Virginia state report: Impact of unenforced racist laws persists

A state commission in Virginia is recommending dozens of policy changes to “dismantle” structural racism and address the lingering effects of segregation.

In a new report released Wednesday, the Virginia state government’s commission to address racist laws said the legacy of discriminatory policies such as “redlining” continues to harm African American communities.

The report is the second released since Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) in 2019 launched the Commission to Examine Racial Inequity in Virginia Law. In its 2019 report, the commission recommended the repeal of several long-enforced laws it considered racist. Virginia’s General Assembly unanimously acted on those recommendations during the 2020 legislative session.

The commission said in its latest study that while many explicitly racist laws no longer exist, including restrictive zoning laws and state-sanctioned redlining, which allowed banks to give preferential treatment to white homebuyers, the long-term effects of those policies are on display in poor neighborhoods and in homeownership gaps.

“In the Commission’s view, this is what structural racism looks like,” the report said. “Virginia policymakers and other leaders spent centuries building legal and other structures to comprehensively segregate and oppress people of color. While the laws have gone away, the impact of what they built, indeed much of the structure they built, has not.”

“The collective goal of the recommendations contained in this report is to make efforts in specific and effective ways to further dismantle this structure, and to address the lingering and disparate effects of Virginia’s segregationist past. These policy ideas, and others like them, will not only help people of color in Virginia, but will help all of us, as well,” the report added.

The roughly 100-page document makes recommendations across six policy areas: housing, education, criminal justice, health, environmental justice and agricultural equity. 

Among the policy suggestions are repealing statutory language that limits the power granted to the state to draw school zone lines, changing landlord-tenant laws to increase affordable housing and reduce evictions, and loosening or repealing restrictions on voting rights for people convicted of felonies.

Northam in a press release Wednesday said the report “makes clear that there is still work to do to shed the ugly remnants of Virginia’s history.”

“Our Commonwealth remains focused on acknowledging and righting the wrongs of our past,” the Democratic governor continued. “The Commission is already having a significant impact on our shared legislative priorities and I look forward to continuing our partnership to build a more honest, equitable, and inclusive future for all.” 

Cynthia Hudson, the commission’s chair and former chief deputy attorney general of Virginia, said in a statement that last year’s police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, as well as the subsequent months-long demonstrations calling for racial justice, “demonstrated that the relevance of the Commission’s work could not be more clear, nor the research and recommendations we made more timely.”