Commentators from a wide variety of locations on the political spectrum hailed the election of a black man to the presidency of the United States as a definitive sign of racial progress.1 Some claims of racial progress were quite far-reaching. For instance, Bob Herbert, a columnist for the New York Times wrote, “The nation deserves to take a bow. This is not the same place it used to be.”2 There was of course a range of opinion regarding the depth of the racial change that President Obama’s election represented. While some heralded the election as evidence of a “postracial” society,3 others did not see it as a fundamental break with the past.4 Part of the conservatives’ argument that America had transcended race had to do with their desires to end progressive policies like affirmative action.5 Supporters countered by raising the persistent racial inequality that African Americans continue to face.6
It was not just commentators and pundits who saw the election as significant. Surveys administered by Gallup immediately after the election in November 2008 indicate that seven of every ten individuals surveyed believed that race relations would improve as a result of Obama’s election.7 In these surveys, respondents were asked whether as the result of Barack Obama’s election race relations had “gotten a lot better, gotten a little better, not changed, gotten a little worse, or gotten a lot worse.” Thirty-nine percent of non-Hispanic whites and 53 percent of blacks surveyed cited improvement in race relations as a result of Obama’s election.8 Although that optimism has been tempered somewhat by the challenges that beset him during his first term in office, it is still common to assert that his victories in two presidential elections are an unmistakable sign that race prejudice no longer plays a significant role in American life.
The broadest claims of postracialism have been widely debunked,9 but in some cases the rush to respond to those who claim that America’s postracial status signals the end of race-specific policies results in a failure to acknowledge the significant racial progress Americans have made in a relatively short period of time. For instance, in 1954, the year that Brown v. Board of Education was decided, surveys conducted by researchers at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) revealed an even split between respondents who felt that black and white students should attend the same and not separate schools.10 There were steady increases in support for integrated schooling, and by 1995, 94 percent of respondents supported integrated schools.11 Though there is still room for increasing tolerance, social scientists studying the improvement in whites’ racial attitudes over time described the improvements as “sweeping and robust,” demonstrating favorable shifts not just in significant areas but rather “in fundamental norms with regard to race.”12
Another trend indicating improved racial equality appears in how individuals view interracial marriage. American views of intermarriage are seen as thresholds for expressing local racial attitudes. In 2011, a record number of Americans told Gallup pollsters that they approved of interracial marriage, with 86 percent (96 percent of blacks, 84 percent of whites) indicating that they approve of marriage between blacks and whites.13 An even greater measure of acceptance is the actual interracial marriage rate, which has increased steadily since the 1970s. A Pew Research Center report on intermarriage found that in 2008 nearly one in seven marriages was interracial or interethnic, a rate more than double that of the 1980s and six times the intermarriage rate in the 1960s.14
Despite the increases in tolerance over the last forty years that allowed many in the white electorate to support the election of a black man as president of the United States, violent expressions of racism—cross burnings and other extreme mechanisms of racist terror—remain all too common, as I describe below. I call the existence of violent racism occurring in the same space and time as such significant increases in racial tolerance the “tolerance-violence paradox.” While many eras in American history have had moments of racial progress occurring in the midst of violence, I submit that in this particular moment—the 2000s—violent expressions of racism are all too present, and especially seem to defy logic.
