John Derbyshire writes on Jewcy.com:
House hunting in the New York suburbs in 1992, my (Chinese-born) wife and I were once sitting in the office of a realtor, an American lady, trying to spell out just what we were looking for. We had no kids at the time, but were moving to the burbs precisely to raise a family. Well, chatting with the realtor, I said that of course we wanted to be in a good school system, one with not too many black kids. The realtor’s reaction was similar to the one described by P.G. Wodehouse when he wrote: “Ice formed on the butler’s upper slopes.”
You don’t say things like that. You just do them: practically no white Americans, looking for a place where they can settle down and raise a family, will seek a school district that is majority black. In fact, that realtor, when she had thawed some, carried out what I am sure is her normal procedure of steering us well away from heavily black school districts.
Patterns of housing segregation in the U.S. speak for themselves, very eloquently. This is, however, the only way in which honest speech about race in America is allowed. (I believe, in fact, that if the realtor had said: “Don’t worry, I won’t waste your time and mine by showing you properties in heavily black neighborhoods,” she would have been breaking the law. Her behavior, however, was indistinguishable from what it would have been if she had said that, and meant it.)
