One of the truly sad realizations in my life is that critical, society-changing battles won, sometimes accomplished with the tragic loss of lives, don’t always stay won. There is backsliding and hedging, the changing of the meaning of words, and Universal Truths turn out to have been written on an Etch-a-Sketch.
I was just a kid when Lyndon Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Bill and the Voting Rights Act. (It would be more than a decade before I found out that it wasn’t an act of devotion stemming from the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but rather an exercise in raw political power, at which Johnson excelled.) To have a Southerner do that for the country (and to the states of the South) was amazing to me to the point that, even with the 900-pound gorilla of Vietnam in the room, I still consider Johnson to be one of the greatest presidents of my lifetime.
The battle for civil rights had been won. There would be no turning back. There would be a few minor skirmishes left, but America was on the path to fulfilling its lofty promise. What a stupid, stupid boy I was.
One of the first political memories I have was of the fight over Proposition 14 in the 1964 election in California. In the run-up to the aforementioned pieces of legislation, the Earl Warren-led Supreme Court had been steadily chipping away at the wall of bigotry. One of the first big pushbacks was Proposition 14. It was billed in almost-folksy terms, a “common sense” law that simply said that a person who owned a house had the right to sell it to whomever they pleased.
The main underlying point was that people could see a Supreme Court decision on the horizon that would have prevented homeowners from refusing to sell based on skin color or religion. The fear was of something referred to as “blockbusting,” where one house in a white neighborhood being sold to a Black couple would cause an immediate drop in home values and an exodus of other white homeowners from the area.
(This issue was deftly dealt with on “All in the Family,” when Archie Bunker’s white neighbor busted the block by selling his house to the Jeffersons.)
For a kid like me, the child of immigrants living in a lower-socioeconomic, mostly minority area during the civil rights era, it was a no-brainer. There was no way that people in California would vote for something so obviously racist. And then two-thirds of them did.
It turned out that this was deeply ingrained in California. Unlike in the South (and South Africa), where the law was used to keep blacks and whites apart, in California, it was de facto segregation, an unwritten and unspoken way of doing things that I’m sure that those in power sincerely believed was in the best interest of everyone involved. You know, keep to your own kind.
Sometime before Proposition 14, in the official publication of the California Real Estate Association, it was written that “millions of homeowners of the caucasian race have constructed or acquired homes in areas restricted against occupancy by Negroes. The practice of surrounding homes in such areas with the security of such restrictions has become a traditional element of value in home ownership throughout this nation.”
It then added, “The threat of occupancy by Negroes of property in such areas depreciates the value of all home properties and constitutes a direct deterrent to investment in the construction or acquisition of homes of superior quality, whether large or small. The experience has been uniform that whenever and wherever Negroes have occupied homes in such areas this has not only depreciated values of the properties which they own, but has depreciated the values of all surrounding properties.”
While it is possible that the preceding paragraphs were originally written by Donald Trump and/or his racist-ass father, I can state categorically that they were not written by Arizona State Sen. Justine Wadsack. No, she’s much more advanced and subtle. She would never come right out and use the terms “caucasian” and Negro.” Instead, she will use the term “political considerations.”
Wadsack, who is also a real estate agent, wants agents to warn prospective buyers that they might be buying into a neighborhood of (gasp!) Democrats. And we all know that “Democrats” means minorities and gay people and other degenerates.
Wadsack wants it to become law that any dwelling listed on the multiple listing service (MLS), a common real estate tool, would have to have an accompanying section detailing the prevailing political persuasion of the area. She is actually quoted as saying, “There’s a lot of people that this is a very important issue to them, especially when they’re coming in from out of state. They want to know that they’ve maybe left one state’s political ideology for another, and they don’t want to move back into another scenario that they may have just left.”
Lord knows that you don’t ever want to live near people who don’t think exactly the same way that you do. Constant (or even occasional) exposure to viewpoints other than your own might lead to a widespread outbreak of… oh, I don’t know, adulthood?
The real estate business is often ugly and Wadsack wants to make it even uglier.
