Jeannine Bell's Hate Thy Neighbor focuses on the problem of move in violence—acts of violence and intimidation that target racial minorities who move into previously segregated neighborhoods. Bell makes a compelling case that move in violence is a serious problem, that it contributes significantly to housing segregation in the United States, and that existing legal remedies like fair housing laws do not adequately address the problem.

Bell's achievement is considerable, in part because move in violence is such a difficult phenomenon to study. Because there is no consistency across local jurisdictions in how racially motivated attacks are reported, Bell develops her account by knitting together a wide range of information. Her sources include official government statistics, case materials, newspaper reports, interviews, and findings from secondary historical accounts and survey research. The book is most powerful in its presentation of numerous disturbing stories of particular incidents, stories that give voice to both perpetrators and targets of racist violence. While the complex and radiating effects of move in violence cannot be measured with precision, Bell's detailed accounts of individual incidents and empirically grounded analysis of underlying racial dynamics provide a compelling case for stronger recognition of move in violence in legal doctrines and for a stronger policy response.

Bell's book also raises some challenging questions about broader trends in race relations and the way scholars conceptualize problems of racism. The persistence of move in violence challenges some optimistic assessments of growing tolerance and declining race discrimination in US society. In particular, Bell identifies a “tolerance-violence paradox” that emerges in the disjuncture between widespread beliefs in rising tolerance and Bell's own finding that racial violence remains a persistent problem in US neighborhoods. Belief in rising tolerance was fed by some findings in survey research, and also by the election of Barack Obama in 2008, which led many observers to claim that the United States had entered a postracial era. Such framings, according to Bell, make racial violence in US neighborhoods seem like “an anachronism that recalls a bygone and far less tolerant era” (92). Bell's account suggests more skepticism: “When it comes to race, American attitudes bear some relation to a funhouse mirror in which the reflection does not accurately depict the reality” (116). Bell ultimately resolves the paradox by arguing that move in violence reveals the limited scope of white commitments to equality: “While many whites may be more tolerant of interracial interaction, for many this still does not extend to sharing neighborhoods with minorities, particularly African Americans” (116).

In this essay, I amplify some elements of Bell's account to push beyond Bell's own conclusions and draw out some of the reasons why even genuine increases in tolerance would not promise an eventual end to racist violence. I then show how Bell's findings help illustrate why attitude-based conceptions of racism need to be replaced by understandings that recognize racism as a structural feature of social organization.Footnote ¹ In particular, I explore how perpetrators of move in violence and other proponents of segregation deploy claims about “property values” as justification for violence. The use of such claims as a defense against charges of racism starkly illustrates a key problem of attitude-based understandings: they allow assertions of racial privilege to resonate as race-neutral articulations of rational self-interest. Bell's account thus shows why rising tolerance alone cannot ensure further progress: The desire to defend racial privileges persists as a significant practical barrier to racial equality.

Resolving the Paradox

Bell's finding of widespread racist violence in America's segregated neighborhoods raises questions about the meaning of the rising “tolerance” that registers on some opinion surveys. One possible explanation is that perpetrators of move in violence are a shrinking minority in an increasingly tolerant society. That view is initially plausible. While move in violence remains common, the number of perpetrators is still small relative to the whole population.Footnote ² Perhaps the violence reflects the capacity of a shrinking number of “bad apples” to spoil an increasingly tolerant barrel.

A “bad apples” explanation allows room for optimism because it suggests that improvements in racial attitudes are real, and perhaps also that that they may continue to improve until racist violence disappears. Unfortunately, however, other elements of Bell's account suggest little grounds for such optimism. Bell shows how perpetrators invoke past racial violence with tactics like burning crosses, displaying nooses, or scrawling “KKK” on a garage door (79–81). Such tactics reveal a key problem: a legacy of past racial violence continues to give perpetrators outsize power even as racist attitudes become less common. The tactics work as intimidation precisely because perpetrators and their targets share knowledge of America's history of racial violence. The shared knowledge often enables relatively powerless perpetrators like individual teenagers to intimidate even when they are not actually members of the Klan or otherwise positioned to carry out threats of lethal violence. The availability of symbols that invoke past violence also empowers many perpetrators to intimidate without high risk of significant criminal punishment or other personal costs; many jurisdictions treat cross burnings or racist graffiti as low-level crimes that do not merit investigatory resources or serious punishment (167, 177).

