Op-Ed: It's Ridiculous to Equate Marin's Fight Over Housing with Segregation

Our community has been warmed in recent weeks by fiery dialog over the Marin County Supervisors’ decision to implement a federally-spun forced housing plan in the name of achieving better racial balance. This fire was kindled by political columnist Dick Spotswood, who suggested that the county should not have taken more than $2 million for the housing bureaucracy in the first place and thereby avoided the federal involvement.

Since then, Supervisor Judy Arnold, who represents most of Novato, has weighed in with columns supporting the supervisors’ actions, and a senior county employee has contributed an important opinion piece speaking out for the vitality and importance of his own department and its work.

This seems to be developing once again into camps of opinion, the politically correct position being that we’re all guilty slobs who ought to get off our butts and make things better by giving more housing and other benefits to persons disadvantaged by societal bias, particularly as to race.

Responsive to that is the competing mythology that America is supposed to be a country respecting of merit, and that quality of life is something to be earned by effort, a position which tends to be held more in areas of Marin where stature was obtained by work, and less in areas of Marin where stature was acquired by beneficial circumstance. There is no perfectly "right" position.

Now into the affray appears Kerry Peirson, who in Monday’s IJ characterizes the supervisors’ action as “courageous” and castigates Marin as having a “stubborn commitment to segregation.”

Whatever one’s views on the competing mythologies in this Wagnerian tableau, Peirson’s phrasing should be condemned, not because of his position but because his words cheapen the history of valor that lifted us up out of the mire of the truly segregated system that once existed.

The legal and cultural battles against segregation were fought by serious people, many of whom lost their very lives, against an intrenched racist governance structure. Ours was a serious fight, with the stakes of life and death, to insure that human beings could not be herded as though cattle on the basis of skin color. It was a fight against entrenched and powerful racial bias, with persons of color forced into separate facilities of every sort, and that racism supported by law.

To call this Marin housing dispute a fight over segregation, when in fact anyone of any race can now go into any public facility or business, drive on any road, invest in any home, and congregate in any place of their choice, is insulting to the memories of those who devoted their lives — and sometimes lost them — in the fight to insure that human beings would be treated as equal under the law. It was equality fought for, not entitlement.