Before I tell you just how it is doing that, let me ask you, do you look at civil rights marchers on television nowadays, clasping hands and singing "We Shall Overcome" and think, "geez fellas, the sixties are over - get a life!"? I do. I wonder why those folks aren't concentrating on educating blacks about credit and finances and how to buy a home, rather than marching against some perceived slight. Maybe its because its easier to march (not to mention guaranteed to draw the television cameras) than it is to teach and try to change behaviors.

 Do you ever wonder where The Reverends Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson get their money? They feed at the same trough as the city's Human Relations Commission - federal grant money. Its money that is distributed based on an old, worn-out model that may have worked thirty years ago but is hopelessly out of date today. Funding - and a bureaucracy surrounding it - grew out of the civil rights and fair housing legislation of the 60s, but the system has become a relic, an embarrassment, about as relevant and useful as a manual typewriter. Proponents of the system are lost in the 60s. Its continued existence is a near-perfect demonstration of the theory that the first aim of any bureaucracy is its own perpetuation. Still, the money keeps rolling out. Let me tell you about how a hundred grand of it is being wasted in Winston.

July 1, 1999, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) gave the Winston-Salem Human Relations Commission $100,000 "for (fair housing) education and outreach programs in the community." More than six months passed before the Commission got around to hiring a "grant coordinator" - who is black - at a cost of $26,000 a year salary plus benefits all to be paid out of the $100,000 grant!

I'll admit, when I heard about the grant (in the Commission's obscure little newsletter) I salivated at the thought of getting some of it. After all, I'd been a mortgage broker for ten years, I write for six different local and national business and mortgage publications plus a few websites, I had taught the Smart Homebuying class at Forsyth Tech for seven years, had worked with some local housing agencies, I'm heavily involved with the effort to open a homeownership center in Winston-Salem, I teach monthly homebuyer and homeseller seminars, I teach various subjects to other mortgage brokers, I host a live, weekly call-in television show on homebuying, and I enjoy - and my student evaluations show I am good at - teaching. I knew that the Commission was probably going to take the path of least resistance in administering the grant - producing a few dull, poorly-distributed brochures and hosting a few desultory, poorly-publicized and poorly-attended seminars, so I had come up with a lot of ideas, including using some of the money to buy some television time on the local network affiliate to air a live, call-in show to discuss fair housing issues - after all, if you want to reach people today you gotta be on television. But my belief that I could get some of my grubby paws on that grant money was, I soon found out, hopelessly naïve.
 

"The way the grant money is going to be spent was decided before (the Commission) even applied for the grant." said an acquaintance of mine, who is black, and is familiar with the workings of the Commission, "The money is going to go to blacks only. And that doesn't include you, " I was told with a smile.
 

"So," I asked, "are you saying that this is basically white guilt money, given by whites to blacks for blacks and the fact that I am white means I am not going to get any? Are you telling me there will be no cheddar for the white boy?"

"Exactly," was the response.

Well, it might surprise you to know that I really wasn't all that upset about it. I mean, whites have taken so much away from blacks without compensation that a little informal reparation only seems appropriate. What I was, and remain, most upset about is how the grant was to be administered - with, as I predicted, a few brochures and a few seminars and maybe a booth at a dreary community fair. And, next year, I knew, the same grant would be given for the same lame activities.

Gene Williams, the ever-genial director of the Commission (a sinecure of sorts for him, after a long and distinguished career as a narcotics detective), says that is just the way grant money like this is spent.

"If you think there's a darn thing you or I or anyone else can do about it, think again," he told me in an interview in his office. I'm thinking, Gene, believe me. And I'm writing.

  Williams, who is black, says fair housing seminars for realtors and other housing professionals are still needed because housing discrimination still exists.

"(Housing discrimination) is not unusual in Winston-Salem," he claims, although "people don't want to admit that there is a problem." Williams says there were 18 "substantiated" fair housing cases in the city and county in the previous twelve months. (The Commission is paid $1,800 by HUD for every substantiated case, which, obviously, presents a conflict of interest - the more substantiated cases, the more money HUD gives the Commission. You read that right - the Commission, which investigates and determines whether a case should be substantiated, has a financial interest in substantiating cases. I have to wonder, did Lewis Carroll help write the rules for this program?)

But is there really a housing discrimination problem, as Williams claims there is? Not according to a longtime friend of his, woman he hired to teach a recent fair housing seminar.

  Stella Adams, the Executive Director of the Fair Housing Center of North Carolina, spoke at a poorly-attended fair housing seminar that I attended recently in Winston-Salem, and startled me and other seminar attendees by admitting that fair housing is not that big an issue anymore.

