“Yo, Is This Racist” Transcript
The following is a snippet from act II, scene III of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. Here, our main characters, the Youngers family, have just moved into their new home in a predominantly white neighborhood in Chicago. They are visited by the head of the Clybourne Park Neighborhood Association, Karl Lindler. Let’s listen and then discuss, on this episode of “Yo, Is This Racist” with your host Alec Schwartz.
RUTH: “You don’t look very comfortable Mr. Lindler. Do you want another chair?”
LINDLER: “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I’m fine. Look, let me just get to the point. I am sure you are aware of some of the incidents which have happened in various parts of the city where colored people have moved in certain areas. Now, what we have, I feel, is a unique organization in American life where we’re trying to do something about it. I mean, most of the trouble in this world is where people don’t sit down with one another, and talk to eachother.”
RUTH: “Well, Amen to that.”
LINDLER: “Yes. That’s the way we feel in Clybourne Park, and that’s why I was elected to come out and, you know, talk to you people friendly like as people should talk to one another and see uhhh, you know, uhhh if we can just work this thing out.”
WALTER: “Work what out?”
LINDLER: “Please, believe me when I say race prejuidice has absolutely nothing to do with this. It’s just that the folks in Clybourne Park feel that, for the happiness of all concerned, our negro families are better off, they’re happier living in their own communities.”
BENEATHA: “This, friends, is the welcoming committee.”
WALTER: “Is this what you came all the way over here to tell us?”
LINDLER: “Well, in the face of what I just said, we are prepared to make your family a very generous offer.”
WALTER: “Yeah?”
LINDLER: “Yes, the association along with the collective efforts of our people would like to buy your house back from you at a financial gain for your family.”
RUTH: “Lord have mercy. It’s the living gall.”
WALTER: “Alright, you through?”
LINDLER: “No, I’d like to give you exact terms of the financial agreement, if I may.”
WALTER: “Oh, no, no, we don’t need no exact terms of no agreement.”
LINDLER: “Do you really feel…”
WALTER: “No, no, don’t worry about how I feel. Come on, get out of my house.”
LINDLER: “Alright. What do you people think you have to gain by moving into a neighborhood where you’re not wanted. You know people get awfully worked up when they feel that their whole way of life, everything they’ve worked for is threatened.”
WALTER: “Get out”
LINDLER: “Can’t force people to change their heart, Mr. Younger. In case you change your mind, you have my card”
That scene is so good, and I really do think that Lorraine Hansberry was able to give a very raw depiction of the kind of fear mongering and intimidation that was occurring all across the nation towards African American families who were just trying to better themselves, and find their pursuit of happiness, and really find their American dream. It’s so interesting because Hansberry herself was in fact subjected to a very similar form of housing discrimination. It was in Chicago, in the 1930s. She was living with her father, Karl Hansberry, who had just bought a house in the South Park neighborhood of Chicago. Now, this house was protected by a racially restrictive covenant, which legally prevented ownership or occupancy of the property by blacks. That covenant was enforced, and the family was evicted and Karl Hansberry sued. That case made it to the Supreme Court in 1940, Hansberry v. Lee. However, it did not overturn the constitutionality of the racially restrictive covenants. That wasn’t until 1948 in Shelley v. Kraemer that the court would find such covenants discriminatory. Yet, other forms of discrimination were still used, such as what happened to Walter and the Youngers family. And that didn’t happen until sometime in the 1950s, when the play is set. At one point, we hear Mr. Lindler say, “I am sure you are aware of some of the incidents which have happened in various parts of the city where colored people have moved in certain areas.” Mr. Lindler is speaking of bombs sent to black people’s homes, and burning crosses planted in their lawns, and other forms of discrimination as well. Now, instances such as these actually became more frequent after racially restrictive covenants were ruled unconstitutional in 1948 because the state was no longer there to enforce the segregation, and you had many whites taking that “responsibility” into their own hands. So this really was the birth of a very dangerous time in America for many black folks. The next thing I want to talk about and I think it is very important to talk about is that it wasn’t only individual states and interpersonal incidents which brought about this discrimination in housing; it was also the federal government. In 1934, the federal government passed the National Housing Act as part of the New Deal, which established the Federal Housing Administration. By regulating the interest rates of the loans, regulating the terms of the contracts, and by insuring the loans given by banks, the entire mortgage system in America had been completely reinvented to make home ownership a possibility for many working and middle-class families. It was a huge opportunity, but the new practices were restricted to only white Americans. To understand how that was able to happen, you have to understand the make-up of the federal government at this time. So, you obviously had FDR in the executive branch, who was trying desperately to get his New Deal programs through Congress. But to do this he needed the support of the Southern Democrats. Now, the