I'm so sorry to hear about your difficulty finding an apartment. That last incident smacks of housing discrimination to me, which is of course illegal! You should not have to send your wife to go house hunting for you.

I agree with you about the values, and the computerization of our identities. We've reduced people to numbers and dollar signs, instead of personalities and values.

I hope you find a place...my thoughts are with you. Good luck!

The shame/wrongness attached to you thinking about your white wife going out to look for apartments without you is a shame/wrongness that does not belong to you. That's my two cents.

hould I be ashamed to say I want to send my white wife with the baby and without me? Is that wrong?

This reminds me of when I was a little kid and my mom would go alone, or sometimes with my older brother, - they both look white - to rent us an apartment to live in. After we were in, she'd keep me (definitely a little brown child) inside for a time, but you can do that only so long with an energetic kid and as soon as I showed my face (especially if I went in the pool... wowee!) we'd be asked (apparently quite legally) to move.

Discrimination in housing is no longer legal, but it's still definitely practiced. I do not at all think it would be wrong if your white wife and the baby went alone to speak to the owners. With a family, especially, the most important thing is to get into someplace and if, in order to do so, you have to circumvent people's prejudices, then do it. No reason your family should have to pay the price for their pathology.

Once you are in and are good tenants, they can no longer legally evict you for being black or brown and at least you'll have a bit of peace and breathing space to concentrate on what to do next.

I'm starting to worry about finding a place. We have three past apts, full years of rentals each one, good refs. But that doesn't mean a damn thing in this new technological surveillance age. My credit report is so bad that banks lock up when I walk by, hers has been ruined by her ex-boyfriend. Run that social security number and ain't nothing happening. I really hate that I live in a nation that doesn't know how to know people anymore. We need databases to know each other and make judgments. Or that checks a record that can stretch back to times you knew much less and had to learn the hard way, and gives no allowance for change.

Oh yes. And it's getting worse, of course. Increasingly, potential employers use them to screen applicants. You do have rights, of course... but as with many other rights, exercising them can cost you in other ways.

And it's so stupid. Especially the part about not considering people who don't have credit histories. Because if you don't have a credit history and you haven't filed for bankruptcy, then it seems obvious that you haven't managed to screw up too badly. All of the major, legal forms of debt are recorded somehow; if you haven't got a record, then either you haven't done anything wrong, or even if you did do something wrong, it's not the kind of thing that would turn up on a report that they'd be able to get their hands on. Getting that report tells you little enough - although in theory, they could show patterns of behavior, credit reports are so prone to distortion and fraud it's hard to tell what you're seeing.

It's... a lot like airport security. People who are seriously determined to make a mess of things will still get in. People who did everything right before can find themselves in bad situations. People can have their identities stolen, or masked, or be defrauded by corporations with fine print and hidden fees. You can have tenants who pay their rent on time and are good people, but who drive you batty and vice versa. There's no such thing as perfect security, or a guaranteed good fit. So while weeding out the obvious bad choices is a good idea (hence the references, etc.), getting their entire life isn't going to tell you any of the things you really need to know. There are diminishing returns at work.

(Not to mention the fact that there's something profoundly disconcerting about having someone all up in your financial colon like that. When we were looking, we had to give not just our names, drivers license numbers, SSNs, renting history, references, reason for moving and the like.. but authorizations for full credit reports, plus our bank account numbers, credit card numbers, current balances, and all that jazz. And when I expressed reservations, well.... like I said, exercising your rights has a cost. We had a lovely apartment it seemed like we might have otherwise gotten, but when the man called back, his enthusiasm was gone and he said he 'just couldn't have someone coming in with such a lack of trust.' All I had asked was that he shred my credit information and account information when he was done, because we were worried about identity theft.)

And Joan Kelly is right. That you feel that way is not your fault at all. We certainly tried it... sending in my white, middle-class male boyfriend to look at places. Which didn't work because he didn't have a credit history at all, let alone a poor one, and he didn't have a job and had just moved to this side of the country. But... yeah.

My head is still in your post about actors being made up to look different, so I read this perfectly serious post about a real difficulty and had you in my mind wearing peach-colored pancake make-up...I think I better quit for a while. :^)

I agree with the others, though, about the fact that, in my opinion, the problem is NOT yours and you need to teflon that sh*t. Whenever I went for an apartment, I went alone whenever that was to the point. It doesn't reduce you. There are times to be all about it. And there are times to be practical. It's called survival and it's been around forever. This wouldn't be such an issue anyway if the crunch wasn't on, so do whatcha gotta do and good luck to you.

i appreciate you guys saying what you have. thanks for the backup. "survival" is pretty much how i saw it, too.

You should send Prince Rudy to rent an apartment for you and see what happens. Probably would be educational.

I feel you on all this. and I'm feeling your hija too as I am the daughter of a brown man and a white woman. As she grows, she will witness the different ways her parents experience the world and will come out with one badass race analysis.

On the name topic, I usually experience my irish first name as: "kate? oh that's so easy"
My last name (villarreal) goes more like this: "vila-what? could you spell one more time? was that 2 r's? oh my that's a hard one. f#$k! what kinda name is that?"

I think you should have no reservations about your wife auditioning for apartments. My ex is a darker shade of brown than I. When we'd go on road trips through rural white areas, I would always be the one to go in to secure motel rooms for us while he waited in the car. The reason being that he doesn't need to put up with any extra racist bullshit than he's already dealing with in this world...in just trying to live in it. If that can be avoided, then so be it. Save yourself the pain. This is where more privileged allies can really support. Also, it will be so healing for you when you can get out of the PNW and exist in a place where there's actual BROWN landlords too!

"Also, it will be so healing for you when you can get out of the PNW and exist in a place where there's actual BROWN landlords too!"

I was thinking the same thing.

Aye, our current landlords are Brown, and quite nice.

(Then again, the former Crazy Landlady From Hell was a deep chocolate black woman that knew my grandmother and was connected to my church, if tenuously... so brownness will only get you so far in the insanity-o-meter. But still.)