Close watchers of the manifestations of racial violence saw it even during the early days of the 2008 presidential campaign. According to some reports, Barack Obama was threatened more times than any presidential candidate in history.15 During the campaign, the Secret Service followed up on more than 500 death threats against the candidate. Some of these cases involved racial extremists, like the two neo-Nazi skinheads arrested for their conspiracy to assassinate candidate Obama.16
Somewhat surprisingly, given the power associated with the job for which he had been chosen, overt racism directed at President Obama did not evaporate. In fact, some reacted to the election of a black man as president, even one who has acted in a racially neutral way, as an assertion of black power and a danger to whites. As such, whites vehemently opposed to Obama’s person, or his policies, responded with extreme bitterness,17 uncharacteristic lack of respect,18 and racialized rhetoric. One of the most prominent, relatively mainstream purveyors of racialized rhetoric in response to President Obama is the Tea Party. Darrel Enck-Wanzer has extensively documented the many manifestations of racism by members of the Tea Party in a variety of formal and informal mechanisms—for example, at Tea Party rallies, on Facebook, and e-mail. Tea Party rhetoric depicting Obama as a racial threat to the nation included:
Visuals such as (A.) the “Obama care” poster featuring a dark “witch doctor” with Obama’s face digitally sutured to the image, (B.) the “Barack the barbarian” cartoon featuring Obama as a hard body barbarian wielding a bronze age axe directed at a scantily clad white woman with long blond hair, and (C.) the iconic “socialism” poster featuring Obama in Joker makeup.19
These were not random depictions, of course. Such racialized images are deployed to mark Obama as a threatening, uncivilized, racialized “other” without ever using the term “black” or using race.
In keeping with the notion that because Obama is black, he is dangerous, attacks on Obama also included the characterization that Obama’s policies pose danger to whites. Signs at Tea Party rallies read: “Obama’s Plan: White Slavery” and “The American Taxpayers Are the Jews for Obama’s Ovens.”20 Enck-Wanzer argues that the goal of such racist stigmatization is to construct Obama as a racialized other, who is both a black racial threat and an antiwhite racist who poses a danger to white America.21
Making claims having to do with Obama’s otherness that are similar to the Tea Party’s are the “birthers,” so called because they demanded that Obama release a copy of his birth certificate to prove he was born in the United States. The suspicion that they articulated was that he was not born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president.22 Though the birther movement included at least one mainstream figure (Donald Trump), many of those insisting that Obama had not been born in the United States were from the far right, including the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white nationalist group which contends that blacks are a retrograde species of humanity.23 After a long-standing refusal to justify the birthers’ arguments with a response, Obama elected to release his long-form birth certificate in July of 2011. This did not end the birthers’ complaints however. Several in the birther movement insisted that the long form released by the White House was a fraud. Joseph Farah, sponsor of the “Where’s the birth certificate?” billboards, said, “It would be a big mistake for everyone to jump to a conclusion now based on the release of this document, which raises as many questions as it answers.”24
It is not just the power of a black president that has generated an extremist response in this post–civil rights era. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks extremist activity, identified 1,002 separate hate groups—groups that have beliefs or practices that attack or malign entire classes of people, generally for immutable characteristics—that were active in the United States in 2010. Such groups were located throughout the United States, in nearly every state, and were engaged in activities ranging from leafleting and publishing to criminal acts, such as race-based arson.
In addition to keeping track of extremist hate groups, SPLC also scans news reports and other media sources for bias-related activities to compile its catalog of hate incidents. The organization’s list includes more than 3,000 incidents occurring between 2003 and 2011. These incidents range from vandalism—slurs or epithets scrawled on someone’s house, car, or religious institution—to bias-motivated murder. The SPLC catalog only scratches the surface of bias-motivated crime. A much more comprehensive list of bias-motivated incidents is compiled each year by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from reports submitted by law enforcement agencies serving in cities and towns around the United States. In 2009, law enforcement agencies reported some 3,816 racially motivated bias crimes to the FBI. Nearly three-quarters of these incidents (71.4 percent) were motivated by antiblack bias.25
Bias-motivated crime is, of course, not new. Looking more closely at the individual incidents of bias-motivated crime reveals much about the contours of such violence. Close analyses of patterns of bias-motivated crime are one of the first steps in explaining why such violence occurs even in the midst of increasing tolerance. A more detailed examination of some of the bias-motivated incidents that have occurred in recent years reveals a pattern of violence in one particular context—violence directed at racial and ethnic minorities who have moved to white neighborhoods. Such violence is historically so common that scholars have coined a term—“move-in violence”—to describe incidents of harassment directed at racial and ethnic minorities who have moved to or are in the process of moving to white neighborhoods. Since violence can occur weeks, months, or even years after moving in, I use the term “anti-integrationist violence” to describe the acts of violence and harassment directed at minorities who moved to white neighborhoods. Most of the incidents that fit the anti-integrationist-violence label occur immediately after the family moves in. But sometimes this is not the case. As I describe below, even if the violence occurs weeks or years after the family moves in, the perpetrators’ intent is clear—they want the family to leave.
