 look at the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, but to provide some greater context to those events. Because, as you will well hear, what happened was the manifestation of what has been decades long policy decisions that have not only created the socioeconomic dynamics in Ferguson, Missouri, but have been replicated throughout our country. As I said, this conversation is being spurred by the work of EPI research associate Richard Rothstein, whose recent paper on the subject has gotten a lot of acclaim and is the basis for our conversation today. I'm going to introduce our speakers and our moderator, and they will kick off the substantive portion of our program. Richard Rothstein is a research associated EPI, and he is also a senior fellow of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute of Law and Social Policy at the University of California Berkeley School of Law. He is a prolific author who has done a number of books that look at education and the dynamics of race and class within education policy. Richard's most recent work on Ferguson has received critical coverage in the American Prospect, The Washington Post, among other publications, and hopefully you all picked up an executive summary when you came into the event. Also joining us today, we are pleased to say is Sherilyn Eiffel, who is the president and director council of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Ms. Eiffel is a longtime member of the LDF family joining their team after she graduated from law school. She's also served as a fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union. She is a professor at the Maryland School of Law, and she is a noted scholar on issues of justice and has her scholarly writing has focused on the importance of diversity in our justice system. Their conversation after they provided moderated by Mr. Bob Cutner, who is co-founder and current co-editor at the American Prospect, which for its 25, nearly 25 year history has certainly lived up to its mission as being the authoritative magazine of liberal ideas. Bob's career as a journalist has included two decades of writing for Business Week, and he continues writing columns for the Boston Globe and the Huffington Post. He's been a prolific author of several books dealing with economics and the intersection with public policy and politics. In short, Bob can be considered one of our most insightful and influential thought leaders and has earned the right to speak across all media platforms to inform thinking as he describes to how to harness capitalism to serve the broad public interest. We were proud to say that Bob 27 years ago, I think it was, 28 years ago, joined a group of five informing and founding the Economic Policy Institute and very apropos for this discussion. Early in Bob's career, he served as the executive director for the National Commission on Neighborhoods, a Jimmy Carter era commission that focused on economic development, housing and neighborhood revitalization programs. So with that, I believe the order of speaking is to have Ms. Sheryl and Eiffel start off first. Welcome. Thank you very much. I'm so grateful for this opportunity to have this conversation today and deeply grateful for the opportunity to co-sponsor this event, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and EPI on the making of Ferguson. I am really excited about the report that Richard Rothstein has written and excited about the opportunity to really fix our eyes on decades, nearly a century in fact, of policies surrounding housing and economic opportunity for African Americans. About seven years ago, I wrote a book. The book was about the last two recorded lynchings in the state of Maryland. And I was inspired to write the book because in my work as a civil rights lawyer, I found that almost everywhere I took up cases, both when I was a lawyer at the Legal Defense Fund and later when I was working in Maryland, I would find that there was a history in that community of some violent act, usually a lynching that had taken place. And what I discovered when I began doing my historical research was that these historical acts that sometimes took place in the 1920s or the 1930s had an extraordinary effect on those communities. It changed the physical landscape. It changed the economic condition. It changed the justice system. It changed the willingness of African Americans to remain in the community. And so when I was engaged with contemporary civil rights issues, I found it so fascinating to discover that you needed to understand this history to understand how we end up today where we are. And so when Michael Brown was killed in August of this year and left on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri for four hours, and when the community came out of their homes to protest, to say we've had enough to seek vindication for the life of this young man who was killed by Officer Darren Wilson, when we saw the police response to those protests, when we saw the militarization of the police in that community, when we saw the powerful activism on the ground, I started to wonder, what happened here? What made Ferguson, Ferguson? Fortunately, Richard Rothstein, we had no conversation about this, was already hard at work trying to answer that question himself. And he was focused on an issue that actually he and I, along with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Patrick Sharkey talked about months ago right in this room. And it was about the history of housing segregation in the United States. And not just about the history of housing segregation, but about the critical role and the powerful role played by the federal government and policies at the federal and state level in creating, perpetuating and maintaining housing segregation in this country. And the way in which policy, investment, and the full force of the federal government was put behind these policies. And what we talked about is the way in which the landscape that we live in today, a hyper-segregated country in 2014, is largely a result of those policies. We are living with the legacy of those acts. The purpose of that discussion, and I hope part of what we'll talk about today, is the way in which we have to shift our attention as we engage issues of race discrimination. Absolutely, we all want accountability for the killing of Mike Brown, for the killing of Eric Garner, for the killing of John Crawford, for the killing of so many other unarmed African-Americans that we've seen over the past months and frankly that have occurred over the past years. But even if Darren Wilson was indicted, even if Darren Wilson was convicted, would that respond to the full set of conditions in Ferguson, Missouri? Would that really respond to the lack of real economic infrastructure? Would that have created an opportunity for Michael Brown had he lived to have a full education, to be fully employed in ways that would have allowed him to live a full, successful and prosperous life? So what I'm hoping we'll do at this session after we hear about the report is have a conversation about the larger structural issues that demand our attention. Yes, absolutely, accountability for individual wrongdoing, but there is a larger, bigger accountability that we must also attend to. And that is the undoing of policies that created a segregated America and that resulted in the economic suppression of African-Americans in communities all over this country. And so with that beginning, I'll turn it over to Richard Rothstein. Thank you very much, Sheryl. You know, when Michael Brown was killed, many people in this country were awakened for the first time to the fact that here was a community, Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, that looked very much like the stereotypes that people had developed of inner city ghettos. How did this happen to be located in a suburb, not in the inner city of St. Louis? And I read a number of media accounts that tried to explain this phenomenon and they typically said things like, well, African-Americans started to move into Ferguson and there was white flight, all the whites left because they wanted to get away from African-Americans or real estate agents steered African-Americans to this community instead of the other places. It was discriminatory behavior of real estate agents or it was just private prejudice. People just didn't want to live near African-Americans and so they moved away. And it struck me that this explanation betrayed a complete lack of historical knowledge. It was a complete, if I may say, whitewashing of how Ferguson became Ferguson. And I'd been spending a lot of time looking at how communities like Ferguson nationwide had come to be the way they are. And so when Michael Brown was killed, I looked into the specifics of St. Louis and Ferguson with which I previously hadn't been familiar. And what I found was in St. Louis, as and everywhere else in the country, every other metropolitan area in the country, the metropolitan area was segregated not by white flight or by private prejudice, although it certainly played a role, but by racially explicit purposeful federal, state and local government policy that lasted over a century. I first got started actually in this endeavor because I was an education policy analyst and I was personally shocked. The last time there was a school desegregation case that covered the towns of Louisville, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington, when the Supreme Court said that it was not permissible to have even the most token integration policy because the communities of Louisville and Seattle had been segregated de facto, not by law, but just by accident because of personal prejudice or people's choices about wanting to live with other people of the same color or private