Freedom to Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired to Segregate Housing and Divide America

by Gene Slater

A landmark history told with supreme narrative skill, Free to Discriminate uncovers realtors' definitive role in segregating America and shaping modern conservative thought. Gene Slater follows this story from inside the realtor profession, drawing on many industry documents that have remained unexamined until now. His book traces the increasingly aggressive ways realtors justified their practices, how they successfully weaponized the word "freedom" for their cause, and how conservative politicians have drawn directly from realtors' rhetoric for the past several decades. Much of this story takes place in California, and Slater demonstrates why one of the very first all-white neighborhoods was in Berkeley, and why the state was the perfect place for Ronald Reagan's political ascension.

The hinge point in this history is Proposition 14, a largely forgotten but monumentally important 1964 ballot initiative. Created and promoted by California realtors, the proposition sought to uphold housing discrimination permanently in the state's constitution, and a vast majority of Californians voted for it. This vote had explosive consequences--ones that still inform our deepest political divisions today--and a true reckoning with the history of American racism requires a closer look at the events leading up to it. Free to Discriminate shatters preconceptions about American segregation, and it connects many seemingly disparate aspects of the nation's history in a novel and galvanizing way.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Sociology, Race, Urban Planning

456 pages, Hardcover

Published September 21, 2021

Reviews

[Robert Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slater’s book achieves must-read status through its exhaustive research and its clear, concise writing. The book shows how a collection of Realtors, originally based in Los Angeles, introduced and enforced racial segregation in housing throughout an America where it had not existed before. Slater documents how Realtors achieved this through the development of rationales that changed as social and economic conditions changed. An early rationale for segregation was based on the assumption that black people moving into a neighborhood depressed property values. When it turned out that the opposite was in fact the case, Realtors turned to an ideological argument. They elaborated a notion of freedom essentially based on the premise that freedom involved being able to do whatever one wanted, without consideration for the impact of one’s behavior on the lives of others and without any role for government in ensuring a more inclusive idea of freedom based on equality of rights. While the Realtors did not invent the self-centered idea of freedom, Slater shows how they developed and promulgated it through a deliberate and well-orchestrated campaign. We live with the consequences of their campaign today, in the form, for example, of the anti-masking and anti-vaccination movements that have hamstrung American efforts to combat COVID. In laying out the Realtors’ previously unrecognized role in popularizing this restrictive ideology and producing its consequences, Slater has written a truly illuminating, important, and timely book.

[Vehbi · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Once in a long while a book comes that answers a question that I’ve been asking myself for nearly 50 years. I am a white male who worked as an engineer in 8 states and bought 11 homes in them. None of these homes were in communities where black people lived. Why? I kept asking myself as an immigrant from Turkey, a country where we did not discriminate people by their color. I worked in big and small companies with highly qualified black people. Some of them made more money than I did. Some of them had outstanding education and qualifications. Yet they never lived in the same communities I did, both in small towns and large cities. Were realtors the problem? But it was clearly stated in all their publications that they did not discriminate by race, religion, color, etc. Every piece of documentation they gave me had these disclaimers. That being the case, who had the right to discriminate our neighborhoods against the law, civil rights movement, and the constitution of the United States? What is striking about this book is how it is both deeply researched yet very easy to read and understand. It is not only informative, but it is fun to read this book! I would highly recommend adding it to your bookshelves.”

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slater lucidly connects the realtor-led racial covenant movement of the early 20th Century to the modern conservative negative notion of freedom: that it is the individual’s right to choose whom they will not associate with, serve or permit to live in their neighborhood, a definition diametrically opposed to notion of freedom for all that inspired the 1960s civil rights movement. Slater shows how the racial makeup of modern neighborhoods still bears the patterns of covenant discrimination…and likewise, how modern conservative definitions of freedom, even as expressed in recent Supreme Court decisions such as Hobby Lobby, likewise bear the marks of this negative view: the right to exclude others based on one’s personal preferences. The racial geography of American neighborhoods can not be fully understood without this essential book.