While this is discouraging enough, there is a deeper problem with the “bad apples” explanation: it does not fit Bell's account. One of Bell's most disconcerting conclusions is that most perpetrators are not extremists with anachronistic attitudes on race. They are quite often people whose expressed views on race are closer to the mainstream. Bell dispels the “Mississippi Burning archetype” (86) of hate crimes committed by extremists. She instead finds that typical perpetrators are not affiliated with racist organizations and not committed to extreme “mission” ideologies of racial purity. The perpetrators' project of racial exclusion typically does not extend beyond neighborhood boundaries, and many deny or downplay racist motivations altogether (6). Perpetrators claim instead to be motivated by the desire to protect property values or preserve their neighborhood character. And as Bell points out, these neighborhood concerns are shared by a much larger number of whites who do not directly engage in violence (116). Thus, the problem is not simply that some small number of outliers use intimidation and violence, but also that a much larger number of whites at least tacitly share the desire to protect the same privileges that perpetrators seek to defend with violence.

Such findings on perpetrator motivation lead Bell toward a resolution of the tolerance-violence paradox that is far more unsettling than the “bad apples” explanation. The problem is not that a few highly intolerant people remain, but that many people coded as “tolerant” have shallow commitments to racial equality. Although some surveys have shown increased agreement with abstract principles like “equal opportunity” or “fair housing,” Bell points out that other, more sophisticated survey studies (e.g., Charles 2006) have revealed that expressed support for abstract equality principles can coexist with hostility toward, or at least discomfort with, racial minorities: “while many whites may be more tolerant of interracial interaction, for many this still does not extend to sharing neighborhoods with minorities, particularly African Americans” (116).

Privilege and the Limits of Tolerance

Bell's findings reveal that what is needed is not more “tolerance” but instead more meaningful commitments to dismantling deeper structural inequality and its associated privileges. A key challenge standing in the way of developing such commitments is revealed in Bell's account of how perpetrators of move in violence justify their actions. Some perpetrators deny charges of racism by claiming that they are motivated only by a desire to protect property values or neighborhood character. The resonance of such claims betrays the chasm between expressing “tolerant” attitudes on surveys and developing real commitments to equality and the dismantling of racial hierarchies. The claims also compactly illustrate how discourses of postracialism and colorblindness work to mask the privileges that structural racism creates and protects.

When people make or express claims about “property values” as a defense against racism they reveal some of the problems with longstanding conceptualizations that define “racism” as the intolerant attitudes or irrational beliefs of aberrant individuals. On such views, “racist” actions are those that are motivated by attitudes of racial animus rooted in discredited ideas about the biological superiority of whites. The current legal strain of this conceptualization of racism is colorblindness, with its claim that the best strategy for ending racism is to simply ignore racial differences. The persistence of such conceptions of racism is odd, given the large volume of scholarship over the past several decades showing that changes in the way racism structures social relations and in the way racist beliefs are expressed require alternative ways of conceptualizing and measuring racism.Footnote ³ Bell's account of how racism structures neighborhood social interactions starkly illustrates the problems with conceptualizing racism narrowly as intolerant attitudes.

“Protecting property values” can resonate as something different from “racism” because an interest in the value of one's property is not rooted in animus or irrational belief. Even truly tolerant people may understandably feel some concern if the value of their property is diminished by the arrival of new neighbors. Claims about property values are particularly attractive to people who want to appear tolerant because they can blame diminishing property values on third-party preferences that are beyond their control. Yet such claims can resonate as “not racist” only because a focus on intolerant attitudes renders the privileges created and preserved through structural racism invisible.