discrimination or just economic circumstance. And I realized and I began to document what nonsense that was. St. Louis as well as Louisville and Seattle have been documented by a century long pattern of federal, state and local explicit racial policy, not the disparate impact of neutral policies but explicit policy designed to segregate this nation. And so let me spend a few minutes describing in the St. Louis case how this happened, but I wanna emphasize, and this is the whole thing I always feared about focusing on St. Louis, even though it's important in the context of Ferguson, I wanna emphasize that this is not a St. Louis story. It's not a story that took place just because St. Louis was a border state. Everything I'm going to describe to you now took place in New York and in Baltimore and Chicago and Detroit and Boston, every metropolitan area of this country. Well the first major event in the segregation of St. Louis took place early in the 20th century. Some of you may know the history when in the Jim Crow era, the gains that African Americans had made after the Civil War began to be rolled back. The most important event probably in that story was the election nationally of Woodrow Wilson as president. He was a Virginian, the segregationist Virginian. He happened to be the president of a New Jersey university, but he was a Virginian and he resegregated the federal silver service. African Americans who previously in the federal service had been in responsible jobs were demoted so that they no longer supervised white workers and henceforth African Americans in the federal silver service were only hired for menial service jobs. That set a tone throughout the country of, some of you may have read a book by C. Van Woodward called The Strange Career of Jim Crow. It's worth rereading in the context of Ferguson today. In St. Louis, shortly after Wilson's ascension to the presidency, the city council proposed and the voters of St. Louis adopted a referendum segregating the city, saying that African Americans could not move onto blocks that were 75% white and whites could not move onto blocks that were 75% black. There were many integrated neighborhoods not integrated in the sense of every other home but neighborhoods where there were both blacks and whites living and the segregation ordinance was designed to separate blacks and whites in 1916. Shortly after that, the US Supreme Court found such ordinances unconstitutional not because they violated the rights, equal protection rights, but because they violated the right of property owners to sell to whomever they wanted. But that didn't deter the city of St. Louis and again, many other cities like this around the country. The city of St. Louis Plan Commission then adopted its own zoning rules which were explicitly racially motivated. The zoning rules divided the city into four groups like many zoning ordinances around the country. Residential, first residential meaning single family homes, second residential meaning multifamily homes, commercial and industrial. Every neighborhood where African-Americans lived, regardless of whether it was a residential neighborhood or not was owned as industrial or commercial. Neighborhoods where whites lived provided they had deeds that restricted blacks from buying in was owned as first residential. And throughout the 20th century, this was not just an early 20th century phenomenon, throughout the 20th century, new zoning rules were adopted if the black or white population seemed to encroach on an area that was zoned for the other. This was the Plan Commission and the city council worked hand in glove with the St. Louis Real Estate Exchange, the local real estate board, and the zones that the zoning commission adopted for black and white residents were then also adopted by real estate agents. And the city were then, the segregation of the city had been attempted by the ordinance that had been adopted by popular referendum was then solidified. The next major event following the action of the zoning board and the city council and the real estate agency board was in the New Deal with the adoption of the first civilian public housing projects in this country. The New Deal under the Public Works Administration built the first civilian public housing. At that time, there was a civilian housing shortage throughout the country. It got worse as the New Deal progressed and as World War II commenced. So that white workers as well as black workers needed housing, there was no civilian housing available, and the public housing that was developed was at first primarily designed for whites, not for blacks, for stable working class families. In St. Louis, the first project was designed in a neighborhood that was about 55% white and 45% black. That neighborhood was raised to make a long story short. There were lots of interim proposals, but when it finally was completed, the middle class, the half white, half black neighborhood on the north side of St. Louis was raised and an all black project was placed in a not location, not all black by accident, all black by requirement. Only blacks could move into this public housing project. Another integrated neighborhood on the south side of St. Louis was also raised. That neighborhood was the site of a whites-only project. Again, not by accident, but by specific requirement. Only whites could move into that project. So two integrated neighborhoods in St. Louis were raised by the city with federal government consent, by the way, consent and approval to build a all black project on the north side and an all black project on the south side. Gradually, as the New Deal progressed and World War II came about, another New Deal agency, the Federal Housing Administration, began to address the civilian housing shortage by subsidizing the development of suburbs all around the country. And this suburban development that was subsidized by the Federal Housing Administration began to solve the civilian housing shortage. It took place in every city in the country. Again, I'll go through New York, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore. If I'm leaving any out, you could add them. This is not a St. Louis story, but it took place in St. Louis as well. The main vehicle that the Federal Housing Administration used was the subsidization of mass production, merchant builders to build large subdivisions for whites only, for lower middle class, working class whites. It's a St. Louis story. As I say, it went on around the country. You're probably, many of you are probably familiar with Levittown in Long Island of New York. You may be familiar with Daly City in California, the tiki-taki houses that Pete Seeger sang about. Subdivisions all over the country, like this, were developed by the Federal Housing Administration as the builders got advanced construction commitments from banks based on an FHA guarantee, and the FHA guarantee required that the homes be sold to whites only. In St. Louis, there was one builder who was relatively liberal. He got an FHA commitment for a subdivision called St. Anne. He built that subdivision for whites only, as the FHA required. Then he tried to build a separate subdivision for African-Americans called the porous. He couldn't get an FHA commitment for the African-American subdivision, so he built two subdivisions. One only for whites called St. Anne with FHA insurance, FHA guarantees for his advance for his construction. That subdivision was high-quality homes. Working-class families could move in with no bet-down payment and get very low monthly payments. In fact, the monthly payments throughout the country for subdivisions like this was lower than families had to pay for rent for apartments in the city from which they moved. For the African-American community to porous, he couldn't get an FHA guarantee. That meant that the African-Americans moved in there could not get mortgages, because banks would not issue mortgages without FHA guarantees at that time. And the construction was more shoddy. The prices were much lower. Most of the homes were rented, not sold, and some were sold on contract on an installment buying plan with which the families who bought them had no equity. This mass creation of subdivisions throughout the country that was financed by the FHA depopulated the central cities of white families. Eventually, in St. Louis, the public housing projects that had built for whites no longer could attract whites, because they were all being subsidized to move to the suburbs by the federal government. Public housing then became an increasingly black phenomenon. Blacks replaced whites in the public housing projects that existed. Some of you may remember the Pruitt-Igo towers. They became the kind of symbol of deteriorated public housing in the country. Pruitt-Igo was originally built. The Pruitt towers were for whites. The Igo towers were for blacks. But as the suburbanization continued, subsidized by the federal government, encouraged by the federal government, segregated by the federal government, the Pruitt towers became depopulated of whites. Blacks moved in. And the Pruitt-Igo towers became all black. Services maintenance declined. The city failed to maintain them. The discrimination in the housing market, in the labor market, which I'll come to in a few minutes, meant that more and more families were on welfare in these projects. Eventually, they became so dilapidated, so deteriorated. And the quality of life in the projects became so poor. Gang-ridden, mostly welfare families, that the federal government and the city of St. Louis evicted all the families, blew up the projects. In the report that I wrote on Ferguson, there are some copies out there, or there's an executive summary, and you can see the website to get the report. There's a picture of the Pruitt-Igo towers