by Lawrence Bush on April 10, 2012
The Civil Rights Act of 1968, commonly called the Fair Housing Act, which outlawed discrimination in the sale, rental, financing and advertising of housing based on race, color, religion, sex (1974), national origin, disability (1988) or family configuration (1988), was signed by President Lyndon Johnson on this date in 1968, one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Jewish organizations, notably the American Jewish Congress and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, took an early leadership role in the campaign for this law, and in every state “there is evidence of some major contribution from Jewish groups,” according to analyst Duane Lockard, including “money to finance campaigns, staff to coordinate and direct activities, lobbying and intralegislative assistance, substantial legal advice and assistance in the drafting and in the defense of civil rights laws.” Anti-Semitic discrimination in housing had peaked and begun to fade in the 1940s and early 1950s — and Jewish housing developers such as William Levitt (Levittown) had actively practiced racist discrimination in building the American suburbs — yet Jewish support for the legislation, within Congress and through the civil rights movement, was solid and critical. Passage of the bill was also strongly influenced by the March 1, 1968 publication of the Kerner Commission report on “race riots” during the 1960s, which pointed to housing segregation as moving America “toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” The legislation gave no strong tools of enforcement, however, and has sadly failed to produce racially integrated neighborhoods throughout the country.
“Integration has certainly not hurt us . . . (but) any homebuilder who chooses to operate on an open occupancy basis, where it is not customary or required by law, runs the grave risk of losing business to his competitor who chooses to discriminate.” —William Levitt
by Alyssa Goldstein on February 26, 2012
So last I was here, I left you with the promise that I’ll look more closely at anti-miscegenation stories like the ones on the Yad L’Achim website and the racist assumptions they make about Palestinians. But they’re not the racist assumptions you were probably expecting!
Here’s what I was surprised to find. In any anti-miscegenationist literature, you might expect that men of the disparaged racial group are warned against because they are “racially inferior,” or have not yet “progressed” to an appropriate cultural level. Going into writing my senior thesis, I would not have expected Israeli anti-miscegenationists to call Palestinian men racially inferior, since members of this movement generally (though not always) attempt to distance themselves from charges of racism. The second explanation would have seemed more likely. Literature that attempts to dissuade Jewish women from entering relationships with Palestinian men almost always centers around claims that Palestinian men are abusive. I would have expected the authors of these accounts to claim that Palestinians have not “culturally advanced” to the proper level of respect for women. However, I did not come across a single account that suggested that “progress” was possible in Palestinian society at all. As I write in my senior thesis: [click to continue…]
by Marc Jampole on February 9, 2012
Newt Gingrich has persisted in calling President Obama the “food stamp” president, despite the fact that more people went on food stamps during Bush II’s presidency than during the Obama presidency.
What I find interesting is how many people, both conservative and progressive, assume that the statement is inherently racist. And behind the assumption of racism stands two other assumptions: [click to continue…]
by Lawrence Bush on November 2, 2011
Dr. Paul Bermanzohn, the son of Holocaust survivors, was among 15 members of the Communist Workers Party who were wounded or killed on this date in 1979 in an attack by the Ku Klux Klan in Greensboro, North Carolina. Dr. Michael Nathan, the chief of pediatrics at the Lincoln Community Health Center in Durham, a clinic that served low-income people, was among five killed in that assault, and a civil suit in 1985 found several of the Klansmen, as well as some Greensboro police officers, liable for his wrongful death. The CWP members had been organizing mostly black industrial workers in the area and were leading a “Death to the Klan” march in a Black housing development when an armed caravan of Klansmen descended upon them and opened fire. Two criminal trials resulted in acquittals of 14 defendants by all-white juries. In 2005, a Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (for Bermanzohn’s testimony, click here) determined that both the police and the FBI had been alerted by informants to the likelihood of violence but had taken no actions to prevent it.
“Over the years I discovered that my roots as the child of a Holocaust survivors gave me special credibility among Black people who had suffered from the severe oppression of the racist system in the US. As we developed our work in the communities around NC, this bond was strengthened repeatedly as I became an organizer in the Black community.” —Paul Bermanzohn
The Civil Rights Act of 1968, commonly called the Fair Housing Act, which outlawed discrimination in the sale, rental, financing and advertising of housing based on race, color, religion, sex (1974), national origin, disability (1988) or family configuration (1988), was signed by President Lyndon Johnson on this date in 1968, one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Jewish organizations, notably the American Jewish Congress and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, took an early leadership role in the campaign for this law, and in every state “there is evidence of some major contribution from Jewish groups,” according to analyst Duane Lockard, including “money to finance campaigns, staff to coordinate and direct activities, lobbying and intralegislative assistance, substantial legal advice and assistance in the drafting and in the defense of civil rights laws.” Anti-Semitic discrimination in housing had peaked and begun to fade in the 1940s and early 1950s — and Jewish housing developers such as William Levitt (Levittown) had actively practiced racist discrimination in building the American suburbs — yet Jewish support for the legislation, within Congress and through the civil rights movement, was solid and critical. Passage of the bill was also strongly influenced by the March 1, 1968 publication of the Kerner Commission report on “race riots” during the 1960s, which pointed to housing segregation as moving America “toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” The legislation gave no strong tools of enforcement, however, and has sadly failed to produce racially integrated neighborhoods throughout the country.
