Forty years ago, I was president of the homeowners association in my condo building on Montecito Avenue, in the Adams Point neighborhood of Oakland. I was an owner. My new next door neighbors were renters: a young couple from West Africa—Nigeria, to be exact. When they moved in, they began drying their clothes on a rope they had strung across their balcony.
This bothered the other owners. Because the new couple’s balcony faced the street, the homeowners felt that the clothesline made our building look like a slum. They brought their concerns to me, and, as president, I had to deal with them.
After careful consideration, I sent the young couple a letter. I asked them to please stop drying their clothes on their balcony. I reminded them that the building had clothes driers on every floor. I said that, if their balcony had faced the back or the sides of the building, there would be no problem—but the fact that it faced the street meant that the Association could not permit them to continue doing so.
Well, the merde hit the fan. Next thing I knew, I got a letter from a lawyer notifying me that I was a racist. In their native Nigeria, he explained, drying clothing on balconies was part of the culture. The fact that the couple were now living in America did not mean they had to drop their traditional cultural practices because a few racists were offended.
After a few weeks of back and forth, the couple took down the clothesline. Before long, they moved out. But the incident had shocked me, and I never forgot it. To me, it seemed obvious that they should not be drying their clothes on their balcony. No one else in the building did; no one else on the street did, or in the entire neighborhood, as best as I could tell. The entire Board (which was multi-racial) backed me up. We had approached the situation sensitively, with taste and tact. This was pretty much my introduction to Oakland: if you objected to anything a Black person did, you were a racist.
Why did the young West African couple react so defensively? It was due to their fundamental misunderstanding of America. Yes, it’s a free country, but that doesn’t mean you can do anything you want. They could not grasp the difference between equal opportunity and equal outcomes. Neither the Constitution nor common sense guarantees every human a life of comfort. You will find that concept nowhere in the Bible or in any other ancient tract of law. The brilliance of the American experiment was that it provided, as much as it could, that every citizen would have the opportunity to make his life a happy one. But nowhere in human history was the outcome of that life guaranteed. It took Marxism to do that—and a century of Marxism in Russia shows what a massive failure it was. When Marxism invaded the intellectual mainstream of Western thought, for a brief moment it appeared that the Left would up-end millennia of experience and guarantee to all, regardless of their effort or lack of it, the success, privilege and comfort that the most talented and hardest working always had enjoyed. Over the last thirty years or so, the Left has repackaged Marxism in a way more amenable to American law and tradition, under the code name “progressivism”; but that doesn’t mean it made Marxism more rational. To this day, we witness the Left’s insistence that all outcomes for all people be equal: this, indeed, is what the “equity” means in “diversity, equity and inclusion.” That this hasn’t happened despite the Left’s best efforts, and that there now exists a severe public reaction against it, were entirely predictable.
And why would there not be blowback? Why should the Nigerian family who put up their clothesline not have realized that they were living, not in West Africa, but in a new land, a land of different cultural practices? Why would they not have adapted to their new environment, which, frankly, welcomed them with open arms? Because the Left told them they would find equity in America and therefore they could do whatever they wanted, and if anyone objected, it was because they were racists. It was a promissory note with nothing to back it up—an empty promise, to the extent it meant that they would not have to alter their behavior in order to be compatible with their new country.
No worse mistake could be made by moral scoffers, whether immigrants or born here. There are rules and expectations that we all do our share of the work of civilization. There are consequences for rebellion against norms. The struggle in which we’re now engaged is whether we’re serious about imposing those consequences on the disobedient, or whether we’ll sit back complacently and allow the work of centuries to be undone.
Most of America is determined to move beyond broken progressivism to a more orderly, sane, workable and accountable society. Oakland is not. Mired in the muck of their crypto-communist ideology, the Left still insists on equal outcomes. That will never happen. It’s counter to human nature, and most people know it. Our new mayor does not. She’ll continue to play the same race card she’s played for half a century until the Left’s destruction of Oakland is complete.
Steve Heimoff