being blown up. It was a national phenomenon in the early 1970s. Where do you think the families who had been evicted from the Pruitt-Igo towers went? Well, I'll come to that later, but I'm sure you can imagine what happened. These weren't the only federal, state, and local policies that segregated St. Louis and every other metropolitan area. Some of you may have heard the term restrictive covenants. This was a form attached to deeds, provision in deeds and housing deeds, that prohibited the owner of a home from selling to an African-American. A more common form of the deed was an association of families in a neighborhood who signed a common contract agreeing that if any one of them were ever to sell to an African-American and the other homeowner in the neighborhood could sue them to get the African-American evicted and the sale reversed. And these restrictive covenants became commonplace across the country in the mid-20th century. In a previous report I wrote, I showed that I think 85% of all the subdivisions developed in New York, in the New York metropolitan area in the 1930s and 40s were covered by these restrictive covenants, prohibiting blacks from moving into homes. They first began as private agreements in St. Louis cities. The St. Louis Zoning Commission that I mentioned earlier used the existence of restrictive covenants as a basis for assigning a first residential classification to a neighborhood. But then the federal government adopted them as policy. And anybody who got a loan, any of the merchant builders that I talked about who got a loan, were not only required to put restrictive covenants on the deeds of the homes they sold, but the FHA, the Federal Housing Administration, gave them model language of the restrictive covenant that they could use. Nobody can claim that this was an accident or a disparate impact. This was explicit federal policy. The fact that there were restrictive covenants in all the white neighborhoods in St. Louis and then in the suburbs as the FHA developed them meant that African-Americans in St. Louis and in every metropolitan area in the country had very, very restricted areas in which they could live. That meant that their rents were much higher than whites paid for similar housing because the supply was much smaller than the demand for African-Americans than it was for whites. It meant that homes in African-American neighborhoods were overcrowded, very overcrowded. Because the rents were so high, people could make rental payments or contract buying payments. Ton and Heesey Coates wrote about that eloquently in the Atlantic Magazine last spring. They couldn't make contract buying payments. And they had to double up or subdivide their homes. By the way, the St. Louis Zoning Commission that I mentioned earlier prohibited subdivision of homes in first residential districts, but not in African-American districts. Homes were subdivided. City services declined. The garbage was collected less frequently. Street lights weren't repaired. Other city services were denied or less present in African-American neighborhoods. African-Americans neighborhoods turned into slums. They turned into slums because of federal policy, because of federal, state, and local policy. It was the current commission, a commission appointed by President Johnson in 1968, early 1968, after a wave of riots across the country in African-American neighborhoods in the previous year, found this systematic across the country, the denial of municipal services to black neighborhoods, as well as the kind of police practices that resulted in Michael Brown's death. Nationwide, they also, of course, documented the kind of housing discrimination I'm talking about before. Well, as public policy, by restricting the area that African-Americans could live in, creating a shortage of supply relative demand to demand, by refusing FHA guarantees that would enable African-Americans to purchase housing at the same prices as whites, by forcing up rents because of the supply demand issue. All of these policies contributed to making African-American neighborhoods slums. And white families who didn't understand the history that I've just been talking about, didn't know about it, came to associate African-Americans with slum dwelling. So it's no surprise that white flight took place when African-Americans moved into a neighborhood because people assumed that African-Americans were slum dwellers and they would bring slum conditions with them. This was all a consequence, a direct consequence of public policy. Well, once African-American neighborhoods in the city of St. Louis and again nationwide became slums, the obvious solution was slum clearance. And beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, the federal government in cooperation with state and local governments began a program of slum clearance. Raising slums in order to clean them up and use the land for better and higher uses. And so in addition to the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe Towers and other public housing in St. Louis, the St. Louis and the federal government began to raise African-American neighborhoods. The entire area adjoining the waterfront in St. Louis which was once a vibrant African-American neighborhood was raised as some of you may be familiar with the gateway arch that's now the symbol of the West. That's all on land that used to be a vibrant African-American neighborhood, a slum. That was cleared. Another area just south of there in St. Louis was raised at an area of 20,000 families, 44 churches in the neighborhood. That was raised to provide space for university, for highway interchanges and for other cultural uses. Other neighborhoods, one neighborhood, the Kosk-Yusko redevelopment project, the African-American neighborhood was cleared in about 1960, it's still vacant today. They were very enthusiastic about clearing out the slum but less enthusiastic about finding anything to replace it. The important thing was to clear out the slum. And so African-Americans had to go somewhere and they first pushed west and north in the city of St. Louis, trying to stay ahead of the bulldozers and the first suburb north of St. Louis that they began to move into was Ferguson. Ferguson is now a community that is overwhelmingly black of its elementary schools. There are five elementary schools in Ferguson. Four of them are 90% African-American and one is 75% African-American. As somebody who spent a lot of time thinking about education, I can tell you that you cannot have schools that have high achievement when you concentrate low income, disadvantaged families in the same school and teachers have to spend disproportionate amount of their time on remediation, on trying to compensate for the kind of communities that the children are forced to live in. Now, there's one other fact that I'll just take a minute in addressing. It's not really a part of the main theme, but in addition to the federal, state and local government sponsorship of housing discrimination, which I've documented, the federal government also maintained throughout this country a dual labor market through much of the 20th century. In other words, by federal policy as well as by state and private discrimination, African-Americans were not given access to the same jobs that whites were given access to. The mass of a large number of migrants to St. Louis, for example, came during World War II. There was a large arms ammunition plant in St. Louis, the St. Louis Small Arms Ammunition Facility, it was called. This was throughout the country, wherever there were defense plants built. St. Louis Small Arms Ammunition Facility would not hire African-Americans. This was a federally paid munitions factory for the war. There were protests, civil rights protests throughout the war. By 1944, the St. Louis Small Arms Ammunition Facility, which by the way employed 40,000 people, finally agreed to employ African-Americans. They were introduced to the assembly line just as the war was ending and the plant ceased production. The big suburban housing boom that I described before that was financed by the federal government required a lot of construction workers. Those construction workers were represented by unions, construction trades unions, that was certified by the federal government as exclusive collective bargaining agents for the construction sites on which they worked, despite the fact that they excluded African-Americans from membership. So while whites throughout the country were gaining from the construction boom that took place with suburbanization, African-Americans were mostly excluded from it. So when the explanation that I began this talk with, you read in the media that somehow African-Americans couldn't afford to move to middle class neighborhoods is true, but the reason they couldn't afford to move to middle class neighborhoods is largely because of a state-sponsored system of dual labor markets in which up until very recently African-Americans were not admitted into the same kinds of jobs as whites. Now, this history that I've just described to you used to be well known. This is not with anybody who's my age in this room but we'll know it, but it's all been whitewashed from our memory in the last 40 years. In the current commission, which was a prominent federal commission, many, many, every college student read its report when it was issued in 1968, was quite explicit about this. In 1974, a federal court of appeals, specifically ruling on a case in St. Louis, said that segregated housing in the St. Louis metropolitan area was in large measure the result of deliberate racial discrimination in the housing market by the real estate industry and by agencies of the federal, state, and local governments. So I'm not telling you anything that wasn't at one point well known. But