Get ready for the latest thing the Left considers racist: landlords preferring tenants who do not have evictions on their records.
That is the basis of a new civil rights case that the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups are litigating. They allege that Hunter Properties in Cook County, Illinois, is discriminating against black people with a “No Evictions Policy” for prospective renters.
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The lawsuit does not even claim that the policy mentions skin color as a penalizing characteristic because it does not. That is already illegal under the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The supposed offense is that people affected by the policy most often happen to be black. And in the most nonsensical way imaginable, the attorneys claim this is racist because of the Fair Housing Act. Unfortunately, there is precedent in federal courts for interpreting the act this way.
What we see here is part of a broader effort by the Left to reorient our legal system around resolving disparate outcomes. A policy or law might be completely blind to race or gender, as this one is, but even if it is perfectly, consistently applied without bias, it may be deemed unfair based on the subjective claim that the differences in effects among certain groups are too large. Policymakers and businesses must now take responsibility for statistical ramifications they cannot control.
You could perhaps argue that a blanket no evictions policy is too harsh, period. Some landlords can be unreasonable and past evictions might have been unfair. The lawsuit makes a valid point that even people who win their eviction cases are still excluded from renting at Hunter Properties.
But that is a question of whether it is reasonable to expect anyone to live up to the standard. Liberal attorneys believe the desire for tenants with no prior evictions is invalid because “too many” black people fit that description, even if they cannot prove any racist intent whatsoever. If landlords considered more carefully whether an evictee’s past behavior disqualifies them, and this still affected black people disproportionately, what then? That would seemingly be grounds for another lawsuit.
Policies ought to reward good behavior and penalize bad behavior without considering skin color. Whether or not they properly define good and bad behavior is always worth debating, as in the case of a no eviction policy.
However, the Left’s twisted definition of “discrimination” has the potential to invalidate any behavior-based policy, valid or not. That leads to the dangerous excusing of bad behavior, which we have already seen in the criminal justice system. If we take this principle to its logical conclusion in our laws, it will upend public life.
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Hudson Crozier is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.