It Gets Your Body A-Movin'

How ironic. I was just talking about this.

True stories: -A Black family moving into a suburban neighborhood actually would lower the prices of homes. Because all the White people would try to move out as soon as possible. -If the new suburb was next to a non-White neighborhood, a fence could be put up “for safety” to instantly raise property values. -Have you heard the term redline/-ing? It refers to the practice of corporations color coding a region and not investing in or refusing service to those from certain (red) areas. These were usually poor Black neighborhoods. This included refusing those in redlined areas access to jobs, loans, medical care, etc. -Many older developments that were predominately home to poor PoC were destroyed with the promise of a new development or a suburb. This almost never happened and left the country with a shortage of affordable housing that still exists today. -“Between 1934 and 1962, the federal government backed $120 billion of home loans. More than 98% went to whites. Of the 350,000 new homes built with federal support in northern California between 1946 and 1960, fewer than 100 went to African Americans.” http://newsreel.org/guides/race/whiteadv.htm

This needs more notes. People need to know just how this society made it a point at every turn to hold (and still hold today) Black people down for the benefit of whites.

White real estate agents also took advantage of racist white homeowners with a practice called blockbusting, where they would encourage them to sell their homes at a loss with just the hint or promise that a black family (or sometimes Jewish or nonblack PoC family, depending on the region) was going to move in.

and this brings us to the current situation where the supreme court is going to take a look at the “Disparate Impact” rule of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. What disparate impact rule does is keep people from trying to discriminate against protected groups in America though subtle means. In our society, racism is very subtle especially when it’s corporate. So instead of putting out a sign that says “whites only” in front of building, a landlord can simply refuse to entertain people with a “Black” sounding name. In doing so they can say that their screening process has nothing to do with race but yet their process negatively impacts Black people and under this rule would be considered illegal. Another example would be banks deciding to issue loans at a higher interest rate to people in a certain part of town and claiming that doing so has nothing to do with race when in fact they are well aware that said part of town is populated by mostly Black people. So again, not blatant, quite subtle but under the disparate impact rule illegal. The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on the legality of this rule and, given their history of gutting civil right protections, could very well strike it down. If that happens, the flood gates of housing discrimination will be wide open and Black people, above all, are going to get hammered.

^ Say that. There’s the blatant erasure by the media, as well as the fellow Latinxs who shun blackness. Then there’s the serious lack of knowledge by people who still don’t understand the clear difference between race and ethnicity, and assume Black means “African American” (which it does not), so as a result they question your identity. Race does not denote one’s ethnicity/ethnicities. Latinxs do not have a specific look or skin color. There are sooooooo many brown skin Latinxs out here.