A black family moves to a predominately white suburb. As they are moving in, their white neighbor across the street yells racial slurs in their direction. The harassment continues for five years as the neighbor threatens the family's children with a car, repeatedly taunts the kids with racial slurs, and even threatens the family dog.

This story feels like a throwback to a much darker time, long before the time when the United States had twice elected a black man as president. Most would guess that this incident occurred in the Deep South, with its complicated and violent history of race relations. Neither of these assumptions is true. The black family whose harassment I just recounted moved to Mount Pleasant, a Chicago suburb, in 2009 and experienced the harassment until departing in 2014.

In Hate Thy Neighbor: Move In Violence and the Persistence of Segregation in American Housing, I analyze news reports and court documents detailing more than 400 incidents of bias-motivated violence occurring between 1990 and 2010. The incidents I identify are cross burnings, assaults, threats, harassment, murders, racially motivated shootings, and other actions specifically directed at minorities who live in white neighborhoods. Perpetrators' intent—to drive their new neighbors out of the neighborhood—is often unambiguous. In places with hate crime legislation, these incidents could be classified as hate crime. In one of the five states without hate crime legislation, such crimes may be prosecutable only under the regular criminal law, which is often inadequate to address their terrifying effect. Many of the crimes I describe in Hate Thy Neighbor are very similar to the incident I detailed at the beginning of this essay. This was still going on when the book was published, a clear sign that contemporary violence directed at racial minorities who move to white neighborhoods still occurs. In many ways, this particular incident captures the most important lessons offered by Hate Thy Neighbor—that contemporary neighborhood hate crimes are here, they are occurring now, and often not enough is done about them.

It's Everywhere …

By detailing where bias-motivated violence occurs, Hate Thy Neighbor exposes its existence around the country, outside of expected locales like the South. Crimes directed at minorities who moved to white neighborhoods occur in every geographic area of the country. For instance, the Midwest has a surprisingly large number of acts of neighborhood hate crimes, which I call “anti-integrationist violence.” Though I detailed many stories of Latinos and Asian Americans victimized, a majority of the targets are African Americans. The prevalence of African Americans as victims of neighborhood violence is unsurprising given housing surveys that have long shown that African Americans are whites, Latinos, and Asian Americans' least preferred neighbor (Charles Reference Charles2006).

One of the most startling truths about contemporary violence is its presence in the face of rising tolerance. I have termed the presence of violence in the same space and time as discrete measures supporting increased tolerance the “tolerance violence paradox.” For instance, I document anti-integrationist violence occurring in the same historical moment, and frequently in the same geographic location, where we extol our increasing tolerance. In his essay in this symposium, George Lovell picks up on a statement I made in the book about rising tolerance being like a funhouse mirror. We cannot assume from survey research on tolerance (or from Obama's election for that matter) that we eradicated our darker, violent inclinations about race. Looking at rising tolerance only offers a distorted funhouse image of America.

We aren't who we think we are

Though we may not be the persons we think we are, we are definitely better than we were. I argue that we ascribe more meaning than we should to the distance the United States has come racially. Hate Thy Neighbor is not a call to ignore the problems as we celebrate our progress. Celebrating our progress in the nuanced way that I suggest requires recognizing the few places in which we are doing well—the few truly integrated neighborhoods, responses to neighborhood hate crime that keep minorities in neighborhoods after they have experienced violence, and legislation that fully responds to bias-motivated violence directed at minorities who moved to the neighborhood.

There is much work that remains to be done. The incident I described at the beginning of this essay provides a perfect encapsulation of the struggle that remains: Iris Howe and her two children moved into a town home in Mount Prospect in April 2009 (Ho Reference Ho2014). According to a hate crimes lawsuit filed by the Howes under the Illinois Hate Crime Act and the Illinois Human Rights Act, they were immediately accosted by Terry Calliari, a white woman who lived across the street. According to the Howes's suit, Calliari shouted slurs at them. Later, the family's teenagers were taunted with racial slurs, obscene gestures, verbal intimidation, and threats of physical assault (Ho Reference Ho2014). Reports made to the police fell on deaf ears. Despite testimony that the Howes made frequent reports of violence, the Mount Prospect police said that only one incident against Calliari had been reported (Ho Reference Ho2014).

The absence of law enforcement response is a struggle that targets of this sort of violence face around the country. Though these incidents are terrifying, they are not considered serious crimes by the police, so there is often no investigation. Despite inattention by the police, relative to other families who experience this sort of violence, the Howes were lucky. They lived in a jurisdiction that has aggressive advocates on behalf of targets of anti-integrationist violence; the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed a lawsuit against the family harassing the Howes, which settled out of court for an undisclosed sum (Peterson Reference Peterson2016).

Though the Howes received some measure of justice, integration lost. Though there was no evidence that other neighbors supported the white woman harassing them, like other families targeted by this sort of violence, the Howes chose to move to another suburb to escape the harassment (Peterson Reference Peterson2016).