today it's completely been forgotten. I did a study recently of high school American history textbooks and found that no American history textbook that's used in high schools in this country today comes anywhere near telling the truth about how our metropolitan areas came to be segregated. The most widely used American history textbook most widely used American history textbook in this country today devotes one sentence to housing segregation in the north. And it says as follows, African-Americans in the north found themselves living in segregated neighborhoods. They woke up one day and looked around and they found that's its explanation. That's what we're teaching high school students today. In 1954, as you all know, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown, ruling that schools could not be segregated by law. The day after the Supreme Court ruling, Thurgood Marshall, Sharon Eiffel's predecessor, she fills issues well, Thurgood Marshall held a press conference. No pressure. Held a press conference in which he said, OK, we've now solved the problem of school segregation. I expect that in five years schools in this country will be integrated. We are now going to turn our attention to housing. And the Legal Defense Fund never did, not in a serious way to approach school desegregation. And the reason was that there was such massive resistance to school desegregation decision that nobody could catch their breath in time to follow through with the results, with the vow to address housing. I spoke to another one of Thurgood Marshall's successors recently, not Sharon. And he said to me, you know, he said if we had done housing desegregation rather than school desegregation, we would have accomplished more for school desegregation than we accomplished by approaching school desegregation directly. The Supreme Court today, as I mentioned, has this myth that it propagates and it is widely accepted by even the most liberal policymakers in this country, that we have a system of de facto segregation for which there is no constitutionally required remedy and for which it's very hard to do anything about because it all happened in some mysterious, accidental way. I think what I've tried to show to you this morning is that this is a form of de jure segregation that still exists. I will give you one illustration and then conclude. I mentioned before the white subdivision of St. Anne, built entirely with FHA financing and only for whites. Houses in that subdivision sold to whites for about $8,000 in 1952 when the suburbs like that were being built, St. Anne and other suburbs. That was about twice national median income. If you put that in today's terms, that's a home selling for $120,000. Working class families, especially with FHA and VA guarantees requiring no down payment at the time and low monthly payments, they said, could afford to buy into those communities. African-Americans earning the same incomes as whites and there were many, many of them in 1953, the FHA estimated that there were 80,000 African-American families in St. Louis who could have afforded to move to the suburbs if the FHA itself had permitted them to do so. African-Americans couldn't move into those suburbs and whites did. Those homes today, I did a study of one suburb called Kirkwood, those homes today sell for $400,000, about six times national median income. Those homes are no longer affordable to work in class and lower middle class families. So African-Americans who could have bought into the suburbs in the 1950s can no longer do so today, simply passing a fair housing law saying that when a house in Kirkwood or St. Anne becomes vacant, you can't discriminate against the buyer. Doesn't accomplish much, because the working class and middle class families who could have bought there 50 years ago can no longer afford to do so. The white families who moved into those suburbs gained, assuming maybe they sped somebody on remodeling and put some more equity into it, they gained a few $100,000 in equity. Today, African-American incomes, on average, are 61% of white incomes. African-American wealth assets are 5% of white wealth. And that's all primarily because of the federal policies that I've described today. So we have a system of, I think, and I'm not a lawyer, but I'm going to turn it on to one of the best ones in the country now. But we have a system of de jure segregation. It not only calls for remedies on moral grounds, but it calls for remedies on constitutional grounds. And I'm going to turn it over to Cheryl and Eiffel now to discuss how we might remedy some of this. Shall we do this one here? Let me just take my order in for a minute. I'm Bob Kutner. I'm really honored to be moderating this. And after Cheryl concludes, we'll take some questions from the audience. This is very incestuous. The histories of EPI and the prospect bridged by my friend Richard go back a long ways. And I should say that this summer, when Richard mentioned to me that he was doing this study for EPI, I said to him, oh boy, do you think there's any way you could break out a shorter version for the prospect? And Richard did. It's in the current issue, and we're very glad to have it. Just to take one moment and echo what Richard said, it is astonishing that 44 years after the Kerner Commission report, we are having this conversation. One of my close colleagues, who's my age and Richard's age, said, well, don't we know all this? And the answer is, well, we once did know all this. But in the United States of Amnesia, we've forgotten it. And I think the other point that cannot be underscored too much that is in Richard's longer paper and in the shorter version of the prospect is that these patterns cast a long, long, long shadow and that they keep reinfecting themselves. The racism that was official, that was stimulated by private prejudice, that then reinforced private prejudice, is reinfected 44 years after the Kerner Commission talked about institutional racism. It's reinfected by the discriminatory policies in the subprime crisis where African-American families were targeted to receive loans that they could not pay back once the interest rates reset, even though more than half of the African-American families that were targeted to get subprime exploding loans qualified for conventional loans. Racism reinfects itself when a community like Ferguson that is shortchanged by budget cuts then relies on very high fines, which then leaves a disproportionate number of African-American young people with warrants out for their arrest because they haven't paid fines that they couldn't afford that might be traffic tickets. And you have a situation that's reminiscent of an African in South Africa during the apartheid regime who doesn't have his passbook. You are just a sitting duck for police violence. And to say that somehow, because these policies were officially changed in the 60s or the 70s, they don't continue to cast a long shadow, is to completely misunderstand history and completely misunderstand the current reality. So thank you. That was a lot to take in, and I really commend to all of you to actually engage the material that Richard developed, either through the American Prospect article or through the longer paper. In part because of what he said, which is that this is information that we have conveniently forgotten. We've been encouraged to forget it in some ways by the Supreme Court, which has infused the jurisprudence of civil rights law with a kind of quest and hunt for real life racists. The idea of intentional discrimination as kind of being the hook for proving that a practice or a policy is discriminatory has focused our attention on the lurid details of an actual individual engaged in actual conduct and has turned too much of our attention as a country away from the structures and policies that those who actually had racial animus created and that cast this long shadow that was just described. So take for a minute what Richard just kind of cataloged and try to assign a dollar value to it. So we're talking about the FHA policies, mortgage insurance. And I think in your paper at one point, Richard, you said at its height, which I think was in 1943, the FHA financed 80% of all private home construction nationwide, 80%. So that means 80% of the homes that were built in the 1940s during that period were subject to the affirmatively segregative requirements that Richard was just talking about in his remarks. So we're talking about something that has embedded and infected housing throughout this country. He talked about the incentive to create white suburbs. Not only were white suburbs supported by these building guarantees through the FHA, but you had to be able to get to the suburbs. And so the investment in the interstate highway system and in federal highways was designed to support suburban living for low and middle income white Americans. Public housing, which Richard just talked about, segregated public housing, the requirement that you could not have integrated public housing, and in fact, the dismantling of integrated neighborhoods to create segregated public housing. And then, of course, the issue of municipal services that Richard also raised and the disparities in municipal services between black and white communities. So if you add all of this up, you are talking about billions of dollars invested in creating a segregated infrastructure in the United States. Then you have to ask yourself, what has been the investment in undoing that segregated infrastructure? Let's suppose we're all nice people and there are no racists anymore in America. Let's suppose that happened. Even that would not change the structure that Richard just described and that is so deeply embedded in the housing infrastructure in this country. It would require affirmative acts to actually undo the damage that has been done. And that's the investment that's never been made. Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968. You heard the cities that Richard was identifying. Fair Housing Act is the Civil Rights Act that's largely known as the Northern Civil Rights Act. It was really meant to address and was passed in response to urban unrest that happened in cities in 1966 and 1968 and was meant to deal with and address the housing crisis in northern cities. I guess in the case of Baltimore kind of up south, largely. The Fair Housing Act includes in it not only the obligation not to discriminate in housing, but it also included in it the obligation to affirmatively further fair housing. What that means is that jurisdictions had the affirmative obligation to promote integrated housing and fair housing practices. But for many decades, that requirement was never really enforced. LDF and other groups pressed for some time to compel HUD to issue a regulation on affirmatively furthering fair housing. In other words, a regulation that would explain and make clear to local jurisdictions their affirmative obligations under the Fair Housing Act. And that regulation was just proposed this past July. This is pretty important, though. Here's what it means, affirmatively furthering fair housing. It means improving integrated living patterns and overcoming historic patterns of segregation, reducing racial and ethnic concentrations of poverty, reducing disparities by race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, or disability, and access to community assets, such as education, transit access, and employment, as well as exposure to environmental health hazards and other stressors that harm a person's quality of life and responding to disproportionate housing needs by protected class. Let's imagine that jurisdictions at the state and local level actually believed that that was their set of obligations around housing policy. What might our housing policy at the state and local and federal level look like? And how might we, if we are serious about upholding the requirement to affirmatively further fair housing, how might we begin to undo some of the segregated infrastructure that was created over a century and that we live with today? One of the great problems I think we have around discrimination in this country is that on the occasions in which we have confronted the reality of racial discrimination and decided that we no longer wish to do it, we believe that the answer is to stop doing it. We believe, in other words, that the answer is simply to stop doing the bad thing we were doing before. What we don't take on is the obligation to affirmatively undo the damage that we did before, to try and fix, correct, transform, undermine, and change fundamentally the conditions that were created based on racial discrimination. And our housing situation in the United States, whether we're talking about St. Louis or whether we're talking about Baltimore, is a reflection of that. We are being asked to pick up the pieces with a table that was already set and that has held in place racial groups through this housing policy. The last piece I think is really important is to talk about the connection of this to the economic empowerment of racial minorities. In this country, we have accepted the idea of home ownership as the means of accumulating wealth. And of course, the housing crisis and the financial crisis of 2008 devastated millions of Americans with a disproportionate effect on African-Americans. 25% of African-Americans found themselves either in foreclosure or near foreclosure as a result of the 2008 housing crisis. So to the extent the idea of wealth, the accumulation of wealth within a family or within a community is premised on home ownership, all of the material that was assembled and described by Richard begins to explain to you the wealth disparity that he also described. And the consequences of that wealth disparity are not just about the disposable income that you have to do things, but it's about your ability to determine where you live, what schools your children will go to, whether your children will be able to participate in higher education, whether you have savings for your elderly parents or whether you have to use the money that you are earning to support elderly or sick parents. Everything about your economic soundness and that of your children and your grandchildren is expressed through your wealth. And to the extent we have failed to focus on housing, we have not only locked communities into segregated enclaves, but we have perpetuated the lack of wealth and the lack of economic stability of African-American communities, families and individuals. So Richard is quite right. At LDF we're spending a lot of time thinking about housing segregation and how we begin to get our hands around it. It is, of course, deeply connected with education, but I think as today's presentation demonstrates, it's deeply connected with almost everything. It's deeply connected with the soundness of the outlook for any family, white or African-American. And so the questions before us are, how do we begin to unpack the structures and the consequences of the structures that we've looked at? One way is, in the way that I've described, looking at the affirmatively, furthering fair housing regulation and how we can give that real meaning. But there are many others as well and they happen both at the federal, state and local level. One of the most powerful stories in Richard's piece, I think, was the story of one family, the Venables, I think, who were able to purchase a home in one of the white neighborhoods surrounding St. Louis, and they did purchase that home. And when the neighbors found out that they were African-American, they put together money, kind of like the film or the play, A Raisin and the Sun, and offered them money to purchase the home in the land, which the family rejected, whereupon the town then used its eminent domain power to take the land and turn that home into a park and playground, which still exists today. So I don't mean to suggest by simply focusing on the macro-federal policies that there were not also micro-local policies that were critically important. And those local policies are ones we also should be attentive to as it relates to zoning and other local power that's exerted, particularly in suburban communities, inner and outer ring suburban communities, to hold in place the segregative effects of earlier practices. So I'll stop there. Thank you very much. So the floor is open for questions while Christian is collecting some live questions. Here's one from Alex, who's watching in New Orleans. In her book, Sherilyn documented how whites suppress their experience of lynching. How can righteous people help whites accept responsibility for the history being discussed today? That's an interesting question. And thank you for it. The question refers to a section in the book that I wrote about whites who had actually been present at lynchings and who kind of conveniently forgot that these events happened and the suppression of those memories. I think that's a pretty tall order to ask people to help whites confront this history. I do think that the truth is this history has been covered for everyone. I suspect that most of the people in this room who have not been engaged with Richard's work or who are not engaged in housing work in general probably don't know this history, whatever race they are from, which is why Richard's comments about what's in our high school textbooks is so important because we're not teaching it anymore. And I think that in many ways, this is the place that arguably is easier to absorb because it's about structures and institutions and not about individual people. That so much of the anxiety around talking about race is the fear that people have that they individually will be branded a racist. And here I think part of what we're trying to suggest not that there aren't individual racists and not that private racism doesn't continue to be a problem, but that the attention really needs to be on these structures that we've inherited. And I think when you lay out the case in the way that Richard does, when you pull the materials and pull the actual language, some of my favorite languages from the FHA manual, you know, in the 1940s and I guess late 1930s, there was an explicit requirement of racial segregation, but in 1947 they changed the language to require compatibility among neighborhood occupants. You know, when you pull that language out and you make it apparent and you show it to people, I think there isn't a lot of convincing to do. This is not like on the one hand, on the other hand. This is what exactly happened. These are facts. And so I think that's why Richard's work is so important and why it's so important, not just to have it in a report that the people in this room might read, but to have it in Americans in Prospect and to have it other places where people who are not focused on this as an issue that they work with might encounter it and become educated about these issues. Let me take a couple more than I wanted to do one of my own questions. Are there government policies in place today that support gentrification in urban areas? You always wonder how long is the time before you get to the G word. It happened actually the last time we were in this room also. Of course, I mean there are all kinds of policies that relate to loans and capital, the ability to amass capital to purchase property. We've been working in Detroit actually working on water issues and we've kind of stumbled across a whole set of pretty obnoxious housing issues in which if you haven't paid your water bill at some point your house can be kind of sold at auction and which buyers