Look, it didn’t just stop with Slavery, or the Civil Rights Movement. Economically disadvantaged populations are that way in part due to decades and centuries of exploitation and discrimination. Jews are routinely stereotyped for their prevalence in certain professions, this is usually a response to the fact they were barred from pursuing other, “nobler” occupations. You want a non-Western example? Untouchables in India.
So it’s pervasive and systemic and rapacious Capital preys first on the weakest. It is a damning statistic how little wealth the median citizen (half above, half below) has- a mere $170,000 (house, car, clothes, computers, everything). It is screaming Racism that the median Hispanic has but a third of that, and the Median African-American 10%- $17,000.
Class Justice is Social Justice.
This is an interview with Bill Black, White Collar Criminologist and Economist about a report titled The Plunder of Black Wealth in Chicago: New Findings on The Lasting Toll of Predatory Housing Contracts. who brought the paper by the Samuel Dubois Cooke Center for Social Equity to The Real News Network’s attention.
Billions Stolen From Black Families by Predatory Lending
The Real News Network
June 20, 2019
Bill Black:
Redlining may have begun in Baltimore, but it was a nationwide phenomenon. It was introduced by the US government. It gets its name because literally they would draw with a red pen on a map and not loan, or not provide a federal mortgage protection to any mortgages issued in that portion of the city. What it was particularly aimed at was not neighborhoods that were already majority or almost exclusively black, but any change from an area that used to be overwhelmingly white to an area that was desegregated.
The theory of this was, oh my god, prices will collapse because of white racism. If somebody who is black moves into the neighborhood and we, the federal government, are guaranteeing the lenders against losses, the lenders will suffer significant losses, they’ll pass them on to us. And so, you know, we don’t have anything against blacks. We just don’t want to lose money, and we realize that many whites are racist, so this is how we’re going to protect ourselves.