Obama administration wants to choose skin color of your neighbors

Do you have enough neighbors whose skin color is different from your own? The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed new rules that are aimed at forcing changes to neighborhoods that it deems to not be racially mixed enough.

When I first read something about this a month or so back, it was just on a few conservative fringe news sites, so I was hesitant to take it seriously. Surely the Obama administration couldn’t think it had the legal power or even moral right to decide where people should live. If mostly working class whites live in one neighborhood and mostly middle class blacks in another, so what? Nobody would be insane enough to think the government should force people to change their voluntary decisions about where they want to live and who they want to live around.

But now that U.S. News and World Report is writing about it — and confirming the gist of what I’d read before — I have to take this insane story seriously. The busybodies in Washington really have decided to use your tax money to socially engineer where people live. Here are the proposed rules, which are currently in a 60-day public comment period.

The Obama administration doesn’t think it’s reasonable that people tend to choose to live around people who are a lot like them. Those social engineers think it’s OK for them to rig the system in ways that will produce neighborhoods with mixes they like — when it comes to both race and income levels.

On what legal, moral or constitutional ground is this being done? Is there any basis to it other than the progressive left belief that people shouldn’t be allowed to make private decisions that conflict with the progressivist vision of what the world should be?

For decades now, it’s been politically correct to pretend that it’s typical for groups of friends to include a little bit of every race — with a handicapped friend or two to complete the picture. You see such images in TV commercials and sometimes in movies. (Here’s a funny recent parody of such a commercial showing false diversity.)

The truth is that those images don’t reflect reality. In the real world, people make very different choices by their own free will. Whether you like those choices or not, they have the right to have the friends they want and move to neighborhoods where others are more like them.

When governments passed laws mandating racial segregation — in schools, business and neighborhoods — it was wrong, because the laws violated people’s freedom to engage in the voluntary transactions they wanted to and the laws meant that different taxpayers were treated in very different ways by governments. That situation was immoral and those Jim Crow laws deserved to be struck down.

Some of us objected (and continue to object) to legislation which prevents people from selling or not selling their property to others as they see fit. I think that racial discrimination in the sale of real estate or hiring is stupid, but I believe people should have the legal right to be stupid. People shouldn’t be forced into private associations that they don’t choose. But even those rules never contemplated dictating outcomes, at least insofar as neighborhoods go. They only insisted that a seller had to sell to whoever wanted to buy and had the money.

These rules will go beyond that. These rules will mandate that the government use everyone’s tax money to achieve arbitrary outcomes that have no legal or moral basis. It’s the worst kind of social engineering.

Not long after I moved to the suburb where I live — more than 20 years ago — a young redneck who lived down the street told me that blacks would never live in this neighborhood. The guy was in his early 20s at the time, but he couldn’t conceive of anything other than the whites who had always lived around him being part of the neighborhood. He told me that “they” — speaking of the local “powers that be” — wouldn’t “allow that.”

That guy moved away many years ago, but I’ve wondered many times whether he remembers his prediction. Although the neighborhood is still predominantly middle-class whites, I’ve had a number of black neighbors — and nobody’s ever said a word about it. There have been a couple of black men who have lived with white women on the street. Nobody’s ever batted an eye. There have been at least half a dozen black families on the street. Nobody’s ever said a thing. Their children played with the other children. The adults chatted with the other people who lived here. It was no big deal.

Are some people racist or prejudiced pretty much everywhere? Of course. But I suspect this scheme is going to do the most damage to people who want to maintain the character of their neighborhoods — and they’re going to find people being pushed into their neighborhoods from very different cultures. I couldn’t care less whether my neighbors are black, white, pink or purple. But I do care what kind of people they are and how they live.

There are a lot of things associated with black urban culture that I don’t want in my neighborhood. It has nothing to do with the color of someone’s skin, but everything to do with a culture that I find dangerous and disgusting. And, for the record, I’m just as disgusted by a certain element of white redneck culture. I don’t want those folks pushed into my neighborhood, either.

People have the right to move to anywhere they choose and can afford. In real life, they choose places where they feel comfortable and that reflect their cultural values. That’s the way it should be. We don’t need Washington bureaucrats engaging in further social engineering to achieve the racial and income mixes they happen to prefer. It’s none of their business.

Let people make their own decisions about who to live around. It’s the legal and moral thing to do.