ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY:
● Shot: The Bay Area of 1970 was less racially segregated than it was in 2010.
—The San Francisco Chronicle, yesterday.
● Chaser: Housing prices are resegregating the Bay Area, UC Berkeley study finds.
—The San Francisco Chronicle, September 19, 2018.
There’s no doubt that housing prices play a factor. Thomas Sowell has written that they’re part of the Bay Area’s built-in “Housing Price of Liberalism.” As Sowell writes, “Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.”
But another contributing factor is the poisonous spread of identity politics on the left beginning in the mid-1970s, a topic explored by the left-leaning professor Mark Lilla in his 2017 book, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. Identity politics have caused a radical transformation from the color-blind Great Society of the LBJ/MLK years, to a disastrous self-segregation made up of hyphens and boxes.