the eye of Nova's mind

He, not she. And if you want to believe that things that happened not just 100 years ago--maybe just a few decades--do not influence how things not only stand today but actually operate, then again I say that you have a blind eye turned to reality.

Fair housing laws came into existence only in the '50s and '60s. In fact, it has been shown that

The federal government played a significant role in perpetuating segregated housing. The predecessor to the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) established the practice of “red-lining” in the 1930s. This was a practice in which housing values were rated on the basis of, among other things, the age and condition of the properties and the ethnicity of the residents of the neighborhood. Properties in racially mixed or all-black neighborhoods were assigned the lowest rating and were ineligible for loans. On maps, a red line was drawn around the perimeters of these areas. In addition to redlining for government insured loans, locations for federally financed public housing developments were selected on the basis of the racial composition of neighborhoods. Developments were located in all-black or all-white areas.

When suburbanization occurred on an unprecedented scale in the years following World War II, African-Americans were excluded as a result of a combination of private
discrimination as well as the policies of the Veterans Administration and FHA, federal agencies whose underwriting guidelines, until 1950, required restrictive covenants on properties with government insured mortgages. As a consequence, African-Americans were locked out of one of the most significant wealth-producing programs in American history. White families that were able to take advantage of the federal government’s policies encouraging and assisting home ownership in the 1940s and 50s benefited from decades of property appreciation, which researchers estimate at billions of dollars (Oliver and Shapiro, 1995). During the same period, African-American veterans and others who desired, and were able, to afford homes were confined by discriminatory practices to central-city communities that tended to deteriorate and lose value (Oliver and Shapiro, 1995). The federal government’s discriminatory policies prevented minority homeowners from accumulating wealth through home ownership and it deprived their children and grandchildren of a valuable asset they would have inherited.

Brown v. Board of Education was also only ruled in the '50s. To say that these practices do not continue to affect the substantive reality of today is to not understand the effect of history.