National

Supreme Court Sharply Divided Over Housing Bias Cases

Published

10 years ago

January 21, 2015

Oakland Post

Chief Justice John Roberts (AP Photo)

SAM HANANEL, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court appeared sharply divided Wednesday in a debate over a decades-old strategy for fighting discrimination in housing.

Chief Justice John Roberts expressed serious doubts during a one-hour argument that the 1968 Fair Housing Act can be used to ban housing or lending practices without any proof of intent to discriminate.

But Justice Antonin Scalia, who usually aligns with Roberts and other conservatives, asked tough questions of both sides, making it tough to determine how the court might rule in a case that has steep ideological divisions.

The court’s four liberal justices defended the use of so-called “disparate impact” lawsuits that allege even race-neutral policies can have a harmful effect on minority groups.

Civil rights organizations have speculated that the court took up the case to knock out such lawsuits, which have long been criticized by banks, mortgage companies and conservative groups.

The case involves an appeal from officials accused of awarding federal housing tax credits in a way that steered low-income housing into mostly poor, black neighborhoods in Dallas and generally kept the units out of wealthier white enclaves.

A Dallas-based fair housing group, Inclusive Communities Project Inc., sued the Texas Department of Housing and Community Development in 2008. The group alleged that agency policies were keeping Dallas neighborhoods segregated and denying blacks a chance to move into safer neighborhoods with better schools.

The housing advocacy group couldn’t prove Texas officials were intentionally biased. But a federal appeals court said the group could use statistics to show the effect of the policies still harmed black residents, in violation of the Fair Housing Act.

“It is very difficult to decide what impact is good and what impact is bad,” Roberts said. What if one community wants to build low-income housing to revitalize minority neighborhoods, while another wants to integrate white areas, he asked. “Which is the bad thing to do?”

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who was arguing in favor of disparate impact, said both plans may ultimately pass muster. Under the test that’s been in place for nearly 40 years, once a disparity is shown, a court must decide whether one race-neutral policy could be replaced with another race-neutral policy.

But Roberts pressed Verrilli with the same question three times, complaining that he wasn’t getting an answer.

Justice Anthony Kennedy said it seemed “very odd to me” that disparate impact could work in either case.

Scott Keller, the Texas Solicitor General, said there was no clear language authorizing discriminatory impact lawsuits when the housing law was passed in 1968.

But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called that argument “a little artificial” because the theory was not mainstream until the Supreme Court approved its use for employment discrimination cases in 1971.

Scalia told Keller that looking at the “grand goals” of Congress in 1968 to eliminate segregated housing, it seemed possible that lawmakers thought disparate impact cases were acceptable. But later, Scalia told Michael Daniel, lawyer for the Texas housing group, that “racial disparity is not racial discrimination.”

“The fact that the NFL is largely black players is not discrimination,” Scalia said.

Justice Stephen Breyer noted that every appeals court to consider the question for the past 40 years has found disparate impact acceptable in the housing context.

“Why when something is so well-established throughout the United States should the court come in and change it?” he asked Keller.

Texas officials say disparate impact claims would essentially force them to make race-conscious decisions to avoid liability. And while disparate impact is allowed under employment discrimination cases, they say it is not explicitly mentioned in the Fair Housing Act.

Texas has won support from business groups, including the Mortgage Bankers Association, the American Financial Services Association and others arguing that federal housing law should punish only intentional acts of discrimination.

But fair housing advocates say eliminating such claims means courts will recognize only the crudest forms of intentional discrimination and not more subtle forms of bias that persist today.

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Oakland Post: Week of December 25 – 31, 2024

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of December 25 – 31, 2024

Published

12 hours ago

December 26, 2024

Oakland Post

To enlarge your view of this issue, use the slider, magnifying glass icon or full page icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.

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Activism

OPINION: “My Girl,” The Temptations, and Nikki Giovanni

Giovanni was probably one of the most famous young African American women in the 1960s, known for her fiery poetry. But even that description is tame. The New York Times obit headline practically buried her historical impact: “Nikki Giovanni, Poet Who Wrote of Black Joy, Dies at 81.” That doesn’t begin to touch the fire of Giovanni’s work through her lifetime.

Published

3 days ago

December 24, 2024

Oakland Post

Nikki Giovanni. Courtesy of Nikki-Giovanni.com

By Emil Guillermo

The Temptations, the harmonizing, singing dancing man-group of your OG youth, were on “The Today Show,” earlier this week.

There were some new members, no David Ruffin. But Otis Williams, 83, was there still crooning and preening, leading the group’s 60th anniversary performance of “My Girl.”

When I first heard “My Girl,” I got it.

I was 9 and had a crush on Julie Satterfield, with the braided ponytails in my catechism class. Unfortunately, she did not become my girl.

But that song was always a special bridge in my life. In college, I was a member of a practically all-White, all-male club that mirrored the demographics at that university. At the parties, the song of choice was “My Girl.”

