I don’t have any moral problem with it, irrespective of the races involved. Not a lawyer, so I have no idea if it’s legal or not (although I was under the impression that sharing a unit you live in isn’t a public accommodation).
Devil’s advocate, since I concede there’s a component of racism and it is illegal.
All that in mind, let’s suppose the person was a gay person or transgender, and they simply didn’t want to live in a house with a gay-bashing homophobe or transphobe, and incorrectly identified such people as simply “right wing Christians”.
That would be discrimination based on religion.
At the same time, I would fully support the right of a gay person to deny someone applying to be their roommate if they were a gay-basher.
If someone has experienced violence, bigotry, and discrimination by a segment of the population of “white people” all their life, and their response is to simply go “I don’t want to live with white people”, that is
(a) Racist, yes, and it can be illegal
(b) Understandable
It’s not exactly equivalent when it’s white on black discrimination versus black on white discrimination. In an ideal world, it would be. But not when minorities are beaten, shot, jailed, pulled over, not hired, or experience socioeconomic segregation by being priced out of more expensive and predominantly white communities.
It’s not fair and it’s probably not legal, but to equate them on the same level as a klansman, for example, is pretty naive and ignores a lot of context.
I’m not gonna fight and die on this hill for this person, but a little empathy wouldn’t hurt.
Can you link back to the part with definitions? Sorry, it wasn’t clear how to do that or I would have done so myself. I think this might hinge on how they define “housing accommodation” and “dwelling”. If it’s the entire unit, as opposed to one room to be shared, then the ad and action is not illegal.
Typically, a municipal code will start out with a list of definitions. If those words are not defined, then it would be up to the courts to make the call.
I’m convinced that you only see this in majors that are way too easy. When’s the last time you saw a complaint like this from someone in the sciences?
I don’t see much of a distinction there. What difference does it make whether it’s the landlord or another tenant who is turning people away because of their race? Either way it’s racial discrimination.
On more specific legal grounds, I think the landlord would be legally liable for any discrimination lawsuits if he allowed the tenant to choose who gets to live in the apartment. By giving the tenant that authority, the landlord has made the tenant his representative and is liable for anything she does on his behalf.
Give me a ticket for skimming the legalese. (I’ll keep my hands visible on the steering wheel while you write me up.) I don’t live in the U.S.A. and find what the law should be to be a more interesting question than what it is.
If there is a law against such discrimination, let me go on record calling that a bad law. It is this sort of liberal political correctness, contrary to normal standards of freedom, which allows the excesses of reactionary redneckism to bloom.
Opposing “separate but equal” schools was a triumph for civil rights. Dictating whom a person must choose for roommate is the opposite of civil rights.
Why is that? What are the normal standards of freedom you’re applying?
I understand it’s not a one-sided issue. Both sides are asserting their freedom. One person wants to be free to not rent apartments to people of a given race. The other person, who is of that given race, wants to be free to rent the apartment of their choosing.
They can’t both have their freedom. One of them will have to lose. So on what basis do you decide that the right to discriminate outweighs the right to not be discriminated against? Why do you decide the first person is free to do what he wants and the second person is not? What’s the standard you apply to decide whose claim to freedom is greater?
To be fair to Bricker, you did start out with a declarative statement about what the law is, not with a statement about what you think the law should be:
Emphasis added. But that is not clear, per the link provided.
Personally, I agree with you about what the law should be. But I think it’s fair to say that most of us are also interested in knowing what the law is and why.
I think the roommate distinction could be a fair one, but I think changing the law in such a way could lead to abuses.
I am truthfully struggling to see it, though. Racist whites will already exclude black persons from living with them by default, they don’t need a law to make that be the case, and they have plenty of ways of avoiding the repercussions. Simply don’t say “no blacks allowed” and you have a blank check to discriminate otherwise.
I kinda want to support this person’s right to choose who they live with. But I am admittedly finding it to be potentially disastrous and legally dubious.
I think they, like the racist whites, simply need to be more careful in their wording. It’s disgusting all around and it would be better if it’s not the case on either side. But I’d rather protect the persons struggling against *systematic *discrimination as best I can, if I were to err on one side.