can bundle up houses together and buy them for a very low amount. So there are particularly and economically distressed neighborhoods and communities, always incentives that and many of them are local. In Baltimore we had this bizarre system of ground rents that caused many people to lose their homes and that helped people gentrify where you own the home but there's also something called a ground rent and you have to pay the ground rent also which very few people knew. You thought you purchased the home, you purchased the home and the ground rent it was very small but you wouldn't know about it and so over 15 years or 20 years it would accumulate and then it would be this huge amount of money which of course you didn't have and you would lose your home because you'd been paying your mortgage but you weren't paying the ground rent and so then because of the depressed property values in those communities others were able to come in, purchase those homes, renovate those homes and transform those communities into kind of gentrified neighborhoods that could not support the population that was a working class population so there are a number of policies that continue to support gentrification and actually Richard in his paper talks about the way in which things have flipped that it used to be working class and African-Americans in the inner cities surrounded by middle class people in the suburbs and now increasingly it's middle class and up and coming strivers in the cities and low income, middle income and African-Americans in the outer ring suburbs and so the reverse incentives that kind of sent the population going wherever, the population that is funded is able to move wherever they want and the rest of us are kind of just following behind whether it's in or out. Let me add something, I support gentrification provided that it's not total gentrification. This is one of the ways of creating integrated neighborhoods if we have a policy that preserves affordable housing in neighborhoods that middle class families are now moving back into. What we need is a national policy that requires every community to have its fair share of low and moderate income housing that can be integrated so that having simply partial gentrification where the only places where you have integration in a temporary neighborhoods and transition in inner cities is not the way to get there. What we need is this kind of national policy as I say requires every community whether it's a rich suburb or an inner city area to have its fair share of affordable housing. Now, I just want to add something that relates this to the previous question. We're never going to get those policies unless people understand this history and I mentioned before the Louisville and Seattle Supreme Court decision. The thing that shocked me the most about that decision was not that John Roberts and the conservative majority put forward this de facto myth. The thing that shocked me about that decision was Justice Breyer and his dissent accepted the fact that the segregation in these cities was de facto. And I said to myself, if even Justice Breyer believes this then we've got a lot of work to do. And that's why I put so much emphasis on these high school textbooks. Every time I speak to a university audience or a school of education audience I ask them to get on the move and do something about these high school textbooks. If the next generation is not educated about these issues we're never going to get that kind of fair share policy that I talked about. Can I just add one thing which is yet another practice that can be helpful is inclusionary development practices where you require those who are developing in a community is going back to your gentrification point. There's a certain percentage of units that they have to maintain that are affordable housing whether it's 20% or whether it's 25% so that even any person who seeks to develop in a community has to set aside some of its housing to try and affirmatively further housing integration which I think is critically important as well. I would just say on the textbook issue I think it's absolutely important. I also think we should not ignore the fact that what I think about for myself is what I learned about the history of race and discrimination in this country I actually did not learn from high school textbooks. So I also think while we ought to be pushing for that we also ought to be recognizing that there are many other education platforms that we have the opportunity to influence and we should be influencing them as well with this information. So here's a question that really follows quite logically from the last one. This is from Julie. Are there any communities doing it right when it comes to reversing the effects of institutional housing discrimination? It's a really good question. There have been pockets here and there. I would hesitate to give any community a gold star or an A on this. It's so interesting. I've just, you know, Baltimore again where I have lived for many years has an inclusionary zoning practice for example and there's supposed to be money set aside for it and there's only $70,000 left in the inclusionary zoning portfolio. It's commitment. Even when you find jurisdictions that light on something that they think would be a good idea and are willing to engage in some of these practices you find the lack of commitment and that's part of why I was talking about the dollar amount that went into creating these practices and then the timidity of the response to these practices. There is not a community I can think of that is kind of all in. That's willing to affirmatively say we are taking this on and this is how we're gonna do it. We litigated a case involving public housing in Baltimore along with the ACLU and other groups and I think this was actually a really interesting case and a good model in which public housing residents received vouchers to go to other neighborhoods but we provided a whole infrastructure of counseling and so forth so that public housing residents could pick communities that were not distressed, could pick communities that had resources to move to in the hopes that not only for those families and individuals would it mean that their families had better opportunities but so that we would begin to try to reverse the effects of segregated public housing in Baltimore. Climbing us out ahead. New Jersey had a statewide fair share housing law requiring every community in the state to have its fair share of low and moderate income housing based on its metropolitan area so that would be proportionally distributed around the country and since that was adopted in the 1970s it's been consistently watered down. First they said well if you don't wanna build your own build your fair share housing you can sell your obligation to a neighboring community to help to resegregate the community and Governor Christie is now trying to water it down even further. There is one community there are some that it's made some progress I'm not saying it hasn't made any and Douglas Massey has recently published a book called Climbing Mount Laurel which describes a very positive experience with this kind of provision but simply having it wasn't enough because then you've gotta defend it and it's been watered down consistently since it was adopted. I wanted to ask a question of my own kind of pivoting off of one of the previous questions and comments. So if you look back at the 60s this was an era when at least some number of white people were capable of being shamed. It was the era of Lyndon Johnson's We Shall Overcome speech. It was the era of civil rights decisions being handed down by progressive federal courts. It was an era when the racism was palpable. Civil rights workers being murdered lynching still occurring. And it was an era when you had economic tailwinds in the sense that average real living standards doubled during the post-war boom. So now the history's forgotten. The racism is still institutional but it's not quite so in your face if you happen to be white. And it's an era when even white people are experiencing downward mobility economically. I think the proof of the pudding is with an African-American president in the White House we haven't been able to make progress on this. So I guess my question, there was a French radical by the name of André Gours who was very influential on me who talked about non-incremental incrementalism meaning that you pursue a policy that doesn't seem transformative but that can have transformative effects. And I think given the fact that you need multi-racial coalitions to get a lot of these policies what are examples of small steps that could move in the right direction that could have transformative effects going forward? That didn't seem like the question that was gonna come out of that building. Well, all right. Take it, take it. Well, I guess I'm bifurcating the question into a policy question and a politics question. The politics question is how do you assemble the coalitions to make the policies possible? The policy question is what policies might start out small but be transformative? Well, I think it's always important that we remember the long arc of this work and that we also not over romanticize the period in the 1950s and 60s when theoretically, you know, there were white people who could be shamed. I don't disagree with that. I think that is true but I think we should not overstate how many and the depth of that shame. I also think that actually shame like fear is a paralyzing emotion. It actually does not galvanize people to do things. And so you are quite right to identify the economic moment that we're in. You know, Derrick Bell always talked about interest convergence. Derrick Bell was a law professor and civil rights lawyer and actually had