Which is odd, because the party was 98% men.

The organization is a little better now, with women, people of color and LGBTQ+, but back in the 70s, the Tempts music was the only thing that integrated that club.

POETRY’S “MY GIRL”

The song’s anniversary took me by surprise. But not as much as the death of Nikki Giovanni.

Giovanni was probably one of the most famous young African American women in the 1960s, known for her fiery poetry. But even that description is tame.

The New York Times obit headline practically buried her historical impact: “Nikki Giovanni, Poet Who Wrote of Black Joy, Dies at 81.”

That doesn’t begin to touch the fire of Giovanni’s work through her lifetime.

I’ll always see her as the Black female voice that broke through the silence of good enough. In 1968, when cities were burning all across America, Giovanni was the militant female voice of a revolution.

Her “The True Import of Present Dialogue: Black vs. Negro,” is the historical record of racial anger as literature from the opening lines.

It reads profane and violent, shockingly so then. These days, it may seem tamer than rap music.

But it’s jarring and pulls no punches. It protests Vietnam, and what Black men were asked to do for their country.

“We kill in Viet Nam,” she wrote. “We kill for UN & NATO & SEATO & US.”

Written in 1968, it was a poem that spoke to the militancy and activism of the times. And she explained herself in a follow up, “My Poem.”

“I am 25 years old, Black female poet,” she wrote referring to her earlier controversial poem. “If they kill me. It won’t stop the revolution.”

Giovanni wrote more poetry and children’s books. She taught at Rutgers, then later Virginia Tech where she followed her fellow professor who would become her spouse, Virginia C. Fowler.

Since Giovanni’s death, I’ve read through her poetry, from what made her famous, to her later poems that revealed her humanity and compassion for all of life.

In “Allowables,” she writes of finding a spider on a book, then killing it.

And she scared me
And I smashed her
I don’t think
I’m allowed
To kill something
Because I am
Frightened

For Giovanni, her soul was in her poetry, and the revolution was her evolution.

About the Author

Emil Guillermo is a journalist, commentator, and solo performer. Join him at www.patreon.com/emilamok

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Black History

Book Review: In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World

It’s a tale of heroes: the Maroons, who created communities in unwanted swampland, and welcomed escaped slaves into their midst; Sarah Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus”; Marème Diarra, who walked more than 2000 miles from Sudan to Senegal with her children to escape slavery; enslaved farmers and horticulturists; and everyday people who still talk about slavery and what the institution left behind.

Published

3 days ago

December 24, 2024

Oakland Post

Book cover. Courtesy of Smithsonian Books.

By Terri Schlichenmeyer

Ever since you learned how it happened you couldn’t get it out of your mind.

People, packed like pencils in a box, tightly next to each other, one by one by one, tier after tier. They couldn’t sit up, couldn’t roll over or scratch an itch or keep themselves clean on a ship that took them from one terrible thing to another. And in the new book “In Slavery’s Wake,” essays by various contributors, you’ll see what trailed in waves behind those vessels.

You don’t need to be told about the horrors of slavery. You’ve grown up knowing about it, reading about it, thinking about everything that’s happened because of it in the past four hundred years. And so have others: in 2014, a committee made of “key staff from several world museums” gathered to discuss “telling the story of racial slavery and colonialism as a world system…” so that together, they could implement a “ten-year road map to expand… our practices of truth telling…”

Here, the effects of slavery are compared to the waves left by a moving ship, a wake the story of which some have tried over time to diminish.

It’s a tale filled with irony. Says one contributor, early American Colonists held enslaved people but believed that King George had “unjustly enslaved” the colonists.

It’s the story of a British company that crafted shackles and cuffs and that still sells handcuffs “used worldwide by police and militaries” today.

Today, discussions about cooperation and diversity remain essential.

Says one essayist, “… embracing a view of history with a more expansive definition of archives in all their forms must be fostered in all societies.”

Unless you’ve been completely unaware and haven’t been paying attention for the past 150 years, a great deal of what you’ll read inside “In Slavery’s Wake” is information you already knew and images you’ve already seen.

Look again, though, because this comprehensive book isn’t just about America and its history. It’s about slavery, worldwide, yesterday and today.

Casual readers – non-historians especially – will, in fact, be surprised to learn, then, about slavery on other continents, how Africans left their legacies in places far from home, and how the “wake” they left changed the worlds of agriculture, music, and culture. Tales of individual people round out the narrative, in legends that melt into the stories of others and present new heroes, activists, resisters, allies, and tales that are inspirational and thrilling.

This book is sometimes a difficult read and is probably best consumed in small bites that can be considered with great care to appreciate fully. Start “In Slavery’s Wake,” though, and you won’t be able to get it out of your mind.

Edited by Paul Gardullo, Johanna Obenda, and Anthony Bogues, Author: Various Contributors, c.2024, Smithsonian Books, $39.95