Converting Conservatives

Understanding the impact of systemic racism can lead to a better understanding of other Americans

For many years I voted mostly Republican, with a few exceptions. My voting straight Republican stopped in 2010 due to the craziness of the tea party and ended completely with the election of Trump in 2016. But my change from being a right-leaning centrist to fully embracing most Democratic policy views had more to do with my beginning to understand how profoundly racist our American society is, how racism has led to so many problems in our society and has prevented so many of our fellow Americans from living meaningful and comfortable lives, like the life that I’ve been fortunate enough to have.

The good thing is that the word “racist” has become a slur that most white Americans are unwilling to bear. And I am not accusing anyone I know of being racist; in fact, most of the people I know are not racist at all. But the fact that you are not racist doesn’t mean that our society isn’t. And even if some think that our society is becoming less racist (debatable), it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t profoundly racist in the recent past. Two racist practices continue to echo today: racism in housing, through the practice of “redlining,” and related, how even after Brown vs Board of Education ended public school segregation, redlining had packed minorities into certain areas in cities resulting in minorities attending poorly performing schools.

While this happened across the US, an example of this practice and how it has harmed people is in my own hometown of San Bernardino, California. “Redlining” was the practice of denoting areas of a city or town via red lines that were deemed undesirable and hence not eligible for government-backed loans. This study by students at the University of Redlands uses maps to explore how redlining impacted schools in San Bernardino. “In San Bernardino, parents, activist groups and teachers fought for high-quality education across a deeply racially divided city. In California’s cities, there may not have been legally segregated Jim Crow schools in the 1960s, but racially segregated neighborhoods produced deeply unequal and racially divided schools” (emphasis mine).

I remember this. I started school in the San Bernardino Unified School District in 1970 with Kindergarten at Bradley Elementary and finished when I graduated from San Gorgonio High School in 1983. During the 1970s my mother was a PTA president at my then-elementary school, Barton Elementary, and organized protests against forced busing to integrate schools. When we moved to Highland, on the northeast end of San Bernardino, she had selected the neighborhood specifically for the schools; she wasn’t about to see her kids bused across town to attend those schools.

It was well-known that “across the railroad tracks” (southwest San Bernardino) as the article states was where the majority of San Bernardino Blacks lived. Why? It’s because that was the part of town where Blacks were allowed to rent or buy property. Due to redlining, “African American and Latino families were concentrated on the west side of San Bernardino and south San Bernardino, and were systematically excluded from housing north of Baseline Street and east of the train tracks and later the 215 freeway.” The west side was a very poor area of town that had all of the symptoms that afflict economically disadvantaged areas: crime, drug use, and generational poverty that make it difficult to break the cycle and develop the personal wealth needed to live comfortably in our society.

Even when there were opportunities to change this situation, both the city of San Bernardino and the state of California fought to maintain the status quo. “The San Bernardino City Council and County Board of Supervisors voted to oppose the Rumsford Fair Housing Act of 1963, which prohibited discrimination by race in renting or selling homes.” And, “… in 1965, California voters agreed with white local political leaders, when they passed Proposition 14 which overturned fair housing and made racial discrimination in home rentals and sales legal again.” “In 1972, the NAACP launched a lawsuit against the (San Bernardino Unified) School district, calling for an immediate end to racial segregation. When the judge ordered the schools to immediately integrate, the school district repeatedly appealed his orders all the way to the California Supreme Court (Timeline, SB Sun, 1984).”

By contrast, the neighborhood where I grew up, in north-east San Bernardino, was mostly white. My neighborhood was safe, I attended schools that were well-regarded, and I was able to turn the circumstances of my childhood into a full-ride scholarship to college, a career in the Air Force, and importantly, I started adulthood without debt and with a stable and supportive family.

My life is how it is in no small part to the fact that I was born to two white parents. Neither was a college graduate; my father, the main earner in my family, had an 8th-grade education. But because he was white, he was able to work wherever he could find it and could buy a home wherever he could afford it. I grew up in a middle-class family in a nice neighborhood with good schools because of this. Other San Bernardino natives, not so fortunate to have been born into a white family, lived very different circumstances.

That this is the reality of current-day America is simply unacceptable to me. I want all Americans to have what I have: the right to walk or drive down the street and not worry about being killed in an encounter with criminals or police. Access to healthcare without having to choose treatment over putting food on the table or paying the rent. The right to generate wealth, and to own property, so that they can pass wealth on to their children, so that their children may be able to live a comfortable and enriching life. The right to an excellent public education. The right to vote. These are rights that I and other White Americans have always had, and that our nation’s systemic and endemic racism has denied for so many others. The simple fact is that Democratic policies favor rights for all Americans, and Republican policies seek to strip away rights from some and preserve them for others. I will never support such policies.

Conservatives seem to spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about what other Americans may “get” from the government that they don’t (in their eyes) deserve. They view anything that benefits Blacks and other minorities as something extra that they (White Americans) don’t get and hence is unfair. They ignore the fact that many Black and Brown Americans never had a hint of the opportunities white Americans have. Addressing the outcomes of systemic racism is essential if we are to be a truly multiracial democracy. There are many ways that this can be done, and a democracy in which all Americans have a voice is the best way to sort through the options. But my fellow White Americans must first acknowledge the privilege they have, and have always had, and be willing to address the unfair conditions many Americans face due to the systemic racism that has always existed in American society.

Reference: Fighting School Segregation in San Bernardino: How activists challenged a geography of segregation in the 1960s, Maile Costello and Daniela Gomez, ed. by J. Tilton, a University of Redlands REST Public History Project