My analysis of newspaper stories published since 1990 reveals more than 400 explicitly race-based incidents targeted at minorities moving to majority-white areas across the country in the 1990s and 2000s.26 Incidents of anti-integrationist violence run the gamut in severity, including arson and firebombing, cross burning, harassment and verbal threats, murder, racial epithets, racist graffiti, and vandalism. Some of these are serious crimes, like murder and arson; while others, like the use of racial epithets, fall into the category of behavior that most likely can only be criminalized if it fits the legal definition of harassment.
Such incidents can be prosecuted under a variety of types of state and federal civil rights law, and also under criminal law.27 The most common type of incident prosecuted in cases of anti-integrationist violence is cross burning, but individuals have also been convicted for attempting to drive minorities out of the neighborhood with threats, gunshots, arson, vandalism, firebombing, and beatings.28 Perhaps surprisingly, perpetrators of anti-integrationist violence are frequently not skinheads, members of the Ku Klux Klan, or involved with some other hate or extremist group. In fact, as with hate crimes in general, most of the incidents involve those unaffiliated with any sort of hate or extremist group. Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt, experts on hate crimes, write, “Hate crimes are more often committed under ordinary circumstances by otherwise unremarkable types—neighbors, a coworker at the next desk, or groups of youngsters looking for ‘bragging rights’ with their friends.”29 The vast majority of individuals targeted by the violence are African Americans who have moved to white neighborhoods, though several cases involve individuals of other races, including cases targeted at interracial couples and people who have nonwhite children.30
One common assumption is that contemporary racial violence is largely restricted to the southern United States. In fact, the incidents I identified were not limited to any particular geographic area of the country and occurred in cities in every region of the country. Over the twenty-year period between 1990 and 2010, fewer than ten incidents were identified in twenty-seven states. Instead, the vast majority of incidents seem to be concentrated in just eight states,31 with the largest number of incidents occurring in California (48), followed by Florida (40). The region of the country with the greatest concentration of incidents is the southern United States, followed closely by the midwestern United States. Perpetrators in just four states—Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and Pennsylvania—were responsible for 23 percent of the total number of incidents countrywide.
In addition to occurring in nearly every area of the country, no particular type of neighborhood setting is immune. Incidents of anti-integrationist violence occurred in big cities, towns, and rural areas during this period. The affluence of either the neighborhood or that of the family moving to the neighborhood does not provide immunity against such violence. Incidents occur in working-class white neighborhoods as well as affluent neighborhoods and upscale developments.32 In fact, one of the most costly residential fires in Maryland history, estimated at $10 million in damage, was an act of anti-integrationist violence.33 On the night of December 6, 2004, arsonists set fire to a number of homes in Hunters Brooke, an upscale development in Indian Head, Maryland. Ten homes were destroyed and sixteen others were damaged. Many of the families moving into the Hunters Brooke development were black. One of the men, who pled guilty to the arson, said the development had been targeted because many of the new residents were black.34
As in the Hunters Brooke arson, in the vast majority of anti-integrationist-violence cases, there is evidence that the perpetrator is not happy with the integration of his or her neighborhood, and his or her actions are aimed at scaring the new family so that they will leave the neighborhood.35 Though the majority of the cases in which individuals are federally prosecuted for acts of anti-integrationist violence involve African American victims, a few of the cases involve whites, and also members of other racial and ethnic minority groups. When members of other ethnic minority groups are attacked, the perpetrators have a similar motive to rid the neighborhood of individuals of that particular background.