"We don't see that much (discrimination) any more as it relates to race," she said. "We see it primarily in cases of juvenile homes, group homes opening up."

In an interview in Raleigh a few weeks after the seminar, Adams, who is black, reluctantly admitted to me that she was disappointed both with the racial composition of and the turnout for the seminar. Held at Forsyth Tech's Mazie Woodruff Center (which is in a black section of Winston-Salem) the seminar drew just 12 attendees (25 were expected), only two of whom were real estate agents - the intended, target audience. All of the attendees, except for me, were black. I mean, isn't this a classic case of preaching to the choir? Housing discrimination, when it is practiced, is overwhelmingly practiced by whites against blacks and Hispanics, right? So, we are spending federal funds training blacks not to discriminate against whites in housing? How ridiculous is that?

The Commission did no advertising or faxing or distribution of flyers for the seminar, admitted Williams, who also, reluctantly, admitted that he, too, was disappointed by the turnout. He claimed he sent out a few press releases to local radio stations. The only word I got of the seminar was a small public service notice in the Winston-Salem Journal two days before the event. As I noted, I counted 12 attendees, two of whom said they were real estate agents. Williams, however, claims there were 14 attendees (correct if you count Williams and his staffer, I guess) and seven, not two, were real estate agents. He spent nearly two hundred dollars of the grant money on food - huge piles of food, at least three quarters of which was still there when the seminar ended. This in a poor, black part of town. Tell me, why are we providing food at a Fair Housing Seminar? Should the federal government be feeding us? None of the attendees - and I include my big butt in this - seemed like they had missed many meals recently.

I ask you, shouldn't this food and seminar money be going to things like educating blacks on consumer issues or, as pertains to housing, trying to achieve racial integration? But instead, we seem to continually be fighting yesterday's battles. Make signs, coordinate a march, demand resignations, go on a hunger strike. Jeez, aren't we beyond that? Furthermore, can't we deliver some of this fair housing information on video, or on computer disc, or on-line?

Professor Charles Day, a UNC law professor and, as Chairman of the Board of the North Carolina Fair Housing Center, Stella Adams' boss, says the reason his organization doesn't concentrate on integration is "we don't have a statute that mandates integration." We do, however, have a statute that mandates Fair Housing education and provides funding for it, so that is apparently what we do even if we don't need to do it anymore. It just strikes me as a classic case of a solution in search of a problem. We have funding, so we must spend the money. Why can't we fund integration activities? Who is out there trying to get blacks and whites to live together?

Day, who is black, told me in an interview at the law school in Chapel Hill that housing discrimination "is still happening," although he reluctantly admits it is lessening. "Minority homebuyers and renters continue to encounter discrimination," he claims. I'm sure he's right, but is that still happening in such great numbers? Shouldn't we re-orient our efforts, re-prioritize our funding to work at integration, to work at helping blacks better manage their money (one recent survey showed fifty percent of blacks have unacceptable credit ratings, while twenty-five percent of whites do), to help blacks buy homes or, as Day himself suggests, find ways to "induce whites to move into black neighborhoods"? How much longer are we going to keep singing "We Shall Overcome"?

Every motivational speaker on the circuit today asks, as if it were original to him (these motivational speakers liberally "borrow" one another's material), if the audience knows the definition of insanity. The definition? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. That is, in a nutshell, what is happening here. Seminars, brochures, and more.

Despite the fact that fair housing is no longer as big an issue as it once was, and few blacks nowadays claim they were discriminated against in their choice of housing, and despite the fact that these seminars, which, I estimate, cost an average of $2,700 each (dividing $100,000 by the number of planned seminars - about 36 - and taking into account food, personnel, printing, and administrative costs), are a bust, and despite the fact that there are other, more effective, and cheaper, ways to accomplish the fair housing mission, the Winston-Salem Human Relations Commission keeps mindlessly plugging along, doing what it has always done, the way it has always done it. This month and next, for a lot less than the $100,000 in federal taxpayer funds that the Commission is blowing, I am hosting, on the much-watched local public access television channel (a station that reaches all cable subscribers in Forsyth County) a series of eight live, weekly, call-in shows on the subject of black home ownership. The cost? Eight bucks a week for the blank tape to record the show so that it can be replayed two or three times on the station later in the week. Far more people will watch that series than will ever attend a fair housing seminar put on by the Winston-Salem Human Relations Commission. The Commission has no plans to host such a series, even though it would cost a total of $64, or .0006% of the $100,000 grant. The Commission does, however, plan, in the next HUD "funding cycle," to ask for another $100,000. To conduct Fair Housing Seminars.