Reimagining Equality

by Anita Hill

  Through Executive Order 9066, Franklin Roosevelt authorized the forcible removal of over one hundred thousand people of Japanese ancestry from their homes, confining them to government internment camps for years. Initially, even Roosevelt’s benevolent pension plans were flawed. Household workers—a large majority of whom were women, and many of whom were racial minorities—were excluded from benefits, as were agricultural workers. And Lyndon Johnson and fellow Democrats, as well as the Supreme Court itself in Milliken v. Bradley, refused to see how local, state, and federal policy encouraged, according to Justice Thurgood Marshall in his dissent, “our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities—one white, the other black.”20 Democratic leadership seemingly accepted the 1960s and 1970s “white flight” from the Democratic Party, and from the homes that became accessible to blacks, as a fait accompli. Very little leadership effort seemed to be put into stemming the tide on either front. Southern white Democrats were seemingly content to go with the political flow by becoming Republicans.

  Yet despite the shortcomings and inconsistencies in each president’s plan, each moved the country toward a stronger democracy for all. If President Obama is to do the same, he must be mindful of the deficiencies in earlier plans. He must call upon all of us, this time, to dig deeper to make sure no one is left out, or even sacrificed for what is conveniently seen as the “greater good.”

  A vision of a more inclusive America, an enlarged concept of home, must guide us as we address the problems of those displaced by the housing crisis and those still awaiting their chance for the American Dream. The Obama administration’s plans to help homeowners of all stripes retain their houses included a $75 billion loan modification program. Yet this amount barely covered the millions of borrowers at risk of foreclosure. The federal foreclosure mediation program to help train counselors and pro bono attorneys who can counsel and support homeowners is lofty, but administrative efforts must go beyond policies that help home buyers pay their mortgages.

  Residents feeling the pain of the foreclosure crisis vary, and so do their needs. Three categories are worth pointing out. Buyers who have been in homes that they struggled to purchase and to keep for decades may now find themselves or their neighbors on the verge of foreclosure. At the very least, many of these long-termers have seen their property values drop and their nest eggs dwindle. In abandoned or dubious areas, security issues are particularly acute for them. Their prospects for retirement and passing on family wealth are greatly diminished. In fact, they may be passing on debt to their children and grandchildren. Demographics and life expectancy being what they are, many of these homeowners are women.

  People who before the meltdown were ten, fifteen, or even twenty years into their home mortgage face a different predicament. These mid-lifers are confronted with the prospect of foreclosure and additional years in the workplace to rebuild pensions and depleted college funds for their children. Moreover, their ability to borrow money to make sure their children get a university degree is jeopardized by their foreclosure status. Even if they keep their homes, the value has declined, and there will be no borrowing against it to make sure their offspring’s education matches or surpasses their own. Many midlifers are couples; many are single, and those one-parent households are most likely headed by women. They are what we once thought of as the solid middle class, the bedrock of the country’s economic and social structure. Ironically, the foundation we thought was sound badly needs shoring up.

  Finally, there are the new entrants to the housing market. Not only are many of them facing foreclosure, but they are the ones who find themselves under the burden of the greatest debt because they bought high and, if they can sell at all, will have to sell low. This category is filled with buyers whose loans are being repaid from one income. The potential fallout from the loss of that income is tremendous but, given the slow jobs recovery, not unimaginable. The new entrants’ category is filled with single women, women of color, and young couples, many of whom are in lower-paying jobs and perhaps bought into neighborhoods in transition because that’s all they could afford. Given the downturn in the entire economy, it’s likely that the upward transition they anticipated has halted. New entrants may walk away from mortgages and turn (or return) to renting, but that market too suffers the same capriciousness as the home-buying market. The combination of compromised credit records and the poor quality of renting opportunities may result in marginalization of these would-be owners. The future for them and their children is in limbo.

  In short, one or more government policies won’t fit all. Renegotiating loans is a start, but is not a make-whole solution.

  The Obama Justice Department supports cities like Memphis and Baltimore in their lawsuits against Wells Fargo. But punishing a handful of lenders in isolated lawsuits throughout the country is not a national strategy for addressing the displacement of millions, a problem that is now spreading to rural areas. Administrative policies like Making Home Affordable, which helps buyers restructure loans, and the Neighborhood Stabilization Act, which provides grants to cities for purchasing and rehabilitating foreclosed properties, have the potential to help stem the dislocation of families, but can cover only a fraction of the households suffering from the collapse of the market. Yes, more must be done to rebuild our cities—especially the pockets that are public and private service wastelands—and those efforts will have to involve the banking industry.

