Racism still found in some home deeds

If Joanna Chin hadn’t paused to look closely at the outdated document of covenants and restrictions for the Lafayette house her family was interested in buying, she never would have known that, years ago, neither her husband nor her daughter would have been able to live on the property with her.

Joanna is white, and her husband is of Chinese descent. They also have a biracial 1yearold daughter. According to a covenant created decades ago for the property, “no persons of any race other than the Caucasian race” were once allowed to occupy the property. The covenant also said nonwhite residents were allowed only as servants or employees.

“It was like a slap in the face,” said Joanna, who decided against buying the house. “Even though it isn’t legal today, these things have a lasting impact. It just felt like a dog whistle telling us, and families like ours, that we probably wouldn’t feel welcome in that neighborhood.”

Racial covenants were common in the U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s, embedded in property deeds as a way to keep nonwhite people from purchasing or occupying land. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial covenants were unenforceable in 1948. But covenants across the country remained commonplace, including through social enforcement, until 1968 when the Fair Housing Act explicitly made them illegal.

These days, the obsolete covenants are a rare sight in the Bay Area. But people still find them in their housing documents. And for the minority buyers and their families, the language is a painful reminder of this region’s ugly history.

So, if racial covenants truly are relics of the past, in the same way those “Whites only” signs that used to hang above public restrooms in the South have been for decades, why are home buyers in the Bay Area still finding them?

Title insurance companies and county recorders point to how expensive and timeconsuming it is to remove the language from thousands of deeds across multiple cities. There’s a much weaker argument made by other experts: Removing the covenants could make it harder to rectify past sins against minorities when it comes to real estate.

But the process is also laborious for homeowners if they were to initiate it themselves, which they have been able to do in California since 2000. In Contra Costa County, for example, residents have to physically go to the county clerkrecorder’s office to fill out paperwork, which can take a couple of hours. The homeowner also has to pay a fee to submit the paperwork to modify the house’s deed. Then the county counsel, at a later date, votes to approve or deny the request.

The overall process takes money, time and patience, and many homeowners don’t have enough of any to follow through with it. So, with both sides choosing not to actively pursue the changes on a regular basis, the covenants remain.

While these covenants often emphasized antiAsian policies, Black people in the Bay Area were also affected. In 2019, journalist Marisa Kendall wrote an encompassing piece for the Mercury News about racial covenants, which included an aside from a local real estate agent who said an African American family was so disturbed by a racial covenant they found tied to an Oakland house that they decided not to buy it.

The stories about racial covenants I hear from people like Joanna and her husband have me thinking more about the nuanced racism against Asians in the Bay Area. As a Black person who has been encouraged over the past few months by the national efforts to address systemic racism against people who look like me, I believe there’s room to expand the dialogue.

Examining modern racism against a specific group requires looking back at the past. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited Chinese immigration into America and denied the Chinese the right to naturalization, resulted in multigenerational mistreatment of Asians in the Bay Area. The racial covenants were only part of it, and, as a Black man, I sympathize and understand.

For decades, Black and Asian people in the Bay Area were denied access to affluent neighborhoods, where white people lived, and today, many of their families are continuing to feel the economic impact of past injustices and

housing bias.

Margaretta Lin, executive director of the Just Cities/Dellums Institute, a social justice group in Oakland, also recently found a racial covenant in the documents for her Oakland home, while going through a permitting process.

“It’s shocking to see,” she said. “But you can see in various neighborhoods, especially around Oakland, how that history of racism has manifested itself today. If you look at the Black and Asian populations, from small businesses suffering right now to illnesses related to COVID, you see a lot of similarities.” While people are pulling down Confederate monuments and creating antiracist legislation, Asian residents in Oakland, like Lin, live in a city where racist language remains embedded in their housing deeds, where the prime waterfront destination, Jack London Square, is named after a writer who once wrote horribly antiAsian prose.

I often describe the moves to right the more subtle social wrongs against minorities, be it Trader Joe’s rebranding some of its products or calls for Twitter to hire more Black employees, as the least that we can do in this country. When it comes to racial covenants and their presence in the local real estate market, it’s hard not to consider a sweeping removal of them as a relatively small effort capable of doing a lot of good.

If racial covenants truly are relics of the past, why are home buyers in the Bay Area still finding them?