White supremacy in liberal Seattle? "It's baked into the design of the city."

[pnwmom]

This is what the BLM protesters knew. Despite its progressive image, Seattle has a segregated past.

When we first moved to Seattle about thirty years ago, we were surprised to see that many of the house deeds contained racial covenants – promises not to sell a house to non-white people. We were told not to worry because the clauses were unenforceable. So Seattle didn’t have segregation imposed by the city. Our segregation was enforced by a network of housing associations with racial covenants.

http://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2015/7/20/no-single-family-zoning-isn-t-racist-but-many-single-family-neighborhoods-historically-were

The mayor put the notion front and center during the release of the official HALA report. “We are dealing not just with the national crisis of income inequality in our city,” he told reporters at city hall last Monday. “In Seattle, we’re also dealing with a pretty horrific history of zoning based on race, and there’s residue of that still in place.”

To back up their talk, the HALA committee points to a massive historical project put together by researchers at the University of Washington in 2006 called the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project. In particular, the committee cites—on pages 5 and 25—Seattle’s grim history of racially discriminatory covenants: amendments to property deeds that forbid minorities from purchasing, renting, or occupying property in a given neighborhood. At the time (between the 1920s and ’60s), this was perfectly legal. Despite a Supreme Court ruling in 1917 that declared segregationist city zoning unconstitutional, private sector covenants were still in the clear in the eyes of the law. Some covenants designated properties as white-only, while others explicitly barred certain races and ethnicities. Here’s a racial covenant from Capitol Hill: “No part of said premises shall ever be used or occupied by or sold, conveyed, leased, rented, or given to negroes or any person or persons of negro blood.” And another from Green Lake: “Said tract shall not be sold, leased, or rented to any person or persons other than of white race nor shall any person or persons other than of white race use or occupy said tract.” (All emphasis ours.)

According to Alan Durning, Executive Director of Sightline (a green city agenda think tank) and a member of HALA, members of the mayor’s task force (from both social justice and urbanist backgrounds) experienced a break-through moment during a presentation given by a representative from the city’s Race and Social Justice Initiative on redlining in Seattle. “The presenter throws a map up on the screen of the historic red lining in the city of Seattle. And then a map of current population by race and ethnicity. And it’s the same thing,” says Durning. “[the committee was like] ‘oh, right. It’s [segregation] baked into the design of the city.’”


SNIP

[KamaAina]

1. Oregon, too.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026123857

[shanti]

9. thank you for the link

i did not know this about oregon.

[leftofcool]

2. I could have told you this. When my late brother moved to Seattle, he was appalled

[MellowDem]

3. The BLM protesters...

Called the crowd white supremacists. That's not the same as saying segregation was instituted in the city, so they really didn't get that point across (and I don't think it was their point).

What's sad is that even though segregation is still not officially sanctioned, it's as prevalent as ever partially because our current economic model helps to perpetuate past inequalities even when legal barriers have been removed.

[pnwmom]

4. Some members of the crowd were shouting obscenities while

others were trying to participate in a 4 minute silence to honor Michael Brown.

So the BLMers were not the only ones who thought there were some bigots in the crowd. But the comment about white supremacy came in a larger context that was left out of many reports:

http://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2015/8/10/black-lives-matter-protestors-shut-down-bernie-sanders-speech-at-westlake

“We want our chance to welcome Bernie to Seattle,” Johnson said. “I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, filled with its [so-called] progressives, but you already did it for me. Thank you,” she said, referring to the booing crowd, “now that you’ve covered yourself in your white supremacist liberalism.”

Johnson proceeded to layout a list of grievances including disproportionate discipline rates between black and white students in Seattle Public Schools, gentrification in the Central District (Seattle’s historically black neighborhood), and the controversial new youth detention center at 12th and Alder juxtaposed against disparate incarceration rates of black youth.

[MellowDem]

5. They're terrible spokespeople...

They proved that. It's possible to talk about racism and its consequences without resorting to calling everyone and everything white supremacists. In fact, it makes it really tough to talk in any realistic way if someone does that.

They are right that even the most progressive areas of the U.S. See lots of segregation as a result of older policies. As for what the current prescription is, that's the really interesting question.

[lumberjack_jeff]

6. And gentrification has changed the color of many of the neighborhoods that remained integrated.

The self congratulatory aspects of Seattle liberalism are a bit annoying. Scan the crowd shots of the next Mariners game.