“You can’t legislate morality.” Somewhere there is a (fuzzy) line to be drawn. We seem to be in agreement that it’s OK to post on Blind_Dates_R_Us.Com “No blonds need apply.” And that it’s not OK for restaurants or landlords to discriminate. Roommates who are going to share kitchen etc. are rather intimate; a house renter looking for a single roommate is simply not similar to a business renting out several apartments.
Yes, you’ll be able to fine-tune the scenario until it’s near the fuzzy threshold and I’ll have no clear answer to whether discrimination should be legal.
*The full quote is “Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.” You probably shouldn’t use Martin Luther King as your go-to if you’re looking for quotes to defend racial discrimination.
Don’t know about you but I’d draw the line well before the point of segregated kitchens. That’s Jim Crow stuff.
If you’re going to discriminate, try not to do it in a way that’s easy to prove… at least unless you’re sure your lawyer charges more per hour than their lawyer.
If the people already in the flat feel threatened by the sight of a white person, any white person, they probably would benefit from seeing a doctor about it. It’s not normal.
A friend of mine did, pointed out that it’s anticonstitutional (Spanish constitution, not US), therefore they had to at least agree to let him see the room and interview him. During the interview he made them a deal they could not refuse (see below). We referred to that flat as “Dave’s harem”.
All people involved were law students (undergrad), they are notorious for “vampire behaviour”: party for 8 months, cram for 1, exams. He told them he could cook and that he would make sure there was always edible food available, 24/7, including during exams, but in exchange he wouldn’t clean other than the kitchen (his mother is a cleanliness and neatness freak). They looked at each other and asked him to come up with lunch. He was in before they got to dessert.
Discrimination is perfectly legal in any situation that doesn’t involve commerce. A roommate situation is a gray area because it involves both commerce and personal relationships. It does seem to me that colleges should enforce their own non-discrimination policies though. In a world where someone can get fired for an off the job tweet, colleges should enforce rules about this kind of thing whether it’s on campus or off campus.
Right, not every university rule must be based on the law. Universities can require students to do things or refrain from things that are not regulated by law.
In practice, there’s a huge difference. Landlords might be overwhelmingly of the same race, sex, or ethnic group. In practice, they probably are in most markets. So if landlords are allowed to discriminate there may be whole classes of people who have trouble finding a decent dwelling. But tenants will be of all races, etc. that are prevalent in a particular area, probably distributed fairly proportionally to the population as a whole. (or at least, to the population seeking rental housing.) So allowing tenants to discriminate should not block anyone out of the market. Especially if only a fraction of tenants chooses to discriminate along any particular lines.
Also, living together is a very intimate situation. There exist racist people. Does it really benefit anyone if they are forced to live with people of a race they despise or fear? I am a Jew, and certainly wouldn’t want to live with a rabid anti-semite. Handing someone a check every month, or accepting payment from them, is much less intimate. There are certainly situations where I’d rather do business with an anti-semite than be blocked from a market.
You can decide based on who’s going to suffer a greater burden as a result of imposition of the law, and on whose claim is more essential to a basic human good.
In this case, I think being forced to share a residence with someone is a greater imposition than not being able to rent the apartment of your choosing. I also think being able to choose the kind of domestic community you want to have (within your own residence) is a more important human good than non-discrimination.
septimus, entirely agree with you.
Why the fuck would it be any different? It is racial discrimination. The student cannot purchase their lodging because of their race. The tenant is the one putting out the commercial offering.
It’s amazing how much twisting people will do to accommodate racism, and wonder why it’s not been eradicated. There is a perfect legal way to deal with this racism, and you guys want to make excuses rather than use it. You want the system to accommodate racism in a place where it currently doesn’t.
I mean, I fully understand that there are certain legal rights that are good to have that make it difficult to eradicate racism. I support freedom of speech, even if it has the side effect of enabling racism. I know that we cannot in any way arrest people for thought crimes. But there is no such right here. The tenant is subletting a room. This is a commercial interaction.
If you can apply the law to stop racism, you should apply the law to stop racism. You don’t try to weaken the law to let the racist get away with it.
