shining his flashlight directly in my face and shouting at me to keep my hands where he could see them, the officer in the driver’s seat of the closest car started interrogating me about who I was, where I was from, and where I was going. He and his partners were on the hunt for two car theft suspects, and according to them I “fit the description”. After thorough questioning they let me go about my business, but not before leaving me with that gem about what might happen if the canines caught my scent.

The next time I “fit the description” was about eight years later. I was waiting at a bus stop on my way to the low wage retail job I was working to get by during the 2008 recession. Just as the bus arrived and I got in line to get on, a police officer approached and instructed me to step out of the line so he could ask me a few questions. He had that puffed chest, carrying heavy suitcases look of a man who enjoys his authority a bit too much. He asked for my ID and made a big show of examining it thoroughly, peppered me with questions about where I was coming from and where I was going (despite the fact that I was clearly wearing a retail work uniform and catching a bus during a typical commute time), and kept the bus waiting on me for more than five minutes, with nearly all the passengers gawking at me through the windows. He explained to me that he was on the lookout for a burglary suspect and that he stopped me because I “fit the description”. He told me I was free to go, sans apology of course, and I got on the bus to enjoy the awkward experience of an entire busload of eyeballs on me as I made my way to my seat.

Those interactions with the police are seared into my memory, but I think they’ve had less of an impact on me than the cumulative psychological effects of the less memorable, micro-indignities I’ve experienced throughout my life: Being greeted with a fist bump by older white men who had greeted their white counterparts with a normal handshake just moments earlier; being called “Tyrone” by random drunken college kids; overhearing white guys who I thought were my friends casually drop the word “nigger” after getting a few too many drinks in them...as if a bottle of tequila were a time warp back to 1940; meeting the father of a girl I dated in college who barely bothered to hide his displeasure at his daughter dating a black guy. The list goes on, but I think you get the point.

Most people who know me have never heard me tell those stories before. Mostly for philosophical reasons - I’ve long felt strongly that perpetuating a victimhood complex is not the path to empowerment for black Americans. This has gotten me into some spirited debates with friends of mine, and it’s the reason I’ve often been critical of Ta-Nehisi Coates and some elements of the BLM movement. But the murder of George Floyd has created a shift in consciousness that seems to demand that black men and women share their experiences of racism with those who up to this point may have only had a vague, intellectual understanding of what it means to be black in America. The image of a white man dressed in the uniform of institutional power with his knee against the neck of a defenseless and shackled black man isn’t just an atrocity caught on camera - it’s a symbol of a greater truth: that racism isn’t just a concept to be “woke” to...it’s a physical reality that has defined the black experience since our nation’s inception. We were born with a knee on our necks.

I now feel that this is the moment to pull back the curtain on that reality as far as possible. Not to shame white people or demand that they confront their “white privilege” (a term that has always sounded a bit too much like “original sin” for my taste), but to make human civilization better by sharing our burdens. Because a burden shared is a burden lifted...and with that burden lifted from our necks, we might one day find it easier to breathe.

Real Estate and Inequality

My nephew Andrew McLane wrote this June 2 on Facebook after the weekend of protests following George Floyd's murder by police.

I don’t normally post on social media, but the events of the past week have catalysed an anger deep inside me that I cannot ignore and feel compelled to share. So here is some of what has been on my mind these past few days:

We all know and say that this country’s original sin was slavery. This is undisputed. However, I want to share another insidious sin this country committed around 75 years ago, a sin whose rotten fruits we are harvesting today and will continue to for some time.

During World War 2, before we declared victory in Europe and the Pacific, our federal government passed the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, which most know now as the GI Bill. This bill was designed to ensure that American soldiers would be guaranteed a prosperous life after they returned from the war. One of the most crucial components of the GI Bill was providing servicemen the option to obtain a low-interest, low- or no-down payment 30 year mortgage to buy one of the hundreds of thousands of new, suburban houses being built around the country. Just seven years after the war, 2.4 million of these loans had been made to veterans.