I'm not defending the disruptors at the social security event though - even if there is a point to be made about Seattle.

[Arugula Latte]

11. Re: the Mariners crowd

I'm not disputing the problems with race segregation in Seattle, etc., but one factor in the very white crowds at events like Mariners games is that according to the 2010 census, Seattle's black population is less than 8 percent. (I don't know about the surrounding suburbs, though.)

http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/cityplanning/populationdemographics/aboutseattle/raceethnicity/default.htm

[jmowreader]

16. Also, that less than 8 percent is smart enough to NOT go to Mariners games

[Bluenorthwest]

7. Of course it's not just Seattle and like in many other places Jewish people and Asians were also

subjected to segregation and restrictive covenants. Red lining and restrictive lending policies were very major in the creation of post WW2 suburbia in almost all instances, developers insisted on whites only financing from coast to coast. This is one of the key areas in which racism has been enforced in modern America including post civil rights America.
I'm not crazy about seeing an issue of such importance tossed about for partisan reasons. No national Democrats have ever addressed this. None of this happened in the last few years.

Segregation maps Here is a set of detailed maps showing residential locations for Blacks, Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, Jews, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Whites in Seattle from 1920-2010. Follow the link above to view more than 70 demographic maps.
http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/segregation_maps.htm

Here is a great report from NPR and Richard Rothstein.
"The second policy, which was probably even more effective in segregating metropolitan areas, was the Federal Housing Administration, which financed mass production builders of subdivisions starting in the '30s and then going on to the '40s and '50s in which those mass production builders, places like Levittown [New York] for example, and Nassau County in New York and in every metropolitan area in the country, the Federal Housing Administration gave builders like Levitt concessionary loans through banks because they guaranteed loans at lower interest rates for banks that the developers could use to build these subdivisions on the condition that no homes in those subdivisions be sold to African-Americans."
http://www.npr.org/2015/05/14/406699264/historian-says-dont-sanitize-how-our-government-created-the-ghettos

[Matariki]

8. And there's this shameful historical fact about our fair city...

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/opinion/article/Remember-Seattle-s-segregated-history-1222098.php

The ship canal that bisects Seattle means different things to different people. Younger Seattleites know that it means traffic jams during rush hour and when the bridges rise. Older Seattleites who are African American or Asian American may have a different association. They remember when the ship canal was a primary boundary of racial segregation, when people of color could not live beyond the canal and could not travel in North Seattle neighborhoods after dark.

[yardwork]

10. Is Seattle different from other cities in this respect?

I thought that our whole country was red-lined and segregated. It's hard to believe that Seattle is worse than any city in the south, for instance. What about Boston? Detroit? Cleveland?

This is a genuine question. Is Seattle different?

[pnwmom]

13. The difference is that in some cities back east

the segregation was mandated by law, so it was obvious. So were segregated schools.

In Seattle, it was hidden in the deeds of neighborhoods full of single family houses. So you didn't know it unless you tried to buy a house in one of those neighborhoods.

So what is different is that Seattle did it more subtly -- but just as effectively.

[yardwork]

14. Here in North Carolina, those restrictive covenants were also written into deeds.

[cemaphonic]

15. I think the idea is more the gulf between its history and progressive image.

There have been a few threads here over the years showing Google Map overlays on racial demographic distribution in American cities. Seattle is definitely more integrated than most large American cities, but still a long way from ideal, and there are some racial fault lines running through the city (like the ship canal mentioned elsewhere in this thread).

The other complicating matter is that discussions of racial politics usually involve white and black (and sometimes Hispanic) populations, but the Seattle metro area has about twice as many Asians as blacks (~15% vs 6%), so while Seattle is more integrated than Baltimore or Detroit, blacks are a small political block, and a lot of their concerns don't get much recognition from the city government.

[yardwork]

17. I see. Thanks for that explanation.

The bottom line is that communities cling to racism and segregation very persistently, even in supposedly more enlightened communities.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

12. NoCal too

I was raised in lolly-white NoCal and we abhorred racism. But it wasn't until I moved to Chicago in my early 20s twenty-five years ago that I was first confronted by palpable racism. At the time, I hadn't heard of gentrification, but that's why NoCal is lilly-white: they've simply priced blacks out of the neighborhoods. If you're black and can afford to live in these neighborhoods, you're welcomed. But since blacks won't come in numbers, no big whoop.