HUD ad full of racial bigotry

The following Letter was inspired by and in response to a series of radio ads now running here in California and probably the rest of the country. In the ad, three men call about an ad in the newspaper for an apartment and are told the apartment is no longer available by an ethnically neutral female voice. The three include an obvious Latino, an obvious Indian American, and an obvious African-American. When the fourth man calls and gives his name as Graham Wellington, in an obvious English-American voice, he is told the apartment is still available. This is one of the most conspicuously bigoted and highly discriminatory ad of any kind I have heard in a very long time. In response I sent the following letter. I couldn’t find an email address to use so it went out snail mail. I suppose all you bleeding hearts out there think this ad is perfectly OK.

San Francisco Regional Office of FHEO
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
600 Harrison Street, 3rd Floor
San Francisco, California 94107-1387

I am incensed at the recent series of radio ads about housing discrimination which are apparently coming from your organization. These ads are a blatantly obvious attempt to smear Caucasian, English-Americans and incite anger toward them by Latinos, Indian-Americans and African-Americans. These ads are highly discriminatory and would never be used in another venue with a reverse implication castigating equally any minority other than Caucasian, English-Americans. Graham Wellington indeed–your intent is blatantly obvious and it is most certainly not to promote fair housing. To be truly fair–a word I seriously doubt anyone in your organization really understands–you would run four ads with each of the ethnic groups used, winning in turn the apartment in preference to the other three. This would be “fair.”

The “Graham Wellingtons” of our country have become part of the most discriminated against group by virtually every government agency, media mouthpiece, news reporter, and politician in the country.

Unfortunately, should your bigoted ad actually be run with any of the other three groups being accepted by the apartment owner, the ACLU and dozens of other similar organizations would be filing law suits the first day the ad ran. How about leaving the ad as is but replacing, “Graham Wellington” with Harvey Goldberg, Sean McGinty, Antonio Sabartini, Franz Shultz, or Hillary Swank? You could even make more of an impact for your agenda by changing the African American’s voice to that of a homosexual and making the Indian American a woman.

You people are most certainly not against discrimination, but strongly support it when it is turned against groups of any kind other than those you favor. Pardon me, but your supposedly hidden agenda is showing clearly and it surely isn’t equal treatment for all. Replacing bigotry against one or more ethnic groups with bigotry against another is replacing one evil with another. This is clearly what your ad is doing. How about a change to real fairness?

Cordially,
Howard E. Johnson