been a lawyer at the Legal Defense Fund. You know, and he said all of the progress that ever happened around civil rights happened when it was in the best interests of the United States, not necessarily because people felt shamed. And so, you know, the post-war period and the Cold War in which it was important for America not to be seen as oppressive as they were fighting the Cold War and many fronts created a context in which some of the gains of the civil rights movement could be made. It's also true that when you're on the economic upswing you can appeal to the American sense of fairness and equality. You can say, you know, here we have this great big delicious hot steaming apple pie and it's fantastic. You know, should we share it with these people who are here with us? Why not? You know, I'm full. I've had four slices. We can afford to give one slice to these folks. Well, in the time of a shrinking pie, which is the period that we're in now in this country, although, you know, the economy is rebounding in very important ways, but certainly not in ways that will wipe out the damage that was done by the 2008 financial crisis. You're essentially dealing with an entire country that feels, you know, the fear of economic instability. And it's very hard when you only have one piece of pie to ask someone to, you know, slice that piece in half. So I think, you know, that that's just a reality. Therefore, we have to stop thinking about it as, you know, my piece of pie and your piece of pie. The progress that has always happened for African Americans, for immigrants, for the poor, for marginalized Americans in this country. And there has been progress. I myself am the youngest of 10 children. It would not have been possible for me to receive the education I received, the advantages I received and so forth without the civil rights movement, without Brown, you know, whatever its limitations and so forth. But it also wouldn't have been possible without America in that time period having made a commitment to public life and to public infrastructure. And the only way you have an opportunity to really reverse these kinds of policies and to create these coalitions is when you have a commitment to building a robust infrastructure. Whether it's public highways, whether it's public universities, whether it's public education K through 12, it is all of the, it's public parks, all of the public infrastructure that was created to accommodate the immigrant population, for example, in New York in the early 1900s, right. You know, the system was created, the public education system, vaccination, sanitation, public parks, all of that was, you know, if you read the rhetoric, they were just as racist, you know, although it was about Italians and Irish, but the answer they thought was to create this public infrastructure to accommodate this population. And we have the ability to make that decision today too. It's not racism that means, or xenophobic behavior or thinking that means that you can't invest in the public, right, because we did that before. So we could make the choice to do that again, but we have to understand that's the choice before us, that as we increasingly talk about, you know, a privatized America as the ideal, we are walking away from an America that has the ability to deal with this past. And I would just like to put in a plug for our hosts, EPI, because EPI is all about restoring public investment, raising wages, improving family incomes, and that is indeed, as you're suggesting, one way of diffusing racial strife and emphasizing racial commonality. Here's another question. In cities that have African American mayors or minorities, other minorities, it's not a good word to use these days, diverse city councils controlling local governments, such as Washington, what are these cities doing to take the lead to integrate housing? Well again, it's always interesting that we think those should be the cities that take the lead, but it's really interesting and I'm glad you asked the question because, you know, whoever asked, thank you. Going back to the issue of Ferguson, I'm actually finishing up an op-ed right now about the power structure in Ferguson itself, which everyone's talked about the fact that Ferguson is a majority black city, which it is, and yet it has a white mayor and a mostly white city council. What are you talking about? And so I'm writing a piece about the structure, the power structure in Ferguson. And to go back to your question, I think that's actually the point of the work that Richard has done in the conversation we're having today. I write about diversity, I think it's critically important for a whole variety of reasons, not the least of which it brings into the places of power and decision making, the perspective and the history of people who were excluded who can speak to these issues and think creatively about how to resolve them. However, the mere fact that someone is African-American does not magically anoint them with the power to undo a century of policies that Richard's talked about. And so this is what I mean when I say we focus too much on incidents and personalities, rather than on structures. An African-American mayor is no better equipped to dismantle this incredibly powerful and well-financed structure than a white mayor. The African-American mayor may have a greater will to do it, maybe, not always, but that's not the same as having the power to do it. And so I think that we shouldn't conflate the two. Of course it's important to have diversity and to have diverse elected officials and to have communities feel that they have representatives who speak for them, absolutely. But the question of how we dismantle a centuries-old structure that was embedded and put in place by the federal government at the cost of billions of dollars is a question we have to answer at a much higher pay grade. Here's a question for Richard. You said in your remarks that schools in high poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods, cannot be successful. Do you believe this? And if so, why? I don't think I said that. I said that students who attend schools in which poverty is highly concentrated cannot achieve at the high levels that we expect. And I do believe that. I think that we have about 30 years ago, we started on this campaign that we were gonna close the achievement gap by having higher expectations for children and whole teachers accountable for having higher expectations and we're gonna test children more often and it hasn't accomplished anything. It hasn't accomplished much. I mean, we've had some improvements in achievement across all racial groups in that period. But so long as you have, as I said before, a school in which children, if you have a school which a few children, an integrated school, economically as well as racially, in which a few children come to school less prepared to learn than other children, teachers can devote some special attention to that child and bring that child along farther than they otherwise would have come. But when every single child in a class comes from a home where parents are unemployed, income is low, we're housing unstable, where they're moving constantly, where they're walking to school in stress through violent neighborhoods, if every single child in a class is suffering from those disadvantages, you cannot get the kind of achievement in those classrooms that you can get in a classroom where none of the children have those disadvantages. Now it's certainly the case that high quality schools, better teachers, good curriculum, can do more with disadvantaged children than poor schools can. But the notion that somehow we can wipe out the disadvantage that children come to school with simply by having higher expectations for them or better curriculum or holding teachers' feet to the fire is ludicrous and it's been disproven by now decades of experience from which we apparently are unable to learn. Here's a question for Richard again. Do you consider the policies of segregation in St. Louis in the late 19th and early 20th century could have been weapons wielded by capital to divide the working class with the fresh memory of the 1877 general strike which was fully integrated? I'm not gonna get into that, but I will say that I was discussing policies of the middle and late 20th centuries, not the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. This is the federal policy and the state policy and local policy is segregated on metropolitan areas began in full force in the 20th century and proceeded throughout the 20th century. It wasn't something that we can go back to. We made more progress in the years after the Civil War than we made in the early 20th century. And I would just think that this is one of the most shocking things because I think many Americans grow up feeling that what occurred over the past now 150 years is an unfortunate legacy of slavery that sort of gradually got better and better. And I think the important contribution of this research is to show that it actually got worse. It got worse well into the 20th century. I'm gonna ask Ross Eisenbray of EPI to break the rule on no live questions. Ross? Well, housing wealth and that was denied to the black soldiers who we owed the same thing. And you talked a little bit about that. Is that a place where we can actually measure the damage done and... Well, just briefly, the question was, can I talk for a minute about the GI Bill which I didn't mention in my talk. Well, the VA policy was coordinated with the FHA policy. So that many of them, when I talked generally about subdivisions being financed by the FHA, some of it was VA financing, some it was FHA financing, families who got mortgages that were insured, both by the FHA and the VA, they were similar policies. The suburbs that I