Many years ago, I sold real estate. With some regularity, I'd e-mail a list of homes to an eager young professional couple. The sort who always say the correc

Many years ago, I sold real estate. With some regularity, I'd e-mail a list of homes to an eager young professional couple. The sort who always say the correct things and always vote the correct way. One of the homes in that list would be so well shot, and so well priced, that they'd take time off of work--they had to see it right now! They chatter excitedly on the drive over. We slow down as we enter the neighborhood. Their excitement is at its apex. Then the excitement drops an octave. I scan the horizon, pondering, "What is this disturbance in the force?" Then I notice, we just drove by a black guy raking his yard. After the next black guy in his yard--silence. We pull up to the house. As I let them out of the car, I am met with the faces of two people searching for an excuse. One of them breaks, "It's not that we're racists. Some of my best friends are black. It's just that, um, we don't want to be the only white people in the neighborhood." They get back into the car. I take them back to the office, and I never see them again. Nice neighborhood, great price, neighbors that take care of their yards--obviously no rational reason to scrub the showing, no one screaming the n-word, no "far-right" politics, just a couple higher-level office slaves quietly reclining into the old tribalisms.