Housing Discrimination in New Berlin?

The current controversy regarding “affordable housing” in New Berlin illustrates the weakness of federal law regarding housing discrimination based on socioeconomic class.

By way of backdrop, New Berlin is a suburb southwest of Milwaukee on the eastern edge of Waukesha County.  When a developer came forward with plans for low-cost rental housing in New Berlin, some members of the City’s largely white, bourgeois population expressed opposition.  New Berlin’s Plan Commission then hastily nixed the affordable housing idea.  This led in turn to an investigation by the United States Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. 

I anticipate the investigation will not lead to legal action.  No information has emerged suggesting New Berlin’s actions were explicitly aimed at racial or ethnic minorities, and this is significant when federal law is applied.  The federal Fair Housing Act, for example, was enacted with race and ethnicity rather than socioeconomic class in mind.  In addition, while race is surely a viable basis for an equal protection argument under the Fourteenth Amendment, socioeconomic classifications are not “suspect” and therefore can be justified with a conventional claim of rationality.

Has New Berlin engaged in housing discrimination by excluding affordable housing and the poor and working-class people who might rent such housing?  It appears that the dominant ideology as re-packaged by the federal law offers little help when facing exclusionary practices geared to socioeconomic status.  Under the law, the United States has no class.

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Law & Order and the Rise of the Pop Cultural Prosecutor

Years before Law & Order ended its incredible twenty-year run on May 24, 2010, the series had staked its claim to being the longest-running primetime series featuring lawyer characters. In addition, the series included an important change in how the heroic pop cultural lawyer is represented. In earlier lawyer shows with especially lengthy runs, such as Perry Mason in the 1950s and ‘60s and Matlock in the 1980s and ‘90s, the lawyer hero was customarily a criminal defense lawyer. Even the fictional firm of McKenzie, Brackman, Cheney & Kuzak in L.A. Law had a department devoted to criminal defense work. In Law & Order, by contrast, the heroic lawyers are always prosecutors.

What explains this very popular shift in imagery? Part of the reason is the general sense that crime has run amuck. Starting in the 1980s, a commitment to crime control replaced the drive for racial and economic justice as the preeminent domestic policy. Any politician on the local, state, or national level who seems “soft on crime” is doomed at the polls. More generally, the Reagan Presidency marked a national turn to the right, and in subsequent decades even the Democrats who have occupied the White House have been moderates. The heroic pop cultural prosecutor is well suited to crack down on crime and to embody conservative values.

Over the years, Law & Order became a genuine cultural phenomenon. The series’ popularity led to spin-offs and to countless reruns of both the original episodes and the spin-offs. In the end, Law & Order in all its forms not only reflected a public sentiment and emergent politics but also powerfully reinforced that sentiment and politics.

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Capital Punishment and the Contemporary Cinema

American cinema of the last century includes a large number of films with major characters on death row.  James Hogan’s silent film “Capital Punishment,” for example, screened in 1925.  During the 1950s, the death penalty was at the forefront in such respected films as Fritz Lang’s “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” (1956), Robert Wise’s “I Want to Live” (1958), and Howard Koch’s “The Last Mile” (1959).  The late 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century saw an even greater number of films inviting contemplation of the death penalty.

The latter flurry of films perhaps relates to the period’s especially pronounced campaign to end capital punishment.  In keeping with the often-heard assertion that Hollywood leans to the left politically, most of these films seem opposed to the death penalty.  Some express their opposition in the fashion of a “message film,” while others proffer more subtle dramatic narratives.

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