described in St. Louis, they were actually VA, many of the mortgages of the families who moved into those two suburbs I described, St. Anne and Kirkwood, were financed with VA mortgages, not just the FHA mortgages. The VA was discriminatory throughout its practice. There was a struggle within the Roosevelt administration about whether the job training programs that were financed by the VA should be run by states and therefore, southern state legislatures could implement segregation policies that was won by the state supremacist faction. And therefore, when black GIs came to employment services with their VI credits to gain training or employment, they were only trained for menial jobs throughout the 20th century. And this was not just the VA. I talk a lot about federal, state and local policy. I didn't talk much about state policy. Employment services throughout the country, and this was through the 20th century. We're not talking about the 19th century or the 20th century. Throughout the 20th century, employment services to which unemployed workers came or workers with VI benefits wanting training and wanting access to better jobs, employment services accepted discriminatory listings and most of the listings were discriminatory. So if an employer said he wants white only, the state employment service would send only white workers to them, whether they had VA benefits or not. So whether north or south, there was discrimination in the use of GI benefits. Colleges in many parts of the country, soldiers, returning soldiers with VI benefits if they were black, were sent only to vocational schools, whereas whites could get into four-year colleges. Now, in terms of monetizing it, you know, I don't know how you monetize it. The problem, as Sherilyn said before, is the Supreme Court wants you to find a particular victim today. Well, you cannot find, you cannot prove that any individual African-American today would be in a different position if his father or grandfather who returned from World War II had full access to the GI benefits that whites had. But we know systematically that that's the case. And so this requires, and I'm not trying to step on your turf, but this requires a different kind of constitutional theory because it's clear that the constitutional violation occurred, but the remedy can't be a remedy that's targeted to the specific individuals who can prove that they were the ones who were hurt. Yeah, and the court has made clear that they are not willing to take societal discrimination, right, which is what they would call this, you know, as a cognizable claim in which there is an actor and a victim. It's the personalization of racial discrimination, I think, that has been so detrimental. I mean, when someone like Justice Scalia says, you know, I don't, you know, about affirmative action, you know, my parents or grandparents were immigrants, I didn't, you know, we never owned slaves, my family as though, you know, clean hands. If you weren't, you know, if you can't trace your family back to slave owners, then you didn't benefit from racial discrimination. I mean, the value of Richard's report is that it essentially says kind of all you did, you know, we're saying 80% of housing in 1943, you know, was financed by the FHA, then yes, you did. You benefited from a set of policies that did not impose the kinds of restrictions on your family that it imposed on African American families. And so, that's the difficulty, you know, it does not require the individual homeowner, let's leave aside racially restrictive covenants for a minute or belonging to an association of racial restrictive covenants. It didn't require the individual homeowner themselves to be personally affirmatively racist. The whole system was created with that in mind and it allowed people, and that's part of the shame issue I kind of want to get to, that it allows people to be insulated and has allowed generations of people to be insulated from the idea of participating in a racially discriminatory system. It allows people to wake up today and say, you know, I have clean hands. It's a really interesting thing because, you know, in this country we do, it's not as though we don't memorialize our past. We do, you know, there are all these reenactors who care about the Civil War and, you know, we have all these holidays named after different people and monuments and places and it's not as though we don't, you know, we're a country that only looks forward. We do look to the past. We do recognize the past and we do also recognize that, you know, even if your family just got here last year, you probably still go out for the, you know, you still do the cookout on the Fourth of July. You celebrate all the holidays as though, you know, you had anything to do with them. You were, you know, your family wasn't here in 1776. They didn't fight in any wars, but, you know, you got your flag out for Memorial Day. I mean, you do all the stuff because you were the beneficiary of people who did things before, right? For all the good stuff, we recognize that. You know, we open up the tap and water comes out and, you know, we didn't lay the pipes and our parents didn't lay the pipes. Somebody laid the pipes under Washington DC and as a result, we can turn on the tap and water comes out, right? And we accept that. But when it comes to this other part of our history, somehow we believe we have the right to decide whether we are beneficiaries of it or not, whether we are connected to it or not, whether we have to study it or not, whether we have to pay attention to it or not. And to the extent you bring it to people, it is as though you were trying to provoke this feeling of shame. Rather than what I think Richard is doing in fact quite dispassionately, which is to say, these are the facts. Just like, you know, if I showed you the facts about, you know, Paul Revere's ride, it is what it is. And I think that's what we're really struggling with. Let me withdraw the word shame and I think a better concept here is scales falling from the eyes. Richard, last word. Well, I just want to say the response to, you know, Sherylen who heads the Legal Defense Fund has to be worried about what the court thinks. I don't care what the court thinks. When Thurgood Marshall began his campaign, his crusade to desegregate schools, it was in 1933, he had a 20-year strategy. What we need to worry about is what the court is gonna think 20 years from now, not what the court thinks today, and there's gonna be a different court 20 years from now. But I guarantee that if the American public, if policymakers, if educated people haven't educated themselves to what is required and what the reality of this history is, there's no chance that the Supreme Court is going to take the lead. So what we've got to do, it seems to me, is not so much worry about what the present court thinks because we're not gonna take this to the court this year. But what we need to do is create a new climate of opinion, a new awareness, more scales falling from the eyes over the next 20 years, so that when we do have a consensus in this country about the need to do something, the Supreme Court will, as it always does, follow. I can't give the last word on that because I actually think this is the critically important point, and I say this to our staff all the time. I'm actually quite uninterested in having long conversations about the conservative Supreme Court and what, because the reality is courts do change, this court will change. And what I think of as our challenge at the Legal Defense Fund is, you talk about the 20 year strategy. The 20 year strategy was designed and quite carefully managed, right? And there was forward and there was backwards. But the first case on that road to Brown was the case challenging segregation at the University of Maryland Law School in 1935. That case was brought in municipal court in Baltimore City. So there is a stage of experimentation that has to happen. It's not about kind of taking something to the Supreme Court. Where our heads are at now is right in that space. It's that experimental space. It's worth reminding people that frankly, if Chief Justice Vincent didn't have a heart attack between the first and second arguments in Brown versus Board of Education, it's not entirely clear what the outcome would be. In other words, things change and what you have to do is have something teed up for the moment when the court is ready to hear. And I think that's, you know, Richard's point is exactly what we talk about. That's our job. Our job is to be engaged right now in the experimental work, in the strategic work that allows us to tee something up so that at the moment, that's right, the court can hear it. What makes a court hear it? Well, some of it is the jurisprudence that you've developed at lower levels, but you know, both at the state and at the federal level, if you look at what's happened with marriage equality, you can see that. You can see the way in which the court gets influenced. The court does get influenced by the zeitgeist of what's happening in the world and what we're talking about and what policy is. So there's a long arc of work that has to happen before you get to the point of trying to change it at the Supreme Court level. And that's not the only forum. There is also federal and state policy and we operate in that space pretty powerfully as well. And so everything's not lined up to be moved into litigation. There are many different avenues to try and influence policy that can make these changes and we're trying to kind of tap into all of them. What a great conversation, you know. Thank you both so much for this discussion. Thank you both so much for this discussion. Thank you both so much for your work. Thank you to EPI and the prospect for sponsoring this. Thank you.