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

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About Freedom To Discriminate: How Realtors Conspired To

Product Description A bracing, original look at the connected histories of real estate, institutionalized racism, and our political polarization A landmark history told with supreme narrative skill, Freedom 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. Freedom 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. Review “A searing account of how the professional gatekeepers of America’s neighborhoods—realtors—constructed and reconstructed the ideas that anchored the gates of residential segregation, as told by someone who spent a career trying to tear them down. Mining the largely unexcavated records of realtors themselves, many of them smoking guns, Freedom to Discriminate offers a critical perspective on the history of housing discrimination: how its ostensibly race-neutral defense helped shape American political conservatism and, ultimately, underpin the yawning contemporary racial wealth gap.”— MARK BRILLIANT, Associate Professor, Department of History, and Director, Program in American Studies, University of California, Berkeley “Slater’s richly researched and persuasive account of planned housing segregation in the United States opens the door to a shameful part of our history, the effects of which reverberate to this day. This work should be read by all who are interested in America’s current racial predicament.”— ANNETTE GORDON-REED, author of On Juneteenth “They told a Big Lie—that Black neighbors lower property values—then made it true. They forged an iron cage of legal and institutional restriction, then called it ‘individual choice.’ They invented an ‘American dream’ they systematically denied to millions of Americans. The endless resourcefulness of America’s real estate industry in building and maintaining a racist system in the twentieth century is an astonishment to behold. Slater tells the story with brilliance and clarity.”— RICK PERLSTEIN, author of Reaganland “A fascinating and timely look at how the seemingly innocuous idea of consumer choice can fuel insidious racism and discrimination. Slater’s rigorous analysis is an excellent addition to the history of the United States, before and after Martin Luther King implored the nation to dismantle its racial hierarchies.”— MARCIA CHATELAIN, author of Franchise, winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History “Although I’ve been writing about issues of racial justice much of my life, this remarkable book taught me things I didn’t know. Slater shows how the seldom-scrutinized real estate industry is as powerful as the police and the prison-industrial complex in denying Black Americans their rights.”— ADAM HOCHSCHILD, author of Bury the Chain