Southern Democrats wanted to give their states federal aid just as much as FDR, but they were also elected to fight against any measures that would minimize the gap between white and black America. The Southern Democrats were able to use their disproportionate numbers on committees, their mastery of legislative rules and procedures, and the threat of voting against FDR’s New Deal programs entirely to pressure their political opponents to allow an exclusion of blacks from these programs. In the case of the Federal Housing Administration, blacks were excluded under a policy known as redlining. We can actually look at the agency’s documents and maps to see how redlining was practiced. The neighborhoods that were zoned red were marked by the letter D, and that meant that the FHA, or Federal Housing Administration, would not back your loan. Then you have neighborhoods marked C, and those neighborhoods had what the FHA called “dis-harmonious racial mixing”. Meaning, both blacks and whites lived there. In these neighborhoods marked D we can see just how closely redlining policies were tied to race. For example, in Detroit, Michigan, there was a young white man, who after being denied for a mortgage year after year, decided to build a wall where he believed the FHA could then rezone the homes on his side of the wall to be eligible for loans. He built that wall specifically to lower the number of blacks in his neighborhood, and the FHA ended up backing his mortgage. In 1968, the federal government passed the Fair Housing Act as part of the Civil Rights Movement, which made redlining practices illegal. Yet, there were still other policies and practices performed by the government and individuals that still to this day create a disparate impact against African Americans. The first are a series of strict local land use regulations enacted by many municipalities across the nation meant to control density, protect open space, and inflate housing prices. These policies limit affordability and the number of rental, multi family homes in the city. And because blacks disproportionately live in the city, they are disproportionately affected. A second form of discrimination still used are by individual businesses. I think Martin Luther King said it best when he said, “Morality cannot be legislated.” In other words, just because the Fair Housing Act was passed does not mean that discrimination will disappear. Having access to affordable housing is vital to living a life with dignity, where one can thrive in their environment. Your zip code often determines how you will be educated, what businesses are available for your employment, how stable your family will be, and much more. The benefits of the New Deal and the GI Bill — which many blacks were also excluded from — were life changing for their recipients. White America witnessed a boom in home ownership, a boom in higher education, and a boom in prosperity. By the time of the Civil Rights Movement, the gap between white America and black America had grown, not shrank. Yet, this is exactly what many white Americans had wanted. To understand why this is, I have chosen to employ Hegel’s philosophy of the Master-Slave Dialectic. Hegel’s theory says that all self-conscious beings express themselves in relation to other consciousnesses. Whereby, your consciousness is attempting to validate itself and its beliefs as superior to other consciousnesses by gaining recognition from others. The consciousnesses struggle against each other, until one consciousness voluntarily becomes a subordinate to the other and believes they have no power over their master. The master then must make sure that the slave never realizes their power, for when the slave discovers their power, the master slave relationship is over. So if we apply Hegel’s philosophy to the concept of housing discrimination in the United States, we understand that the reason the Southern Democrats and many white Americans did not want black America to have access to affordable housing or to help them out in any way is because it would allow them to begin to discover their power against their master. Thus, breaking the master slave dialectic between the two groups. And that is going to wrap it up on our discussion of Hegel and discriminatory housing in the United States. I would like to thank everybody for tuning in to “Yo, Is This Racist” with your host Alec Schwartz.
Sources
Hansberry, Lorraine. “A Raisin in the Sun 2008.” YouTube, Storyline Entertainment, 29 Jan. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKj7wcuY6X8.
Chenelle, Susan, and Audrey Fisch. “Text to Text | ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ and ‘Discrimination in Housing Against Nonwhites Persists Quietly’.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 13 Mar. 2014, learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/13/text-to-text-a-raisin-in-the-sun-and-discrimination-in-housing-against-nonwhites-persists-quietly/.
Haberman, Clyde. “Housing Bias and the Roots of Segregation.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 19 Sept. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/us/housing-bias-and-the-roots-of-segregation.html.
“Federal Housing Administration.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 12 Sept. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Housing_Administration.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press, 1807.
Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White an Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.
“Housing Discrimination in the United States.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 29 Oct. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_discrimination_in_the_United_States.