Willem Oltmans • 31 mei 1987

• Willem Oltmans (1925-2004) was een Nederlandse journalist. In 1988 publiceerde hij een journaal over apartheid in de Verenigde Staten: Apartheid. USA 1988.

May 31, 1987:
The dominant use of white models in real estate advertisements is increasingly coming under attack by open housing groups and public-interest lawyers in New York and elsewhere State human-rights officials are investigating the practice which has been common for decades as a possible form of racial discrimination in housing. Fair housing advocates assert the advertisements violate the Federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. This law prohibits discrimination in the sale or rental of housing and bans the production or publication of an advertisement that indicates any preference based on race. The overwhelming use of white models in newspaper advertisements is supposed to have the same effect as putting up a ‘whites only’ sign. In this way, newspapers are aiding and abetting discrimination if they knowingly publish these adds. In one instance a real estate developer violated the law with its brochure showing 70 photographs of about 200 people, only 5 of whom were black. The rest were white. The Washington Post, for instance, voluntarily agreed already to require that 25 percent of models in real estate advertisements be black.

As the nation celebrates the creation of its Constitution, many American blacks are uneasily questioning the extent to which they should honor the Founding Fathers, a number of whom were slave owners. ‘Under the original American Constitution, blacks were not people,’ said Judge A Leon Higginbotham of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in New York. If one had to identify a single theme in the discussions leading to the Constitution, he added, ‘it was that slaves should be viewed as property, as subhumans.’ Judge Higginbotham further suggested that ‘the framers of the Constitution were less than straightforward in never using the word slavery.’ Not until 1865, when the 13th Amendment freeing the slaves took effect, did the word find its way into the Constitution. He called the original document an exercise in nondisclosure.’ ‘There is a national amnesia about the reality of race,’ added Nathaniel R Jones, a Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. ‘Now there are storm clouds gathering on the horizon.’