  Of special concern to the problem of home is the lack of financial services available in many inner-city neighborhoods, where people rely on check cashing services that charge fees as high 20 percent and payday loan outlets and rent-to-own stores that command appallingly high interest rates. These precursors to subprime lending continue to flourish in many communities. I have no doubt that the acceptance of these credit options as the norm contributed to the culture inside the banking industry that declared that certain neighborhoods deserved no more than toxic credit products, like the subprime and high-cost devices that even the country’s largest banks peddled. Indeed, researchers Jacob Rugh and Douglas Massey have concluded that years of racial segregation and isolation in America’s cities created a natural market for subprime loans, resulting in high rates of foreclosure and leaving “minority group members uniquely vulnerable to the housing bust.”21 If communities remain racially isolated and devoid of employment opportunities, retail clothing and food outlets, and options for viable credit, our entire society will continue to be susceptible to additional catastrophes.

  Just as not all residents are the same, neither are all cities in the same predicament. Places like Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, and Los Angeles have their own unique genealogy. Where they are today is shaped by their past. Within each city’s history is the special place it held as the ground where the hopes and aspirations of migrants would be met, where they would find a more hospitable home. Those stories are part of a larger American story of promise that must be taken into account as we revitalize our cities.

  As middle-income people of color begin the reverse migration to the South, cities lose social capital and a portion of their economic base. Farming in rural areas by people of color is not a workable option. Urban policy must give people a place and a reason to stay. Yes, critics will choose to deny this part of our national narrative and even claim that efforts directed at inner-city neighborhoods amount to racial reparations. So be it. If we’ve learned nothing over the past two years, we’ve surely learned that the fate of urban areas and those who live in them is linked to the health of the entire nation. As they suffer, so suffers the American Dream. Refusal to address problems in distressed communities is tantamount to cutting off the country’s nose.

  Can We Talk?

  Sadly, experience tells us that President Obama will have a difficult time addressing race publicly. Since his election, the president’s one attempt to broach the topic proved problematic and ultimately unfruitful. In what Harv
ard law professor Charles Ogletree calls a teaching moment on the lingering issues of racial inequality, President Barack Obama called for a “beer summit” on the White House lawn.22 Joining him were Vice President Joe Biden, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, and Cambridge police officer James Crowley.

  Chance brought the cast of characters together on that summer night in July 2009. Weeks earlier, Officer Crowley had responded to a call from a passerby who saw Gates trying to enter his Cambridge home and suspected that he might be a burglar. Even after Gates produced identification showing that he belonged in the neighborhood, and indeed in that home, Crowley arrested him for disorderly conduct. What ensued was a series of comments by the president about the imprudent arrest and a public ruckus—never really a full-fledged debate—over racial profiling.

  After a forty-minute chat on the Rose Garden patio, the president declared his hope that we would all draw a positive lesson from the episode. But in fact, the “beer summit,” intended to serve as a moment of reconciliation and illumination, fell flat. The topic, context, and even players failed to offer America a lasting engagement in a conversation on race.

  Gender won’t be easy for President Obama to speak to either, especially given his contentious primary battles with Hillary Clinton in which gender and race collided. Even though he has not made speeches about gender equality, he has signed important legislation designed to protect women against workplace discrimination. On January 29, 2009, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was one of the first bills President Obama signed into law. His order establishing the White House Council on Women and Girls was hailed as a landmark as well. But that council has been relatively quiet. If we are to achieve the more inclusive America his presidency promises, the Obama administration cannot shy away from talking about either gender or race bias in the country.

  My experience in the years since the 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing convinces me of the power of public discourse. Following my testimony about Supreme Court nominee Thomas’s egregious conduct toward me, the nation began an earnest, though often contentious and painful, conversation on the issue of sexual harassment. Talking publicly and privately about the problem changed our collective understanding of the nature of a behavior that had been the bane of women’s and girls’ workplace experience for centuries, notwithstanding laws that prohibited it. Changing the way we talked and thought about sexual harassment encouraged individuals and the legal system to combat it. Employers instituted zero-tolerance workplace policies. Women and men filed complaints in record numbers. Many succeeded. The Supreme Court, which had decided only one sexual harassment case in its history, in one year (1998) heard three claims. In one claim against automobile manufacturer Mitsubishi Motors, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal government’s office for enforcing anti–sexual harassment laws, negotiated a record $34 million settlement. Though the problem of sexual harassment still exists, in the years since the hearing, we as a country have learned a lot about the pernicious nature of gender inequality. We are better off for having started a long-overdue conversation about sexual harassment.

  The foreclosure crisis and the loss of homes should serve as the impetus for another public conversation that would include national, state, local, community, and business leaders, as well as regular people. The times call for a “Home Summit,” not at the White House but in communities around the country. President Obama has two offices at his disposal to help orchestrate such a discussion. Together, the Council on Women and Girls (CWG) and the White House Domestic Policy Council (DPC) are made up of representatives from Cabinet-level federal agencies. The DPC coordinates the domestic policy-making process in the White House, offers advice to the president, and supervises the execution of domestic policy.23 Given the housing crisis and the effort it is taking for us to recover from it, it’s hard to imagine a more critical domestic concern than the search for home in America.

