FAIRNESS IN HOUSING STILL NEEDS WORK!

I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. For as long as I can remember, there was the Black part of town. It was something that everyone knew and took for granted. Everyone, meaning me and my neighbors who were all white. The school bus took my friends and me from my all-white neighborhood to school, across an imaginary line that cleaved downtown along Wilmington Street where, on the other side, like magic, everyone was Black.

I still remember that feeling that I got, the discomfort, like something wasn’t right when we crossed that line into a different world where the houses were smaller, some were even boarded up, and frayed around the edges.

In 2005, I moved to Tucson, nearly 2,100 miles west of the Southern city where I grew up. It didn’t take long before another racial line entered my consciousness: 22nd Street. Tucsonans know that south of 22nd is the Hispanic part of town. Though the architecture is different, Black Raleigh and Hispanic Tucson have much in common. Why is almost every city in this country still segregated by race and ethnicity?

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