Sounds good, right? Well, this program had one massive, gaping hole in it: these home loans weren’t issued by the government directly. Instead, they were backed by the government, but issued by private lenders. Since this is the 40s and the 50s, hundreds of thousands of black veterans, who had answered the call of duty in the face of fascism and tyranny, were denied these loans by white-run financial institutions. The government that they had fought and spilled blood for didn’t implement protections from racial discrimination, and this was by design to appease Southern Democrats in order to convince them to vote for it.

In addition to our government not looking out for its black veterans in regards to obtaining home loans, it would take Uncle Sam another 30 years from the passage of the first GI Bill to ban the practice of racial covenants. These covenants allowed suburban developers to bar all non-white people from buying property in new neighborhoods, and these restrictions would be passed on to all subsequent owners.

A black veteran returning from World War 2 would have to wait 24 years before he could go into a bank without fear of being legally denied a home loan on the basis of being black. If that wasn’t enough of an injustice, he would have to wait another six years before he could buy a house in any neighborhood without fear of being prevented in doing so on the basis of being black.

As many of you know, I’m a real estate broker. I get to help people through one of the biggest purchases of their lifetime, and all the brokers at my office are wonderful human beings. I got into this industry because it’s exciting, fascinating, and fun. But it wasn’t until after I became a real estate professional that I learned the full extent of this dark, racist history.

In the process of obtaining your real estate license, you’re given a brief history of housing and lending discrimination in the 20th century, and this usually transitions into the laws and ethics that real estate professionals must abide by in both marketing and business activity.

However, these lessons don't touch on why this history is important.

Today, the sum value of America’s residential real estate holdings is hovering around $33 trillion. The vast majority of that wealth has been created since the passing of the GI Bill and the massive expansion of new Levittown-style suburbs. Our government, through multiple and intentional actions, denied black people, black veterans, the ability to access this financial opportunity. To put this into further perspective, we are only one and a half standard length mortgages removed from that codified segregation.

Time and time again, black people have been denied their supposedly “constitutional” rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, and real estate has been no different. If you come from a place of privilege like myself, think of it this way: If you’re my age and don’t own a home, think of all the wealth in your family. How much of that is in the form of your parent’s home, which will be passed on down to you? If you already own your own home, how much of your down payment was paid for by your parents? Or, if you make good money, how much of your college education, which allows you to make good money, was financed by your parent’s home equity? Like I said, Black Americans have only had one generation’s worth of unfettered access to that opportunity. The more I think about the implications of what this country has done, the more I am sickened by it.

Today, I see listings for homes in the Central District and the Rainier Valley, with specific descriptions that describe these neighborhoods. Every time I see an example of this I cringe, because whether the agent who wrote those words knew it or not, they are utilizing the same verbiage that white lenders used to racially classify neighborhoods all those decades ago. As you can see from this map, when the CD was all-black it was “definitely declining”, or “hazardous”. But now that white people have completely flipped the demographics of these same neighborhoods, agents can describe them as “up and coming”, or “trendy”, or even flat out using the word “desirable”, like the racially covenanted white neighborhoods were described at the time.

I don’t want any broker or lender that knows me to think that I’m directly blaming them, because I’m not. However, we as an industry need to realize this: it is absolutely imperative that we acknowledge and come to terms with our historic culpability in the plight that black Americans face today. It is absolutely imperative that we understand how our current conduct affects communities that suffered at the hands of institutionalized property segregation and racism. It is absolutely imperative that we ensure that we reform as an industry going forward, because as we all should know, THIS IS STILL HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.

We all know the terms blockbusting, steering, and redlining, but what do we know about the effects these horrible acts have on the people of color that lived and still do live in the neighborhoods we serve? We need to do better. We can do better.

I didn’t join the protests this past weekend because of my health condition, but my anger has now surpassed my fear of getting COVID-19. I will be marching this week, for George Floyd, and I will be marching this week because #BlackLivesMatter. I hope to see you all there with me too.