Stamped From the Beginning, NIMBYs & Blockbusting

 

Stamped From the Beginning, NIMBYs & Blockbusting

 

 

Today’s quotation comes from “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” by author and historian Ibram X. Kendi. Released in 2016, this critically acclaimed book explores the shockingly repetitive and enduring history of racist, anti-black ideas in American culture through the representative lens of five influential thinkers who explored the topic of race in their lives and writing – Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois and Angela Davis.

First and foremost, it should be noted that Stamped from the Beginning is a staggeringly important scholarly investigation into the formation, adoption, repackaging and recycling of racist ideas in American history. The key word here being “ideas” – Kendi’s work is not a catalogue of the violence and discrimination inflicted on African Americans by racists, but rather the societal beliefs, theories and propaganda that creates this violence, and indeed drives racism as a whole in the United States. In particular, the author’s research dramatically exposes the way in which the purveyors of racist ideas have responded to societal pushback by simply re-framing prior racist ideological arguments in a new, modernized context and beginning the marketing cycle anew. There is, to my knowledge, literally no other book in history that has explored specifically the recorded patterns and effects of these ideas on American society, with this much depth, candor and attention to fine detail. On that measure alone, I’m inclined to call Stamped from the Beginning an academic triumph.

Importantly however, Kendi’s argument moves beyond proving that there’s largely nothing new about the racist ideas that shape American society today and explores the larger economic reasons behind the ongoing and purposeful propagation of bigoted, racist and anti-black ideas. Thus, in contrast to the frankly missionary approach of the liberal orthodoxy, Stamped from the Beginning successfully argues that racial economic inequity is not the result of popularly embraced racist ideas, but rather that the racist ideas themselves are created and marketed by the ruling classes to defend and justify already existing economic inequity. As anyone who has ever read my writing will no doubt already be aware, this idea puts Kendi’s theories firmly in my wheelhouse and the sheer volume of evidence the author provides to demonstrate this idea’s veracity is invaluable to anyone who writes about the economics of racism in western “democratic” societies.

Finally I should note that despite the book’s undeniable scholastic heft, Kendi’s writing style remains incredibly accessible even to the novice reader with literally zero background in critical race theory or prior academic understanding of white supremacy – which makes it tremendous starting point for aspiring scholars. Indeed, one of my first thoughts after finishing Stamped from the Beginning is that I wished I could share it with most of the white people I know because the work so effectively exposes the often aged origins and bigoted logic behind the racist ideas that so thoroughly capture American society even to this day.

 

Blockbusting, NIMBYs and Trump’s 2020 Re-election Campaign:

With that out of the way, let’s turn back to our quoted passage and talk a little bit about the practice of “blockbusting” for a moment. What is blockbusting?

In a technical sense, the practice of blockbusting involved greedy real estate agents preying on the latent racism of white American homeowners to acquire property at a reduced value and then eventually selling that property to African American families with fewer housing options, at a greatly inflated value.

Typically this would take the form of convincing panicked white home owners that their property values would plummet when African American families moved into their now desegregated neighborhoods, thus encouraging them to “sell now” at a point well below the home’s market value – or risk losing everything later when the real estate agent’s prediction came true. Once even one home on the block had been “busted” this would in turn actually cause a drop (albeit, temporarily) in recorded property values and in no time at all, petrified homeowners would be falling all over themselves to take whatever the real estate agent was offering. Once enough white families had been scared into selling their homes, the realtors would begin moving in African American families at exorbitant rates and good old fashioned racism would take care of the rest – forcing the remaining white families to sell quickly or accept the promised higher crime rates and social ills purveyors of racist ideas assured them would come from desegregated living.

Of course, the real beauty of these scam for unscrupulous realtors was that not only could they make money hand over fist by fleecing homeowners on either side of the segregation fight – but they actually managed to profit from the arrangement a third time, by selling suburban housing to the very white people who’d just pawned away their family home at a cut rate in the face of a wholly manufactured “black invasion” – as racist scams go, blockbusting most certainly “used every part of the buffalo” as it were.

At its root however, the practice of blockbusting wasn’t really about predatory real estate speculation – the immense profits registered through blockbusting (and other forms of racial housing discrimination) were simply the “reward” for engaging in the behavior. Ultimately, blockbusting was about threatening comfortable white people with alien and unfamiliar brown people and simply letting latent racism and white supremacist beliefs work their course in the marketplace. The often unspoken truth here is that blockbusting was actually more effective when used against moderate, middle class NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) liberals than overt white supremacists and avowed racists; after all, the bigoted cracker white nationalists were just as likely to refuse to sell to a realtor who dealt with black families as they were to flee. NIMBY white liberals on the other hand could consistently be relied on to “pragmatically” take the money and run to the white majority suburbs – all the while professing their support of the very same desegregated housing initiatives they were now fleeing under the guise of protecting their property investments.

This is important because while blockbusting has long since been replaced by more subtle forms of segregation in our society, the tradition of manipulating white behavior by threatening them with the mere presence of brown people, continues on unabated. Indeed, after watching Downmarket Mussolini gleefully announce his intentions to release undocumented migrants into primarily liberal “Sanctuary Cities” I found it impossible not to think back to Kendi’s book and the parallels between Trump’s behavior and the practice of blockbusting.

While the President’s objectively nativist declaration of his intent to punish his political enemies (liberals who ostensibly support migration) immediately triggered discussions about the legality of going through with such a threat, I think that conversation is largely missing the forest for the trees.

Yes, Trump’s racist bluster plays well in the cheap seats of his Pork Reich re-election rallies and the living rooms of Fox News Nation – but the truth is, Herr Donald isn’t actually talking to his own supporters when he repeats this threat against (again, primarily liberal) Sanctuary Cities. He’s threatening affluent, white NIMBY liberals with brown people and allowing latent racist ideas and white supremacist beliefs in our society to do the heavy lifting. Furthermore, this is likely to be an effective strategy because ultimately, many of the same affluent white liberals who would put on a vagina hat and protest the Trump administration on weekends, are also low-key economic segregationists on the side. It really doesn’t even matter if Trump goes through with the plan quite frankly, he’s already seeded the idea that a vote against Trump is a vote for flooding your neighborhood with hordes of swarthy migrants; from there, the targets of his threat will be encouraged to make their own, inherently racist associations between foreign brown people and increased crime, drugs, terrorism and so on – as was the case with blockbusting.

Throw in a war (or two), a supposedly booming economy, as well as Trump’s bizarre suggestions that he may interfere with or ignore election results he doesn’t like, and you can see the outlines of a focused, race-based strategy to break off moderate “Anti-Trump” conservatives and affluent white liberals from a possible Democratic Party coalition – much in the same way Nixon broke those same moderates and NIMBYs away from McGovern and the Democrats in the disastrous 1972 election. Sadly, it might even work too; if the Democratic Party nominates an out of touch, racist stiff like Joe Biden and in the process continues to suppress their own turnout, then even a marginal decrease in “mighty white” folks voting Democrat could hand Herr Donald a second term.

And that my friends, would be an unmitigated disaster of historical proportions.

 

– nina illingworth