In cases of anti-integrationist violence involving people of color who are not African American, the defendants’ desire to preserve their whites-only space was crystal clear. For instance, the incidents that led to the government prosecution in U.S. v. Nichols involved an attack on a group of Hispanics who had moved to a white neighborhood in Bessemer City, North Carolina.36 Minorities—in this case, blacks and Hispanics—had begun to move into the formerly all-white neighborhood of Michael Nichols and Shane Greene, two white men. Nichols and Greene had complained about the neighborhood’s changing demographics, indicating that they had a problem with “niggers” and “spics” living in Bessemer City.37 Witnesses also heard Nichols and Greene spewing racial epithets at African Americans and Hispanics who lived in the neighborhood.38 On July 30, 1999, Nichols and Greene approached Julio Sanchez while he and a friend were sitting on Sanchez’s front porch. One of the men assaulted the friend and tried to hit Sanchez. Nichols and Greene left and then returned with an iron pipe, which they used to break all the windows in the front of the house, in addition to the windows of vehicles parked outside the house.39
One undercurrent running through these incidents is that the offenders do not want minorities in their neighborhoods because they feel that the very presence of minorities, particularly African Americans, ruins the neighborhood. Perpetrators have expressed the fear that the presence of minorities will lead to the ruin of the offender’s white neighborhood. In some cases, whites who commit crimes against African American neighbors attribute problems they’ve seen in the neighborhood to the nearest member of a minority group. In these incidents, African Americans and, in some cases, other minorities constitute an undifferentiated mass, and a crime directed at one may be viewed by the perpetrators as helping to solve the problem. As the perpetrator in Nichols, described above, was vandalizing the Latino target’s home and car, a witness testified that Nichols had screamed, “Go back to Mexico, you done got all our jobs.”40 Sanchez, as the target of Nichols, had invaded Nichols’s white neighborhood, and his very presence symbolized white unemployment.41
Ironically, increasing tolerance nationwide makes the incidents that targets experience all the more difficult. For many contemporary targets of racial violence in the post–civil rights era who encounter the violence firsthand, the very existence of such violent hatred is stunning and shocking. Frequently, multiple incidents may have to occur before the family even realizes someone has a problem with their presence.42 Such was the case for the Defoe family. The Defoes, a Jewish family, moved from New England to Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania, in 2004. Mr. Defoe had been transferred, and Jocelyn Defoe indicated that she expected their life in Pennsylvania to be as uneventful as the life they lived in Massachusetts.43 This proved impossible. After they moved into their house in Pennsylvania, it was vandalized multiple times. Less than three months after they moved in, Richard Rick, who lived less than five minutes from the Defoes, tried to burn a cross on the family’s front lawn.44 After the attempted cross burning, the Defoes prepared themselves for further incidents. “I didn’t know what to say. I thought, what the heck did we do to deserve this?” said the clearly upset Jocelyn Defoe.45
Neighbors are similarly taken aback by acts of anti-integrationist violence. When asked to comment on a cross burning, racist graffiti, or other incidents, neighbors and others express amazement. In reacting to acts of anti-integrationist violence directed at two black women in Cleveland, for instance, the executive director of the local NAACP commented, “Something like this is not supposed to happen in 2007. . . . Those are things that we had to deal with back in the 50s and 60s and we should not have to deal with it today and the NAACP refuses to let that happen on our watch.”46 The surprise publicly expressed by those interviewed in the wake of acts of anti-integrationist violence is in line with what one might expect given the current levels of racial tolerance expressed in survey research. Disgust and shock was not the reaction of white neighbors who witnessed similar crimes in the 1950s and earlier. From the 1920s, when African American moves to white neighborhoods began to be controversial, until the late 1960s, when the Fair Housing Act was passed, angry, often stone-throwing mobs gathered in front of homes of blacks who had moved to white neighborhoods.47
So how can we explain contemporary racial extremism in this post–civil rights era? One explanation put forth by scholars, the averse racism theory, suggests that conflicting views, such as those suggesting equal treatment for all regardless of race and racial bias, may coexist within a particular individual.48 Because such views are contradictory, averse racists subconsciously suppress their negative views and will not discriminate unless they can ascribe nonracial reasons to their perspectives. One method of testing such hidden racial bias is the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT measures the speed of individuals’ computer responses to concepts of race (black or white faces) when paired with evaluative attributes (“pleasant” or “unpleasant”).49 Researchers assume that racially biased individuals will take longer when forced to respond to a pairing that reflects a view they do not hold, for example, white=unpleasant; black=pleasant.50 With respect to whether there has been change as a result of Obama’s presidency, measures of racial bias using IAT responses taken before Obama’s announcement of his candidacy for presidency and four months after Obama’s first inauguration showed little evidence of change.51
