What's So Bad About Dallas

[lord_of_entropy]

"Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush and his wife sold their Dallas home in 1995 with a "restrictive covenant" in the deed designed to restrict ownership to white residents, records of the sale indicate

Comments

[teegarden]

Heh! "Going back to Dallas, TX / To see if anything could be worse then losing you". Well, I've finished that experiment. The answer is, yes, yes there is. Not too much, but a little bit. Mostly, though, the city has been alright. Biggest little hicksville place I've encountered, to be sure, but it's acceptable. At least the weather is better than Houston. :P

Not surprised about the racist language hereabouts. The locals talk in a much more divisive way. The black-white racism is more obvious and on the surface. It's more subtle with hispanic-white racism, but that's still there too. :-/

[kellymeine]

IIRC, this was actually a common thing to do at the turn of the twentieth. The Housing Rights Act of 1968 overturned most, if not all of them. Though, someone mentioned to me that when they bought their house here in Houston, there was still, as of this year a racial restrictive covenant in his deed.

[lord_of_entropy]

I included the "Texas outlawed such restrictions in 1984" for a reason- this isn't just Dallas problem. This same bigotry is why Craig's-list ended-up in court over users not wanting to rent on the basis of racial bias. Sunset towns continued far past the turn of the 2oth century and the Housing Rights Act and were in no way limited to the South.

Still, for Houston vs. Dallas, the difference might be best put by comparing the River Oaks' "gentleman's agreement" vs. Meaders Estates' explicit and long lasting covenant. In what makes it more blatant, Meaders Estates wasn't founded until 1956 and thus was almost certainly reacting to the integrations that were already slowly taking place.

Quiet racism is bad, but it is not worse then blatant racism.

[kellymeine]

I didn't mean to imply any kind of racism is good. I was simply pointing out that Dallas isn't alone in this.

[bibulb]

I enjoyed the 236.com coverage : "Bush just made the "Western White House" a lame-duck ranch"

"The new digs are in the Preston Hollow area of Dallas, which is less awful than the rest of Dallas."