DeSantis, who is running for the White House in 2024, said that the law was designed to counter “the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party."

Manjusha Kulkarni, the executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance and a co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, compared the measure to the "alien land laws" passed in California and other states in the 20th century, which restricted Asian migrants' right to own land. The law, she said, signals to Chinese Americans "that they don't belong."

But the town’s Elysian charm comes with a dark past. Just on the other side of the park lies the neighborhood of Willard-Hay. There, the median household income drops to about $55,000 per year, and there’s quite a bit more crime. Willard-Hay is 26 percent white and 40 percent Black. Golden Valley is 85 percent white and 5 percent Black — the result of pervasive racial covenants.

At the very least, the steady stream of Justice Department reports depicting rampant police abuse ought to temper the claim that policing shortages are fueling crime. It’s no coincidence that the cities we most associate with violence also have long and documented histories of police abuse. When people don’t trust law enforcement, they stop cooperating and resolve disputes in other ways. Instead of fighting to retain police officers who feel threatened by accountability and perpetuate that distrust, cities might consider just letting them leave.

To Reese, that means having hard conversations about that history with her children, friends and neighbors. She plans to frame the covenant and hang it in her home as evidence of systemic racism that needs to be addressed.

"People will try to say things didn't happen or they weren't as bad as they seem," Reese said. "It's always downplayed."

Gordon argues that racially restrictive covenants are the "original sin" of segregation in America and are largely responsible for the racial wealth gap that exists today.

Gordon said the covenants are not mere artifacts of a painful past. They laid the foundation for other discriminatory practices, such as zoning and redlining, that picked up where covenants left off.

He said white builders and buyers deemed segregation and white supremacy as trendy. Once it was in vogue, people put it in their deeds and assumed that that's what their white buyers wanted. The repetitive language of these deeds, which seems nearly identical from one deed to the next, suggests that racial restrictions were boilerplate clauses.

Experts say the far-right extremism among some Latino residents stems from those identifying as white and anti-Black sentiment.