Originally published at: A gut wrenching 'Last Week Tonight' on housing discrimination | Boing Boing
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After a month in San Diego for a Summer visit, I can with all candor announce that if you ain’t rich, really rich, your living situation is tenuous at best and at worst “one foot out the door & the other on a banana peel”. Even starting wages at $18 - $20 an hour won’t cover the rent / living expenses / occasional fun-ski at the bar-ski. Surely not the San Diego of my youth…
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Um, yeah…
…guilty as charged.
And that’s for white people who don’t have to deal with institutionalised and personal racism as well.
We’re moving back toward a situation where only the top 20% in terms of income or wealth will be able to afford a home or be lucky enough to inherit one; the vast majority of those Americans are most assuredly not POC.
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It seems to me that the United States could tackle this problem directly, it would only help people and hurt no one. At a time when our economy is throwing more people onto the street than it is minting as new millionaires, I can not fathom what we are waiting for.
How long have you been around? Haven’t you noticed that a policy that doesn’t actively hurt other people is anathema to around a third of the electorate (and if it helps those uppity black people, then it’s anathema to maybe as much as another third of the electorate, although there is likely to be something of an overlap between those two groups.) It’s really not that difficult. </s>
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It has been proven many white people cannot see beyond their own culture.
I have seen several videos on redlining. I think Vox had one too that was good. It is clear, with out a doubt, that our current neighborhood make ups are mostly a product of systemic racism. And that greatly also affected what companies were around, jobs created, resources built, etc etc etc. You segregate and prevent people from building wealth and then wonder why they are suffering economically? GTFO. And this is within living memory, not some distant past.
I’m currently reading “The Color of Law”, which was briefly referenced in this piece. The book goes into a lot of detail, which opened up my eyes to a lot of injustices that I hadn’t been aware of, particularly with regards to public housing built for white soldiers and workers during WW2, FHA loans, etc., etc., etc… I’d recommend the book to anyone who hasn’t read it yet. It totally destroys any argument that there is no such thing as institutional racism in America-- as if it weren’t obvious enough already.
My neighborhood just recently had all of the racist covenants in our neighborhood amended, now that the state of Maryland has created a process to do so. Though the covenants were unenforceable since Shelley v. Kraemer, there were some appalling ones still on the books. Fuck you, Continental Life Insurance Co (The developer at the time)!
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