This is what the legacy of ‘white privilege’ looks like in Bill O’Reilly’s hometown

This is what the legacy of ‘white privilege’ looks like in Bill O’Reilly’s hometown

By Emily Badger at the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/17/what-bill-oreilly-doesnt-get-about-the-racial-history-of-his-own-hometown/?TID+SM_FB

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And it was available only to whites.

The latter detail — now at the center of an epic standoff between O'Reilly and Jon Stewart over race, suburbia and the legacy of "white privilege" — wasn't an innovation specific to Levittown. Racial discrimination in housing wasn't merely commonplace in the 1940s and '50s; it was government policy. The Federal Housing Administration helped finance the construction of many suburban places like Levittown on the condition that they exclude blacks. And it underwrote mortgages to white families there with the expectation that their property values would only hold if blacks did not move in.

At first, the requirement that homeowners in Levittown not rent or sell their homes to minorities was included in the deeds to their homes. Yes, homeowners in Bill O'Reilly's hometown were contractually bound to keep out blacks.

But after that explicit discrimination was struck down in court, it lived on in other, important ways. It showed up in the hostility of neighbors and the simple refusal of the Levitt brothers, who built the suburb, to sell the homes they'd designed for World War II veterans to non-whites. In 1957, when Bill O'Reilly was 8 years old, the developer William Levitt explained his logic this way to the New York Times:

The plain fact is that most whites prefer not to live in mixed communities. This attitude may be wrong morally, and some day it may change. I hope it will. But as matters now stand, it is unfair to charge an individual with the blame for creating this attitude or saddle him with the sole responsibility for correcting it.




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