  The CWG, chaired by Obama’s adviser and friend Valerie Jarrett, is the only White House agency with equality written into its mission. When Obama established the council, he noted that the issues facing women today “are not just women’s issues.” In particular, he observed that “when women make less than men for the same work, it hurts families who find themselves with less income.”24 Likewise, in the housing crisis, women and their families often find themselves shut out of the American Dream. As an issue impacting the entire country, home is a fitting topic for the council to tackle.

  One may question whether an agency whose mission is to address gender inequality is up to responding to racial inequities. It can, but only if the leadership is truly multiracial. If they know anything about social bias, women of color know that their equality can be achieved only through the elimination of both race and gender inequality. When the CWG was established, its mandate was quite broad. Obama cited “the true purpose of our government” in signing the presidential order commissioning the group “to ensure that in America, all things are still possible for all people.” Moreover, the council must make sure that federal agencies consider “the needs of women and girls in the policies they draft, the programs they create, the legislation they support.”25 In working with Congress to make sure that the administration’s policies are implemented, the DPC’s role is complementary to that of the CWG.

  The DPC’s and CWG’s first order of business would be to convene discussions of the concerns of those set adrift by the home crisis. Together these two agencies have the authority to bring together the myriad of buyers, government agencies, and private financial institutions implicated in the collapse of the housing market. The dialogue model could be adapted from President Bill Clinton’s Conversation on Race. Clinton himself took the lead in that 1997 initiative calling for a “great and unprecedented conversation.”26 With the guidance of an advisory board headed by John Hope Franklin, the late historian, town hall talks aimed at engaging the American public took place in Little Rock, Arkansas; San Francisco, California; Washington, DC; and points in between. Clinton’s initiative was a critical start in a long-overdue racial discourse.

  Like Clinton’s Conversation on Race, the conversation about home must take place not just in Washington, but throughout the country, especially in cities like Baltimore, Memphis, and Chicago—those ravaged by the housing crisis. But even with the illustrious John Hope Franklin behind it, Clinton’s Conversation on Race did not do its subject justice. As law professor Lani Guinier noted in commenting on the Clinton talks, the country deserved a “dialogue with depth” with a “problem solving format” that was “neither conducted in campaign mode nor politician-centered.”27 Instead, we got a discussion that avoided worrisome and controversial issues, like affirmative action. Today, a focused conversation, one that engages longstanding and even painful issues related to gender and race and the struggles of diverse individuals to find a place they can call home, is needed.

  In earlier chapters I began the discussion of questions we must address to restore our faith in America as the place of great promise. As we move beyond the immediate housing crisis, there are important questions we must ask ourselves:

  How do we stop further social and economic isolation of communities of color?

  How do we incorporate gender equality into our vision for racial equality and residential integration?

  What steps will we take to avoid visiting the impact of foreclosures on the children of those whose homes and neighborhoods have been lost?

  Within our cities, what are our plans to build community and put an end to the notion that individualism and neighborhood isolation will protect us from violence and crime in economically distressed areas?

  Will we challenge the undemocratic exclusivity of an American Dream that can be achieved only by families with two incomes buying large suburban homes?

  Can we imagine an American Dream founded on the idea that one’s gender or race will not predestine w
here one finds home—both the place and the state of being?

  Structuring a conversation about these and many other issues won’t be easy. It is perhaps unprecedented, but others have contemplated just this kind of public discourse. In his work on poverty alleviation among inner-city youth, William Julius Wilson, a sociologist and adviser to President Obama, offers guidance for resolving entrenched and often complicated racial problems. In his book More Than Just Race, Wilson advises that consideration of cultural and institutional forces are key to frank, hopeful, and fruitful discussion and problem solving. Indeed, Wilson advises that in order to “make people feel at home in this country,” cultural and institutional factors must be considered.28

  In the Home Summit, the apparent cultural and behavioral factors that disadvantage women and people of color in their efforts to find home, both as a place and as a state of being, have to be dealt with. In the subprime meltdown, borrowers and lenders both engaged in ill-advised, and often potentially illegal, behavior. Yet discussing individual behavior alone, or even group behavior, too easily lends itself to “victim blaming” and will not move the conversation forward. The meltdown was made possible by institutional failures to halt what John Kenneth Galbraith called a global game of “pass the bad penny to the greater fool.”29 Women’s lower wages have also been built into our employment and credit institutions. The confluence of structural forces cannot be divorced from the racial isolation and gender bias that have existed for decades in the home purchasing market. All must be taken into account if America is to dig out of the “awfully big mess” of the housing crisis and move toward a better future. According to Wilson, only after “policymakers, philanthropists, educators, community leaders, and others” have addressed these structural impediments that contributed to the crisis and interfered with peoples’ ability to “realize their values in calling a place home” should they focus on “problematic cultural behavior” that impeded home building.30