Austin's racist attitudes .. more prevalent than you might think

"What did Bandera Road and Whiteway Drive teach me about Austin’s residential segregation? It helps foster an environment where we become fearful when someone who doesn’t look like us so much as walks down the street — even in a city many regard as a wellspring of progressivism."


TALES OF THE CITY: by JOHN SAVAGE
Mapping the color lines in a ‘progressive’ city by John Savage

In the summer of 2007 I bought a house on Bandera Road, four miles east of I-35, just off Martin Luther King Boulevard. Buying a house on Bandera Road was an important milestone, the fulfillment of an adolescent promise made a quarter-century ago.

On a sweltering Saturday morning I stuffed my Honda Civic with books, clothes and CDs, and lit out for my new digs. As I crossed the freeway, the neatly maintained homes and xeriscaped yards on the west side gave way to a different reality on the east. Houses began to sag and wilt, grass turned to dirt and street corners rustled with fast-food wrappers and Styrofoam cups.

I-35 has long delineated the two worlds of Austin ­— the haves on the west side with their charming Craftsman bungalows, crunchy organic co-op grocery and hip indie coffee shops, and the have-nots on the east side with paint peeling from their rickety frame houses, Church’s Fried Chicken franchises and Pay Day Lenders.

From house-hunting walks I knew I would be the only white person on Bandera Road. That, you see, was the point. Like many of you reading this, I grew up in a segregated community — a small town in North Carolina. At 12 years old, I grasped the fact that I lived in a segregated neighborhood. The youthful version of myself, lacking the cynicism of adulthood, made a solemn vow: One day I would live in a neighborhood where everyone didn’t look like me.

Segregated neighborhoods are part of the American experience. Not only across Texas but across the country, racially restrictive housing covenants were common during most of the 20th century. In Austin, the 1928 city plan locating municipal services for black citizens east of what was then East Avenue served to further concentrate the minority population there.

I wasn’t pondering racist housing policy the morning I moved into my 720-square-foot slice of the American dream. I was simply excited to be a homeowner. As I struggled to carry an armful of clothes and books, a group of teenage girls sashayed past my fixer-upper house. “Stupid white boy!” one of them yelled. Her friends laughed loudly.

My immediate neighbors, all of them elderly, greeted me warmly with smiles and handshakes. I often contemplated the decades of conspicuous racism they had endured, and marveled at their kindness in the face of that history. The teenagers on the block weren’t quite as affable — the “stupid white boy” comment wasn’t an isolated event.

After two years on Bandera Road, I married my girlfriend, sold my little house and moved west to the almost exclusively white Allandale neighborhood, to a street fittingly named Whiteway Drive. I rationalized the move because we would be close to my wife’s job.

Soon after, I joined the Allandale neighborhood listserv. Much like the 19th century West Texas frontier, neighborhood listservs can be uncouth places, and I found certain posts about “suspicious” blacks and Latinos spiritually wearying. Just two examples:
“There is a man distributing flyers on Nasco (Street). My wife became suspicious when he skipped our house where there is a car and lights on, but hit our neighbors’ houses who are not home. She described an African American male in baggy pants carrying a canvas bag. She is reporting him to 911 now … “ “There was a suspicious couple walking slowly up and down Daugherty Street this afternoon about 4:00 p.m. I did not see them going to any homes but they stopped for a long time at the corner of Albata and Daughtery and ‘seemed’ to be talking on cell phones and taking photos of homes. They were African-Americans and maybe in their later 20s or 30s […] Be on the lookout.”

That couple taking pictures of Allandale homes and talking on their cell phones — well, that sounds exactly like what my wife and I did when we were house hunting. As for calling 911 to report the flyer distributor who was just doing his thankless job, I was speechless. I still am. I like to think of myself as fairly thoughtful about issues of race and place — something I attribute, in part, to attending integrated schools. Unfortunately this is not an advantage afforded a child growing up on Bandera Road or Whiteway Drive.

Austin draws its school attendance zones so that children living on Bandera attend an elementary school that is 99 percent minority students; if they live on Whiteway Drive, their school’s student body is 80 percent Anglo. Both mirror their surrounding neighborhoods. In this way, our public schools, the bedrock of our democracy, tend to reinforce a lack of cultural understanding in Austin — an unpleasant reality not discussed often enough.

What did Bandera Road and Whiteway Drive teach me about Austin’s residential segregation? It helps foster an environment where we become fearful when someone who doesn’t look like us so much as walks down the street — even in a city many regard as a wellspring of progressivism. My wife and I have moved again. Our new neighborhood isn’t quite as diverse as it could be, but it’s no Whiteway Drive.

And thankfully, I haven’t had to abide any comments about suspicious-looking brown people or stupid white boys. Perhaps the day will someday come in our progressive city when no one else will have to, either.