Why does this board have people suddenly start leaning libertarian out of nowhere? It’s the professed conservative who has the most liberal position. That’s insane!
And for those saying the girls aren’t getting money–yeah, she they are. They are subletting. They get the money and then pay it to the landlord. If they don’t get this fourth person, they would each have to pay more to the landlord. They thus are getting more money.
I see two main distinctions between the landlord discriminating vs. a tenant discriminating: First, the landlord has more power in the relationship: A landlord can choose to deny a tenant not just one unit, but all units that he or she owns or operates. And even once the relationship is established, the landlord can still kick out a tenant. By contrast, if you let a roommate move in with you as a peer (i.e., both sharing the lease, not a sub-lease), and you later decide that you don’t want to live with that person after all, then you probably have to move out yourself.
Second, a roommate relationship is, as others have mentioned, more intimate than a landlord-tenant relationship. A landlord will not actually be sharing living space with their tenants (even if the landlord lives in another unit in the building, it’s still probably closed off from the tenants’ spaces), while a roommate is sharing living space.
There’s also a practical matter of enforcement: A landlord will typically do business with a much larger number of tenants than a roommate will, which makes it much easier to establish a pattern of behavior. If a person rooms with three other people, all of whom are the same race, it’s hard to say that means anything, but if a landlord leases to two hundred people, all of whom are the same race, that’s a pretty clear sign of racial discrimination. Admittedly, this objection doesn’t apply when the roommate is so stupid as to actually specify race in an advertisement, but I’m still not fond of laws that can only be enforced in the event of stupidity on the part of violators.
Between those points, I think that there’s enough justification to make discrimination illegal for the landlord, but leave it legal for roommates. Though even if it’s legal, I see no objection to the landlord establishing a policy forbidding it (a private entity’s policy needs to clear a lower bar than does a law, to be acceptable).
EDIT: In reply to BigT, I was not assuming that this was a sub-lease situation. A person sub-letting an apartment is, in at least some ways, a landlord, and so the laws concerning landlords would and should apply. I was assuming that all of the roommates (including the new one) would be sharing the same primary lease. I haven’t read enough details about the specific case at hand to say for sure whether this assumption is correct, but in my experience, most landlords don’t allow subletting.
Again, lacking info on how the terms in the law are defined, it’s difficult to know if this is illegal or not. It might even matter if the roommate is subletting from the existing tenant or being asked to co-sign on the lease. The other odd thing about the law is that it uses two different terms for, what seems to me, to be the same thing. One wonders what the difference is between a “housing accommodation” and a “dwelling” is, and is there a reason for there to be a different term used in those different subsections. Or just sloppy crafting of legislation.
As a libertarian leaning guy, I support the right of property owners to rent to whomever they wish. I won’t abide discrimination by the government, especially laws that enforce discrimination or try to set up “separate but equal” situations, but in the private sphere, I don’t think discrimination should be illegal. I think it’s foolish, but that’s not enough for me to think it should be illegal.
So, I’m not only on the side of the roommates who want someone of a specific race, I’m OK with the landlord wishing to rent to folks of a given race. But I won’t belabor that last point as it’s probably a hijack of this thread which is focusing on the specific issue of roommates. The OP threw out the idea that some folks might support “one-way discrimination”, but not universal discrimination. Is there really anyone here who would support that? That is, it’s OK for minorities to discriminate against majorities, but not vice versa.
Here I disagree: I don’t really see a useful distinction between the behavior of private entities and the government. If you can’t rent a building because all the landlords won’t rent to you, you’re being coerced as much as you would be by an explicit government policy, and the negative impact on your welfare is similar.
In a perfect world, I’d be OK with some measure of discrimination on the parts of governments as well as private entities (if the government of a country wants to have a racially or religiously discriminatory policy, for example, I’m more than OK with that). Because of our history, in the United States, I think we need to be very careful about that and I think the laws against private as well as public racial discrimination are a good thing. I think sharing an apartment is as much a personal as a commercial transaction though (no different than having a racially discriminatory social club, which is legal), so I think that should be considered in a different category than a landlord doing the same thing.