According to a recent Oregonian article, the issue of racial discrimination in housing is as bad as ever.  In the story, we find that the Fair Housing Council of Oregon sent black and white testers with the same credentials into Beaverton and Ashland to look at apartments advertised in newspapers and online.  In the tests, 2/3 of the black testers faced discrimination in Ashland and 78% of them in Beaverton.  In these cases, the black testers were told apartments made available to white testers were unavailable for them, they were quoted higher rents or deposits, were shown less desirable units, or were not told about specials.

I usually go about my day not worrying one way or the other about the race of the people that I interact with.  We all live in this world, we all look a little different, and sometimes it is easy to forget about what some others of us have to deal with every day.  Perhaps, after a while, it becomes easy to believe that all of us are treated on an equal basis all the time.  Clearly, this little experiment highlighted how this is not the case.

Of course, as all know that racism is still a big problem in our society.  Despite all the work of civil rights leaders past and present, despite a growing integration of all of us into general society, and despite the fact that “nobody talks about it” as much anymore; racism is still prevalent in our society.  If we had somehow kidded ourselves into believing that the issue was going away, then we are sadly mistaken.

The issue then becomes what to do next.  Certainly we could propose newer and different laws and regulations. But really, we already have a lot of laws and regulations in place to address the issue.  We can, in fact, easily identify the current laws that were violated in this case.  The ultimate solution is something deeper.

There seem to be two kinds of people.  One includes those who truly believe that all of us are equal as people, those who see each other as individuals, rather than as outsiders with a skin color or family history different than their own.  The other group includes those who are somehow either afraid of people of a different race, or those who feel that their generalized group of people are overtly superior to other generalized groups of people.  We are never going to be able to legislate against fear.  Changing deeply seated false beliefs will be incredibly difficult.

In a way, we have made it socially unacceptable to discriminate against others due to their race.  For most of us, discrimination is just not done.  There is no need to do so.  But this has not convinced a significant portion of the public to accept all as equals.  What it has done is to simply hide the problem.  The bigots talk the talk, but they do not walk the walk.  This test only highlighted that fact.

Every time that I hear someone say that we are beyond tracking people’s races on census forms, or that we are beyond anti-discrimination laws, we can also point to where something like this comes up that shows us we still have a problem.  The law keeps the bigots from saying that they discriminate, but the law can never stop it from happening.

Now, the only question:  How do we solve this problem once and for all?

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