Political scientist Vincent Hutchings obtained similar evidence regarding the lack of progress on racial change by examining the black-white divide during Obama’s first presidential campaign and then after his election. Hutchings found significant divisions by race. National exit polls administered postelection revealed significant correlation between Americans’ (or voters’) race and the candidate they supported in the presidential election. Exit polls showed that 95 percent of blacks and approximately two-thirds of Latinos and Asian Americans voted for Barack Obama. Whites however are a much different story—the majority, some 55 percent, voted for Senator John McCain, with only 43 percent supporting Obama.52 While 43 percent of the white vote exceeds the percentage gained by Jesse Jackson in his 1998 presidential primary (11 percent), it nevertheless still represents a black-white racial divide that exceeds 50 percentage points. Hutchings also examined surveys detailing racial policy preferences in surveys administered in 1988 and 2008 and found little change in the significant racial divides on blacks’ and whites’ views of fair job treatment, aid to blacks, and racial preferences.53 Hutchings concludes that there is little “Obama Effect”: “There is little evidence . . . that White liberals, defined as respondents identifying as either extremely liberal, liberal or slightly liberal, are more likely to support racially egalitarian policies in 2008 compared to 1998.”54
Not only are many of those who commit acts of anti-integrationist violence not extremists, many claim to not even be racists.55 It is easy to claim to not be a racist when one articulates a nonracial reason for not wanting minorities in their neighborhood. Frequently, and this is clear from many of the perpetrators’ words, the nonracial reason articulated by the perpetrators is that they feel that minorities moving in will harm their property values. The problem of African Americans moving in and destroying property values was explicit in the case of Cassandra and Edward Terry, an African American couple who moved with their two children to the Country Club of Arkansas neighborhood in Maumelle, Arkansas, in February of 2007. Within two weeks of moving in, Cassandra Terry discovered the following note in her mailbox:
Just a note from ALL your new neighbors in the new neighborhood. This Ls [sic] a white neighborhood and if you have to choose to live in a white neighborhood ACT white not like nigger. Keep your children contained in your house and not riot [sic] hanging out in the street like gangs. You really hurt the property value of the neighborhood. We so appreciate that. Please keep to your selves . . . and not disturb anyone else. It’s embarrassing enough.
—Concerned people in the Country Club56
Though the note had been signed to reflect several neighbors, it was written by Shawn Simone Hardin, the Terrys’ next-door neighbor, who was later indicted on federal charges.57 As in other contemporary cases of anti-integrationist violence, there was little evidence that the Terrys’ moving in affected the neighborhood’s property values. They had respectable jobs (as a mental health professional and a member of the Arkansas National Guard) and received support from their neighbors after the note was publicized.58 The neighbor who left the note claimed to have written it because the Terry clan had drifted onto her lawn when they were outside. Hardin also said she was worried about the fact that the Terry’s twelve-year-old son had come over to play with her eighth-grade daughter.59 When interviewed by the local paper she indicated that she shouldn’t have said what was written in the letter, “but I was just so scared for my daughter.”60
Though it is not always expressed as graphically as it was in the Terrys’ case, perpetrators in cases of anti-integrationist violence are asserting their neighborhood—and all of the houses in it—as a white person’s space. As one of the neighbors of Kelvin Williams, who was harassed by his white neighbor in Independence, Missouri, in 2005, told a police officer investigating the harassment, “This is a white man’s neighborhood and he did not want any niggers living around him.”61 In the Williams and Terry cases, the perpetrators acted alone and their neighbors did not go on record as supporting the violence. This is typical, since frequently the perpetrators of such actions act alone, and their neighbors disavow connection with the incidents. In cases involving neighborhoods that have a history of segregation, where segregation is enforced by reputation and anti-integrationist violence, the idea that the neighborhood is a whites-only space may be shared by many in the neighborhood, even if they do not participate in the violence.62 Such was the case with Sean Jenkins, who moved to a white neighborhood in the Port Richmond area of Philadelphia in 2007. Largely unbeknownst to Jenkins, the neighborhood had a history of anti-integrationist violence. Before Jenkins could move into the row house, vandals broke in, shattering the windows and defacing the walls with epithets.63 “All niggers should be hung,” said one.64 A young white man later accosted Jenkins’s girlfriend in front of the house saying, “Y’all niggers taking over the neighborhood.”65 After this incident, the couple decided not to move in.