[Elyse Bekins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was pleasantly surprised by how this book was hard to put down. It sounded like it would be more academic, but it's really an engaging story. The realtors who invented racial covenants come alive as individual characters and as part of a whole social scene, grasping after status. As the book turns to the political debates during the civil rights movement, I started to see how this story doesn't just explain why America became segregated 100 years ago, but why it's still so hard to de-segregate and to advance racial justice. The conservative idea of freedom is also everywhere, not just with issues of race but gun rights and mask and vaccine mandates. This is the kind of book where after you read it, you start to see its ideas all around you. I highly recommend it!

[Tanya · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book taught me a lot about historical reasons of racial discrimination and inequality in America today. I've heard about banks redlining policy before. From the Slater's book I was surprised to learn that the real estate agents played such an important role. Slater brilliantly describes the reasons the real estate agents pursued the redlining policy: they were defending their vision of "freedom"! The book also explains why term "freedom" is dividing rather than uniting us today.

[Kevin Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

Man fuck Ronald Reagan

[KRISTINE ZAVOLI · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whose Freedom to Choose?
Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2021
This well researched and well written book exposes the little-known role of the power of realtors in creating segregation in the housing market in America. Beginning as early as the 1900s, their belief that a neighborhood would only be successful if it was socially homogeneous became their marketing tool. Major realtors developed “white only” communities (known as “covenants”) while convincing home owners not to sell to minorities as it would lower their property value. “Subdivisions were designed to be not only racially exclusive, but for a single economic class.” The CA realtors published ads as blatant as “Glendale, a 100% white community.” Language was created and shared with realtors nationally reminding them not to sell homes to minorities and urging insistence on discriminatory listings.
When fair housing began to become a “threat” to discrimination in California, the realtor’s defined freedom as the “individual freedom” of the owner to sell. They rallied to create proposition 14, a 1964 ballot initiative which proposed upholding housing discrimination permanently in the state’s constitution. Sadly, it passed with a wide margin.
This book is an eye-opening indictment of the manipulative political forces that shaped housing discrimination and made a major contribution to the very divided America we live in today.
I learned so much about an issue I've always cared about but never fully understood. If you care about this issue as well, this is truly a must read.

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was pleasantly surprised by the narrative quality of this book. The author presented a potentially boring topic (the history of the real estate industry) in an engaging style. Further, his research and arguments were compelling. I’m disheartened not only by the racial discrimination in this country, but also by the chasm between “freedom to” and “freedom from” adherents. There’s a long history of divisive and fearful politics in this country. I didn’t think that the author presented a causation connection between the realtor movement’s and the modern conservative movement’s tactics, but certainly an interesting correlation to consider. I’m further disheartened by the degradation of the housing market caused by corporate property investors, and recommend that they consider the position of earlier conservatives who espoused the principle that property ownership by all people is what will lead to unity and prosperity for the nation. The book was full of great quotes so I include below some of my favorites from the last couple of chapters.

“The realtors had offered a new carefully constructed way to see oneself in relation to liberal government that could be applied to issues after issue. Once freedom meant the right to maintain social traditions, threats to such traditions became threats to one’s individual freedom. Once discrimination was defined to mean simply to make a choice, limits on discrimination became restrictions to freedom of choice. One a particular narrow right became elevated as freedom itself, it could no longer be balanced against the rights of others. Such an approach could be applied to virtually any issue. The more issues this idea of freedom was applied to, the more powerful it became. This picture of freedom created the opposite of the positive framework for interpreting one’s ongoing experiences in the university experiment. Each action of liberal government became yet another attack on the tradition and community that one saw oneself belonging to and on one’s freedom to maintain that community.”

