The absence of public dialogue is one of the conditions that allow racial discrimination to persist. Most individual home buyers see themselves not as change agents but as consumers whose decisions are merely individual choices that have no broader impact. Community organizations and coalitions play a key role in helping to raise public awareness of segregation and the contemporary problems it creates. Second, community organizations can strengthen their case by partnering with researchers and journalists to more precisely document the scope of residential segregation in their communities. Academic researchers can teach local groups techniques for tracing social patterns and analyzing their impact in a community over time.
Journalists can bring the issue of segregation to public attention.
Rather than focusing their stories on individual acts of housing bias involving a few people, news organizations need to cover residential segregation as an issue story, highlighting the social processes and outcomes that affect thousands of people. Such efforts can begin to raise broader public support for changes in policy. Publishers and editors should also assess the racially exclusive advertising practices in their own real estate sections and pressure advertisers to change. Finally, we must call on public officials at local, state and federal levels to address residential segregation through assertive social programs. Models for these already exist, such as the one developed by the Fund for an Open Society in Philadelphia.