Maintaining Integration against Minority Interests: An Anti-Subjugation Theory for Equality in Housing
![handle is hein.journals/urban22 and id is 381 raw text is: Maintaining Integration Against Minority
Interests: An Anti-Subjugation
Theory for Equality in Housing
Ankur J. Goel
Law Clerk, Honorable A. Wallace Tashima, U.S. District
Court, Central District of California;
Harvard Law School, J.D., 1989;
University of Illinois, B.A., 1986.
I. Introduction
A housing development limits the number of black residents for the benign purpose
of preserving integration.
A suburb instructs realtors to try to lure whites so as to maintain the suburb's inte-
grated character.
A housing authority tries to induce all applicants to accept apartments in buildings
in which their race is underrepresented.
A city seeks to guarantee its white homeowners that integration will not cause them
a financial loss. The city insures the value of their properties.
INNOVATIVE PRACTICES LIKE these have arisen over the last few dec-
ades; they are designed to produce integrated communities by means
other than preventing discrimination against blacks in the housing mar-
ket. These programs, usually termed integration maintenance,' have
created a storm of controversy within the civil rights community, be-
cause many such programs discriminate against blacks in order to
achieve integration. By doing so, they pit two of the primary goals of
fair housing-integration and color blindness-against each other.
Ever since the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education,2
the public and legal perception of racial justice has revolved in part
around the idea of integration: a society in which people of all races
would be able to live and work together. But for even longer, at least since
Justice Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson,3 the Constitution has been
seen as color blind. In the extreme form of the argument, classifica-
1. Some prefer diversity assurance. Interview with Sandra Sokol, Oak Park
Community Relations Division (Mar. 31, 1989) See also Integration Maintenance
Hearings, Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the House Judiciary
Committee, Dec. 12, 1988 [hereinafter Integration Maintenance Hearings] (Statement
of Alexander Polikoff at 1-2) [hereinafter Polikoff testimony].
2. 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
3. 163 U.S. 597 (1896).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/urban22&div=28&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Maintaining Integration against Minority Interests: An Anti-Subjugation Theory for Equality in Housing
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