A few years ago, a three – part PBS series entitled  “RACE – The Power of an Illusion” examined the history of institutional bias in the United States.  The third part in the series, “The House We Live In,” specifically looked at racial bias in housing and property rights. The film hit our radar again because the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center is screening it in conjunction with a training on April 20.

Who is ‘white,’ and who gets to enjoy the benefits that come from ‘whiteness?’  The film explores the history of this question beginning with  1790 Naturalization Act had limiting naturalized citizenship to “free, white persons,” and looks at the shockingly biased, contradictory standards of ‘whiteness’ imposed by the U.S. Supreme court in the 1922 – 1923 Ozawa and Thind cases:

Many new arrivals petitioned the courts to be legally designated white in order to gain citizenship. Armenians, known as “Asiatic Turks,” succeeded with the help of anthropologist Franz Boas, who testified on their behalf as an expert scientific witness.

In 1922, Takao Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant who had attended the University of California, also appealed the rejection of his citizenship application. He argued that his skin was physically white and that race shouldn’t matter for citizenship. The Supreme Court, however, decided that the Japanese were not legally white based on science, which classified them as Mongoloid rather than Caucasian. Less than a year later, in the case of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the court contradicted itself by concluding that Asian Indians were not legally white, even though science classified them as Caucasian. Refuting its own reasoning in Ozawa, the justices declared that whiteness should be based not on science, but on “the common understanding of the white man.”

The film explores bias in post-WWII  segregated housing programs and how these programs and the racially discriminatory policies behind them have led to present-day disparities in net worth between average Black families and white families, largely due to the value of the family’s residence.  Dalton Conley, a sociologist and commenter in the film, discusses the peril created by policies that fail to take account of race: “[Until] we recognize that there is really no way to talk about equality of opportunity without talking about equality of condition then we are stuck with this paradoxical idea of a colorblind society in a society that is totally unequal by color.”

A full transcript of the 2003 series can be viewed here.