Brief 10/29 – Welcome to The System!

Richard Rothstein in The Color of Law chooses to focus on a range of government policies enacted in the United States that explain the existence of de jure segregation. Redlining, however, can work to explain the inner workings of the System. The practice of redlining began with the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation(HOLC) in 1933 and transformed as it manifested within the future policies of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in 1934 and the Veteran’s Administration following World War 2 (Rothstein, 63-6; 70). In general, redlining is the process by which these administrations determined the risk-value of homes and decided whether or not to insure a bank’s loan that would allow someone to own a house. The appraisal standards are founded both implicitly and explicitly on race. Any neighborhood with an African-American population was marked red “regardless of the applicants’ creditworthiness” (Rothstein, 67). The implications of this policy go beyond the its racist foundations.

Redlining exposes a key player within the System that seems to disappear within the confusion, the government. In the housing market, it was clear that administrations such as the FHA and VA held the majority of the power. For example, banks refused to issue loans without FDA approval and developments such as Levittown were dependent on FHA financial support that they could be labeled as “publicly assisted housing” (Rothstein, 66;72). Due to their unrivaled power over the development of the housing market, its explicitly racist policy created and solidified housing segregation that helped to internalize segregationist beliefs within individuals. For example, even though the FHA removed “inharmonious racial groups” from the Underwriting Manual in 1947, this did not signal a policy change because the idea that whites could not coexist peacefully with ethnic neighbors had become normalized and accepted (Rothstein, 66). Additionally, the underwriting of these communities fermented the belief that integrated neighborhoods were “bad risks”, “an unstable neighborhood” (Race: The Power of Illusion). Therefore, the racist practices of the FHA developed the hegemonic ideology that races could not coexist with one another. These practices also helped to control the imagination battle by defining what it meant to be white and black.

John A. Powell points this out in Race: The Power of Illusion by stating that whiteness has been reconstructed to mean living in the suburbs (Race: The Power of Illusion). Due to redlining practices, suburbia typically excluded people of color and transformed them through the shared imagination of the white community into invaders who would bring uncertainty and risk into the fragile white utopia (Race: The Power of Illusion). Ultimately, redlining aligned whiteness with material resources, the American Dream, and opportunities; redlining aligned blackness with inferiority, dangerous, and detrimental to society. It locked people of color into a certain place in the societal hierarchy so much so that people of color accepted that “they couldn’t buy into the development” and became locked in someone else’s imagination (Rothstein, 69). Such examples reveal how deeply the racists practices of redlining influenced society both then and now.

Suzannah Faulkner says:

October 28, 2018 at 6:56 pm

The government seemed to be hiding the actual criteria for loans which was whether or not a person was white and I was surprised that it had such a powerful force in creating these stereotypes. The author of The Color of Law even notes, “Private discrimination also played a role, but it would have been considerably less effective had it not been embraced and reinforced by government.” This makes me wonder if the government could be the only power to reverse the racial stereotypes that they created? Or would this problem require something more since it’s had time to grow?
In addition, based on the video we watched, there is actually more genetic diversity within racial groups than outside them, making the government’s “fears” of the “other” illegitimate. This makes me wonder if society will ever be able to see that their fears are irrational. What will it take to expose these hidden injustices and why can’t everyone see them?

Zixuan Liu says:

October 28, 2018 at 10:11 pm

The white flight situation explained in the video reminds of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The belief that a neighborhood with other races will deflate the value of the house sounds repulsive. This reminds me of news I heard that Chinese people “dominate” California, making white flight happening again in recent time. Usually, these Chinese families are wealthy that they do not need mortgages to buy the house. So economically, the white families and these new comers are on the same level. Yet, the white flight still happens. Thus, what does this phenomenon say about our society now? Does this prove the segregation somehow is not caused by the Government, but by the inner discrimination against other races? Also, I wonder, if these “Chinese” neighborhood in rich counties in California are considered as red lining?

Eden Kim says:

October 28, 2018 at 11:10 pm

I thought it was particularly disturbing that redlining could turn internal racism into systemic racism. For example, a white family might not necessarily have discriminatory feelings towards black people; they might simply make the most economical choice to sell their home and move somewhere else. (To be clear, by doing so they are still contributing to white flight and systemic racism.) When this happens, who is to blame – the white families who are ignorant of the effects of their actions, or the government, that imposes the economical pressures on white (and black) families?

Iklim Isyar says:

October 29, 2018 at 12:32 am

In some other article that I wrote was indicating that the mortgage system was favoring the middle class, regardless of the race. However since the middle class has a overwhelming white majority in those times, the economic favors were excluding people of color. In this case, even thought the base idea is racism, the state rhetoric is still in fact a neutral one. We can still see the same rhetoric of neutrality in the state, especially with the media’s use of euphemisms. This makes me question that, after seeing the effects of redlining, how could be a government work as a separator, what kind of a moral stance is that, and how many people can join those ideas.