One indicator of the problem is that the property values defense resonates despite the fact that it crumbles when subjected to the lightest pressure. To begin with, the relationship between property values and changing neighborhood demographics, while complicated, is not typically as strong as what defenders of segregation claim (196). Of course, it remains possible that perpetrators are motivated by a mistaken belief that their property values are at risk. But even conceding the sincerity of such concerns, the decision to respond to a threat to property values by committing a hate crime should be more difficult to detach from racism. Most homeowners have capacity to pursue only a few of the many tasks that might help preserve the value of their home investment. They might regularly clean the gutters and change the furnace filters, remodel the kitchen, or help a temporarily disabled neighbor maintain landscaping. When burning a cross on a new neighbor's lawn rises to the top of the agenda, even sincere beliefs about property values should not automatically rule out racism as part of the story. Additionally, the perpetrators in many of the incidents described in Bell's book are adolescent boys, a demographic not otherwise noted for having intense interest in, or knowledge about, property values.

At bottom, claims about property value are demands that the perceived privileges that result from racial hierarchies must take precedence over working toward equality. The value at risk when a minority family moves into a neighborhood is not value that is earned independently of societal racism. Any such premium accruing to property in segregated neighborhoods exists only because of racial hierarchy and associated discrimination. Conceptions of racism that allow concerns about property values to be categorized as neutral expressions of self-interest allow the privileges afforded whites by systems of racial segregation to become invisible, even as many whites at least tacitly support the use of violence to maintain those privileges.

The crucial importance of privilege as a motivator becomes more visible by considering the costs of segregation for racial minorities. A new generation of researchers is showing once again the importance of neighborhood effects on a variety of outcomes. A key reason that racial minorities remain behind whites on measures of income and wealth is that many minorities remain “stuck in place” in neighborhoods with inferior schools, fewer amenities, and other conditions that limit chances of social mobility (Sharkey Reference Sharkey2013). To understand why racial violence persists despite a rise in “tolerant” attitudes, the benefits of racial hierarchies that accrue to whites and the costs of such hierarchies for minorities have to be made a central part of the story.

Complicating things further, the housing segregation maintained through move in violence also works to render privileges more invisible. Political theorist Iris Marion Young identified the core harm of housing segregation in the way separation simultaneously reproduces structures of privilege and obscures the privileges it creates (Reference Young1999). Segregation makes it more difficult for whites to understand how they benefit from racial hierarchy, and thus less likely that “tolerant” whites will see any need to dismantle the hierarchy.

Conclusion

The persistent racial violence that Bell uncovers provides a compelling illustration of the way attitude-based accounts of racism render invisible the practical barriers created by white privilege, barriers that reduce the progress that might otherwise be expected to accompany increases in tolerance. Survey respondents can express agreement with abstract principles of racial equality without any cost to themselves or other sacrifice. The harder test comes when verbal commitments to equality come into conflict with perceived self-interest. That interest might be material, such as a loss of property value. More likely, it is a psychic cost associated with losing a privileged position in a racial hierarchy. Real or imagined, those costs must be borne by whites for progress toward equality to advance.

Unfortunately, increases in racial tolerance recorded on surveys provide little reason for hope that whites are now ready to bear those costs. Recent studies have shown, quite remarkably, that whites increasingly see discrimination against whites as a more serious problem than discrimination against blacks and also that many whites now conceptualize efforts to combat racial discrimination as zero-sum contests in which gains for minorities necessarily come with costs for whites (Norton and Sommers Reference Norton and Sommers2011). As social scientists continue to devote considerable resources to surveys measuring mass attitudes about race, Bell's use of an accumulation of detail to show how racism is practiced in America's neighborhoods more powerfully reveals the essential truth that rising tolerance is not nearly enough.