The belief that nonwhite professionals will destroy a neighborhood seems more rational given the intense separation of private life that most whites experience today. According to analyses using 2010 census data, the average non-Hispanic white person lives in a neighborhood that is 77 percent white. Statistically, for whites then, predominately white neighborhoods are very much the norm. Even though on the face of it many workplaces may be racially integrated, workplaces are not the same as neighborhoods, which individuals may see as a private space, or sanctuary.
How can white preferences for white neighborhoods exist in light of survey responses demonstrating many whites’ stated preferences for an interracial lifestyle? Research on whites’ racial segregation and isolation suggests that predominately white neighborhoods exist at least in part because many whites, including white liberals, choose them. One such piece of research, conducted by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and David Embrick, using surveys conducted as part of the Detroit Area Study (DAS), explored the disjuncture between respondents’ abstract views on social distance issues and the lives that respondents were actually living. Though a large number of the respondents expressed racially tolerant views, their daily lives did not reflect this: “When students were asked for the five people with whom they interact with most on a daily basis, 67.7 percent stated that none of these five people were black.”66 Such was the case for other measures of social distance—having close black friends (87 percent indicated that none of their three closest friends were black); having invited a black person to lunch or dinner recently (67.7 percent said no); and ever having had a romantic relationship with someone black (89 percent never had).67 The racial isolation of whites was confirmed in interviews, with only four of the forty-one individuals interviewed having lived in neighborhoods with a significant black or minority presence (defined as a neighborhood where at least 20 percent of the residents were nonwhite).68 Whites’ separation from people of other racial backgrounds, the authors argue, helps create a sense of racial solidarity (i.e., “we whites”).69
With respect to housing integration, the America we talk about is quite different from the one experienced by minorities, who either find themselves confined to minority neighborhoods or harassed while attempting to integrate white neighborhoods. When will Americans’ idealized notions of race relations change? It may not happen anytime soon. Postracial America is the dream that we would prefer to believe, and the one that many would rather see depicted.
The events surrounding the 2005 ABC television “reality” show Welcome to the Neighborhood are one example offering a snapshot of this postracial ideal and commitment. The show examined the process by which three white, conservative Christian families in Austin, Texas, evaluated seven minority and nontraditional families for a position as their neighbor.70 The family selected would win a suburban house.71 Six episodes of the show were taped. According to press reports, though there were moments of bigotry over the course of the episodes, in the end the neighbors overcame their prejudices and selected a gay white couple with an adopted black child.72
Even though it showed the mildest version of the difficulties that can occur when housing is racially integrated, Welcome to the Neighborhood was canceled before it even aired because civil rights groups threatened the network with a housing discrimination lawsuit.73 Those civil rights groups were correct; selecting one’s neighbors based on invidious characteristics may be a violation of the Fair Housing Act. The cancellation of the show, however, leaves most Americans with no picture of some of the troubling truths. The too-little-traveled road to racial integration can be fraught, and may be marred by discomforts and harassment. Minorities who have traveled this road and their supporters may ultimately have found more protection in being forewarned.