Can we Get there?

In their essays in this symposium, both Osagie Obasogie and George Lovell express skepticism at the idea that we can attain full integration. Despite the darkness of the many stories recounted in Hate Thy Neighbor, I believe in a rich and warm picture of integration, one that is more than, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “elbows together and hearts apart.” My optimism may come from a personal background that involves more than forty years of peacefully integrating white neighborhoods.

I do not disagree that there are substantial barriers to full integration. Lovell quite astutely raises the issue of white privilege, which I do not spend much time discussing in the book. White privilege is a clear cause of many whites' rejection of black neighbors. Too many of the whites whose actions are featured in the book most likely fight integration because they see a diminution in status associated with having black neighbors. They believe that their property will be worth less if black people move to their neighborhood. I spent much time highlighting the speculation involved in this somewhat irrational undifferentiated fear of blackness.

Obasogie is even more skeptical than Lovell of Americans' ability to achieve full integration. In describing his experiences integrating a neighborhood, he alludes to an important issue beyond the scope of the book. For every low-level crime directed at a black person who moves to a white neighborhood, there are many more experiences like his—whites expressing shock, and sometimes being quite nasty about a black couple's presence. Even in the absence of cross burnings as harassment, being continually treated as if you do not belong in the neighborhood is not the type of full integration I lionize in Hate Thy Neighbor.

Obasogie highlights another important issue that is an undercurrent running throughout the book. Sharing a neighborhood is an act of intimacy. What separates whites who are willing to share their neighborhoods with nonwhites from those who do not is the desire for some level of intimacy with strangers outside of one's own racial group. Whites who do not have the capacity to share any level of intimacy with people of color may experience difficulty being good neighbors when someone black moves in.

With respect to sharing intimacy, many whites and blacks have significant distance to travel. Though racial tolerance scores may have increased over time, many of the other measures of interracial intimacy (with exception of the number of interracial relationships) are actually stubbornly resistant to change. Black-white segregation has decreased only modestly in recent decades; Hispanic and Asian segregation showed no decline between 1980 and 2010; whites rarely choose to move to predominantly minority neighborhoods; and whites frequently leave mixed neighborhoods (Logan Reference Logan2013). It is not just housing that is segregated; few white Americans attend integrated church services (Lipka Reference Lipka2014), or have nonwhites as part of their social networks (Cox, Navarro-Rivera, and Jones Reference Cox, Navarro‐Rivera and Jones2016).

The Failed Promise of our Current Remedies

All this might change with increased housing integration. In Hate Thy Neighbor I suggest that cities must mount an aggressive campaign against anti-integrationist violence in order to support those minorities who elect to cross the color line. It is not clear how well situated we are to respond to bias-motivated violence. In some ways it seems as if our institutionalization around hate crimes has declined. The states and the Justice Department prosecute very few hate crime cases. One study of hate crime referrals found that prosecutors turned down nearly 90 percent of the incidents referred to the federal offices (Patterson Reference Patterson2016). Few police departments assign specialized attention to hate crimes, and this shows. A 2013 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that just 4 percent of hate crime incidents resulted in an arrest (Sandholtz, Langston, and Planty Reference Sandholtz, Langston and Planty2013). The number of police departments reporting that even a single hate crime occurred in their jurisdiction fell in 2014. Reporting matters as well. A Bureau of Justice Statistics report analyzing data from the National Crime Victimization Survey indicated that the number of individuals who declined to report hate crimes because they believed that the police could not or would not help increased 10 percent in the period 2007–2011 to 24 percent from earlier data collected between 2003 and 2006 (Sandholtz, Langston, and Planty Reference Sandholtz, Langston and Planty2013).

Responding to Hate Crime in 2017

The incidents described in Hate Thy Neighbor would be prosecuted as hate crimes if they were reported to the police in the jurisdictions with hate crime legislation. Data on hate crime are scant, and usually released with a lag of more than a year. In 2016, however, in the wake of the presidential election, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which has a long history of collecting data on hate incidents, released its report on hate incidents in the wake of the 2016 election. The SPLC data suggested that incidents directed at individuals in the locations where they are most vulnerable—at home—have continued. Of 700 hate incidents occurring in the week following the November 2016 election, over 10 percent of these incidents occurred at individuals' homes (SPLC 2016).

The contemporary situation—both the remedies we have to address bias-motivated neighborhood violence, and the continuing presence of crimes directed at minorities who move to white neighborhoods—does not inspire optimism about moving to full integration. In that sense, I understand the skepticism expressed by Lovell and Obasogie. That being said, the stakes for the United States of not integrating are just too high. Remaining in segregated neighborhoods diminishes the lives of everyone—from blacks who have the limited life outcomes that segregated neighborhoods offer, to whites who pay the cost associated with the artificial barriers that keep neighborhoods white. In other words, I believe that saving our society is worth the substantial leap of faith I am making in advocating change.