It's been an angry week, and The Color of Law added to my rage. I'd heard Richard Rothstein on NPR, and I'm somewhat familiar with 20th Century urban history so nothing was new or shocking. But it still infuriated me.
The average white family has a net worth of about $132K; the average African American family a net worth of about $10K. Most of this is because American wealth is built on home ownership. That's why my parents encouraged me to buy a house (even letting me live at home for a few years while I paid down law school debt and save for a down payment). And my parents were able to do that because *their* parents were able to buy houses - my paternal grandparents' house had a deed with a white-only cause. Home ownership means a stable living situation, costs that don't rise as quickly as rent, equity against which to borrow for education, and a nest egg for a comfortable retirement or to pass down to heirs. A combination of laws (struck down by the Supreme Court in 1948) and real estate and banking practices made this simple step into economic security unattainable for one eighth of the population.
Federal programs - VA and FHA loans and the GI Bill for college education - and good union wages created a booming middle class in the middle third of the 20th Century. African Americans didn't get those benefits. New suburbs had restrictive covenants (later on, mob violence abetted rather than stopped by the authorities enforced the whiteness of Levittown, PA (among other places), and the federal agencies wouldn't guarantee loans to non-white borrowers. Add in manipulated school district lines, earlier discrimination in New Deal jobs programs, and unions minimizing or outright disallowing African American membership and you have a country more segregated in 1970 than it was in 1900.
No comments:
Post a Comment