America is beginning to awaken to the myriad social structures that limit the upward mobility of Black citizens. Many of these structures are related to neighborhood apartheid.
Neighborhood apartheid is a set of official and unofficial codes that determine who is allowed to live where, who is able to thrive where, and who feels secure where. And it continues to be a powerful force shaping our collective life, determining access to essentials like food, safety, education, and economic opportunity. White enclaves like the New England town of Amherst, where 77% of the population is white and less than 6% is Black, were not segregated by accident. They developed as a result of neighborhood apartheid.
David Chaplin, an Amherst College student who did his thesis in 1953-1954 on the Black community in Amherst found that, between 1900 and the 1950s, the number of Black residents in Amherst dropped by nearly 50%, even as the overall population of the town doubled. Most of the Black people still in Amherst by the mid-1950s were from long-established families who owned their own homes and had “settled principally in homes south of Northampton Road near the Hadley line.” (Davis-Harris 1982)
A white resident in the 1978 book “Essays on Amherst’s History” recalls this section of town populated with Black residents: “We weren’t scared of coloreds. They were just different, you know? We never had any trouble with the colored people, down Northampton Road and Snell Street. That used to be called N Heaven [slur omitted].”
Another white resident reflected: “They were treated with, I think stiff kindness, but they stayed in their place…It wasn’t violence really, it was just a bit of indifference to hobnob. … They never worked in stores except, perhaps, as janitors. They rode the trolley, of course, but I don’t know that we would sit with them.”
Chaplin also found that of four barbers in town, only one was willing to cut a Black customer’s hair. Several dozen restrictive real-estate covenants, though illegal, were being actively enforced throughout the 1950s. And up until 1945, the Lord Jeffrey Inn, owned by Amherst College, banned Black guests.
Jim Crow segregation was institutionalized in the South during the 100 years between 1865 and 1968. It was brutally enforced “de jure” (by law), and officially encoded into the state’s civil and legal structures. In the North, where many people today believe racism was not prevalent, a “de facto” (in practice) segregation ensured that Black people did not have access to the same opportunities as whites to build wealth and secure the well-being of their families.
In a 2019 interview Ta-Nehisi Coates said, “the average African American family in the U.S. making $100,000, lives in the same kind of neighborhood that the average white family making $35,000 lives in. This is totally tied to the legacy of enslavement and Jim Crow and the input and the idea in the mind that white people and Black people are deserving of different things.”
The “different things” that Coates refers to include a basic sense of safety and security. The structures that support neighborhood apartheid have prioritized safety and security for white bodies, and white people have come to rely on these structures in order to feel safe. According to a recent 10-year report by the Amherst Police Department, Black drivers speed less and are involved in fewer car accidents, but are stopped, searched, and arrested disproportionately relative to whites. When they are searched, the search is more likely to result in “nothing found” than searches of vehicles driven by white people. And during the 2019-2020 school year, Black students made up 8.2% of the Amherst Regional High School student population, but 18.75% of suspensions.
Knowing that one is more likely to be disciplined or policed creates stress in body and mind. This stress, coupled with an underlying sense of being unwelcome in the collective life of the community and a lack of accumulated wealth to fall back on, is familiar to Black residents of white enclaves like Amherst. But the effects of this covert, de facto racism are often unknown by the white majority, because key indicators of racial disparities in areas like health and economic opportunity are not tracked. And we can’t address what we don’t know.
According to Coates,“If I tax you or if tell you you have to be loyal to this country and pledge fealty to its laws, but then I don’t give you the same degree of protection, I don’t give you the same access to resources that I give to another group of people, I have effectively stolen something from you. I have stolen your tax money. I have stolen your fealty. I have stolen your loyalty.”
White enclaves owe a debt to their past and present Black residents, and to the Black people who should have been able to enjoy the benefits of safety, security, and belonging that white enclaves offer, but were not able to access these benefits. Neighborhood apartheid is theft, and theft is a crime. Local reparations, which can take many forms, is the way we acknowledge and atone for the crime.
Michele Miller and Matthew Andrews are co-founders of Reparations for Amherst (R4A). The group will host an educational symposium to share its latest research finding with the community on April 27. Join its Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/reparationsforamherst – for details.