“The realtors most powerful contribution to modern conservative politics was an idea of freedom that effectively prioritized the freedom of certain Americans without directly saying so. The realtors’ idea of freedom appealed to a wide range of white voters because it protected and emphasized ‘our rights,’ meaning the rights of white Americans to contribute to discriminate while claiming to support the equal freedom of all Americans. By defining freedom as they did, realtors did not have to say that the freedom of some Americans was more important than that of others. Rather they redefined freedom so that this would be the result. A key reason for that realtors and conservatives succeeded in their effort was that they used the same word as the Civil Rights Movement to mean something very different. Whenever they spoke about American freedom, freedom of choice, or rights, realtors presented freedom as belonging to each person separately as a personal possession so that freedom for others diminished one’s own. This legitimized one’s right to limit the freedom of others.“

“We can summarize these differences as two paper, powerful, and far reaching ideas of American freedom, the exclusive freedom that realtors envisioned to continue discrimination in contrast with the inclusive freedom of the Civil Rights Movement, exclusive versus inclusive freedom. In their deepest and most longstanding beliefs, realtors, conservative intellectuals, and white Southern leaders all saw American freedom not as an automatic and equal birthright but as a reward for those who deserved it, for those it truly belonged to. Realtors described rights as something that had to be earned. . . . The idea that freedom depended on worthiness was implicit in the realtors basic premise that the right to discriminate was essential to American freedom.”

“When realtors and conservatives dropped the language of racial entitlement and spoke about freedom, it was not to agree with the Civil Rights Movement’s idea of inclusive freedom but to oppose it more effectively. The idea that freedom must entail the right to discriminate meant that freedom was exclusive. For proponents of Proposition 14, the very purpose of freedom was the right to exclude. Exclusive freedom already fully existed for everyone who deserved it. It did not have to be created or served by government. Indeed realities insisted that American freedom preceded American government. It simply had to be defended against government taking the rights to exclude.”

“Conservative success was built on using the language of color blindness and equal legal rights to justify exclusive freedom. This was the precise formula realtors had developed for Proposition 14. When Reagan spoke about freedom and equality, the language and arguments he used were those of the realtors not of National Review. Reagan praised Russell Kirk as an intellectual leader who shaped so much of our thoughts and created the intellectual infrastructure of the conservative revival of our nation. But Reagan would never have succeeded if like Kirk, he had praised John C. Calhoun’s view of ‘all men are created equal’ as ‘so great an error’ and deemed the Declaration of Independence as essentially in-American. If as some have argued, the party of Lincoln has become the party of Calhoun, it has done so not by citing Calhoun but, like Spike Wilson, claiming to be following Lincoln. To argue for exclusive freedom after the 1960s, to win national elections based on freedom having at its very core the right to discriminate, conservatives needed to follow the realtor’s example. They needed to quote the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. They had to be in favor of freedom for all Americans while helping ensure that the benefits of such freedom belonged, by the very way they defined freedom, as if by the natural order of things, to some Americans more than others.”

“Freedom is not a message in a common future in the future and democracy or in Republican government. The animating message of the Revolution, the Union in the Civil War, or America in both World Wars, but a way to express resentment, reticence, autonomy, and resistance. It was this no accident that the political power conservatives attained, the more central they made this message of resistance. Conservative presidents needed to demonstrate that they were really the leaders of the resistance and that running the government was a battle against the enemy.”

[Mills College Library]

363.51 S6314 2021

[D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would recommend this book.

Interesting exploration of how realtors fueled discrimination in the US housing market and in politics as a whole.

[Erik · Rating 2 out of 5]

I appreciated the topic and all the seeming research that went into the writing of this book. Really, there is plenty to like about what the author accomplished. Yet I was ultimately disappointed with it. Many of the faults I have in my own writing on large topics I found here: too many nitty-gritty details that don't get back to the thesis, too much delving into a narrow sub-topic, too many needlessly long direct quotes, to name a few. This would be a much better book with some more editing down, perhaps someone to push the author to cut more. The introduction was also a bit heavy-handed in its judgment and, while the rest of the book presented a more scholarly approach, it set a tone that put me on guard.