Surely California Has Done Away With Racism By Now

Let’s face it: As much as we here in New York would like to think of ourselves as the true vanguard of woke progressivism, California has long since seized that honor from us. On everything from sanctuary and free health care for illegal immigrants, to requiring transgender bathrooms, to banning plastic straws, to having the highest personal income tax rates in the country, it is California that today claims the mantle of woke progressive leadership.

Surely, then, California has done away with racism by now.

If you think that, then you must have missed the big piece in the December 23 print edition of the New York Times, with the headline “Black, Homeless and Burdened by L.A.’s Legacy of Racism.” This multi-page spread tells the tale of one Timothy Wynn, a black Los Angeles resident, who somehow recently “landed on the streets” in his 50s. How could that have happened? We are given few specifics about Mr. Wynn’s life prior to homelessness. Yes, there are brief mentions (without any details) of “mental illness” and of a “criminal conviction for drug trafficking” as possibly being “part of the problem.” But overwhelmingly, according to this article, the main factor in Mr. Wynn’s downfall was racism.

To read this story, California has not just failed to do away with racism. Even as California loudly proclaims to the world its woke progressive virtue, it has, instead, turned into a hotbed — some might even say a “cesspit” — of racism.

So who was it who denied Mr. Wynn the fair treatment to which he was entitled? No names are named; and indeed, it appears that actual namable people don’t have much to do with this. What we’re talking about here is not personal discriminatory misconduct, but rather something referred to as “structural” or “institutional” racism that has brought about an explosion of homelessness, now seen as the “defining crisis” of Los Angeles today.

Thus, we hear from one Peter Lynn, described as the “longtime head of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.” Do you think that this guy might bear some responsibility for an explosion of homelessness that has taken place on his watch as head of the agency responsible for dealing with the issue? Don’t be ridiculous. Here is Mr. Lynn’s take:

[Lynn said that] discrimination played a major role in the origins of the [homelessness] crisis. “There is a staggering overrepresentation of black people in homelessness, and that is not based on poverty,” he said. “That is based on structural and institutional racism.”

Got that? — We homelessness bureaucrats no how, no way bear any responsibility. But how does Mr. Lynn know that the real cause of the crisis is “structural and institutional racism”? Beyond the overrepresentation of black people in the homeless population, he doesn’t say. After all, it’s obvious. Everybody knows it!

By what mechanism does this “structural” or “institutional” racism thing turn into today’s homelessness crisis for black Angelenos? The Times has an answer for you. It all started in the post-World War II era, with the practice known as “redlining,” by which banks and other lenders refused to provide mortgages in neighborhoods inhabited mostly by blacks. In Los Angeles, that was a big swath of South LA, which then was majority black. The Times provides large maps showing the substantial overlap of then-majority black areas with the redlined districts.

Through a practice known as redlining, real estate agents and lenders marked these neighborhoods as areas undesirable for investment, preventing residents there from obtaining home loans.

That does sound bad. But wasn’t the practice of redlining outlawed and ended in the 1970s and 80s? Surely, that should have turned things around. Remarkably, the Times piece acknowledges the long-ago end of redlining, but somehow claims that that change of policy actually made things even worse:

By 2000, South L.A. had a new racial makeup. Once predominantly black spaces were now majority Latino, and the black residents who remained were among the city’s poorest. The Great Recession hit them the hardest while the recovery offered them the least. About a third of South L.A.’s black residents now live in poverty. “It has been a vicious barrage of public and private policies and actions that have placed and will continue to place black individuals and families into a downward spiral into poverty,” said Chancela Al-Mansour, the director of a local housing advocacy group.

And thus the Times’s evidence that “structural and institutional racism” caused the homelessness of Mr. Wynn and other black Angelenos consists of the facts that redlining existed in the 1950s through 70s, and that it was ended thereafter not in an effort to correct a wrong, but rather as part of a “vicious barrage” of public and private policies equally intended to harm blacks.

If that chain of logic seems to you to be hard to follow, and you are looking for an alternative explanation of the crisis of homelessness (and particularly of black homelessness) in California, you might look to the piece by Michael Shellenberger titled “Why California Keeps Making Homelessness Worse” that appeared in Forbes back on September 12. Shellenberger quotes an LA doctor named Susan Partovi, who has treated thousands of homeless patients, as follows:

“I’ve rarely seen a normal able-bodied able-minded non-drug-using homeless person who’s just down on their luck,” L.A. street doctor Susan Partovi told me. “Of the thousands of people I’ve worked with over 16 years, it’s like one or two people a year.  And they’re the easiest to deal with.”

Shellenberger’s conclusion:

California made homelessness worse by making perfect housing the enemy of good housing, by liberalizing drug laws, and by opposing mandatory treatment for mental illness and drug addiction.

To the extent that Dr. Partovi is right, and that homelessness is in nearly every case associated with mental illness and/or drug abuse, it becomes almost impossible to ascribe the overrepresentation of blacks among the homeless to some kind of discriminatory behavior in the housing market. A separate question is why blacks should be overrepresented among those with mental illness and drug addiction problems sufficient to lead to homelessness. I don’t know the answer to that question. But I can predict with some confidence that California’s policies of leniency and non-treatment toward the mentally ill and the drug addicted are not likely to reduce the incidence of black homelessness, or the overrepresentation of blacks among the homeless, any time soon. They must therefore be racists!