Monthly Archives: October 2019

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership : Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

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Recommended Reading: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

(Justice, Power, and Politics reading)

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion.

Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining’s end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers – as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation’s first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind.

Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.

ABOUT Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor @KeeangaYamahtta

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. Taylor’s writing and scholarship engage issues of contemporary Black politics, the history of Black social movements and Black radicalism, and issues concerning public policy, race and racial inequality. Taylor’s writing has been published in New York Times, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Al Jazeera America, Jacobin, In These Times, New Politics, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, and beyond. Taylor is also author of the award-winning From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation published by Haymarket Books in 2016. She is also author of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective which won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction. Taylor’s forthcoming book with the University of North Carolina Press, titled Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership will be published in October of 2019.

Taylor received her PhD in African American Studies at Northwestern University in 2013.

Inside the “Most Incarcerated” Zip Code in the Country | The New Republic

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Inside the “Most Incarcerated” Zip Code in the Country 53206, a heavily African American neighborhood north of downtown Milwaukee, suffers from all manner of ills—not least of which are the myths of criminality that continue to surround it.

Robinson’s family came to Milwaukee from Chicago in the 1980s because, as Robinson put it, “Chicago was getting out of pocket.” With crime rising and jobs disappearing in the Windy City, she told me, “my mom wanted a better place for us to live.” But Robinson’s mother could never have anticipated the crucibles awaiting her daughter in Wisconsin—the array of social and political deficits associated with the five numbers that came at the end of her listed address: 53206, now notoriously known as the most incarcerated zip code in the country.

The neighborhood’s rectangular outline sits like a brick just north of the Fiserv Forum, home of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks in downtown Milwaukee, where the 2020 Democratic National Convention will be held next summer. In addition to its high incarceration rates, 53206, a heavily African American district, suffers from every manner of social ill, from socioeconomic stagnation to poor health. The Democratic primary field is teeming with proposals to address these ingrained injustices, and the party’s eventual candidate will also have a personal incentive to pay attention to what is happening in 53206: Its residents, among others in Milwaukee, may well prove to be the key to Democrats’ hopes of winning the battleground state of Wisconsin and unseating Donald Trump in the presidential election.

As long as those residents can gain access to the ballot, that is.African Americans represent nearly 40 percent of Milwaukee’s population, but their political clout has been diminished by laws that suppress the black vote. There is also the problem of African Americans choosing not to vote: Black turnout in Wisconsin dropped nearly 19 percent between the 2012 to the 2016 elections—a clear sign that, despite their historic need to mobilize black voters, Democrats haven’t been meeting the challenge especially well of late.

Source: Inside the “Most Incarcerated” Zip Code in the Country | The New Republic

How Men Distort the Race Debate | The New Republic

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Patriarchy functions in much the same way, particularly with respect to how the many life-destroying dynamics of anti-Black racism are erased and redubbed into a baby-simple saga of negligent Black mothers and absent Black fathers. Whether the inequality at issue is the police killing of Black people, the mass incarceration of Black communities, anti-Black violence, disparities in health and wealth, crumbling schools, abandoned cities, or diminishing political power, the patriarchal neuralyzer manages to make it all vanish in a blinding flash. Neuralization isn’t new.

In fact, a telltale sign of its impact is just how enthusiastically stunned and disoriented witnesses lapse into incoherent analysis. In Jay-Z’s case, his viewers became mired in a vastly oversimplified bit of pop psychology when the hip-hop legend conjured up an explanation for Black death at the hands of police that had been recycled from generations of earlier commentators who rest the blame on Black gender disrepair: “You’re like, ‘I hate my dad. Don’t nobody tell me what to do. I’m the man of the house.’

And then you hit the streets and run into a police officer and first thing he says, ‘Put your hands up, freeze, shut up,’ and you’re like, ‘Fuck you!’”Meanwhile, during September’s Democratic presidential debate in Houston, the party’s front-runner, Joe Biden, was asked to address earlier views in which he angrily rejected any responsibility for addressing slavery.

Given the opportunity to talk concretely about the contemporary legacies of slavery, Biden produced his own neuralyzed script. Regurgitating a tangled fur ball of tropes from policy debates past, Biden delivered an impressionistic, stereotyped word-picture of Black family life that only made notional sense because of the exhausting familiarity of the narrative.

Source: How Men Distort the Race Debate | The New Republic

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is the founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum.  @sandylocks

Bad Romance | Boston Review

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Capitalism twists our God-given love for neighbor and world into a force of estrangement, and it transforms our God-given desire to work into forms of exploitation.

McCarraher contends that this whole story is disastrously misguided; it keeps us from seeing how capitalism functions, and why it continues to exert so much appeal. Disenchantment, he argues, never happened. Our world is still soaked with meaning, just as it was in the Middle Ages. We are not abandoned to a universe of moral relativism and nihilism, because capitalism and its prophets have offered an astonishingly stable set of alternatives. “Capitalism,” McCarraher insists, “is a love story.” What he means is that the market translates the poetry of our desire into the prose of institutions and exchange. (And isn’t this the structure of any love story, or at least those ending in marriage?) Our world, in other words, is just as “enchanted” as the one of our medieval forebears: the human frame is such that it could not survive otherwise. Capitalism offers us community, faith, ritual, nature worship, and everything else that we imagine in the enchanted worldview of the past.

The trouble is that it is black magic. It twists our God-given love for neighbor and world into a force of estrangement, and it transforms our God-given desire to work into forms of exploitation. The problem with capitalism isn’t that it lacks values, but that it values the wrong things. If McCarraher is right, the salvation we seek will not come through technological breakthroughs or even the creation of new political coalitions. The first order of business, he thinks, is to learn how to love again, and to love better.

Source: Bad Romance | Boston Review

Elijah Cummings’ Death Leaves a Void – Rolling Stone

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Elijah Cummings Was Not Done

The House Oversight chairman died too soon at 68, while working on his deathbed to ensure this country measured up to his standards

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., speaks during a luncheon at the National Press Club in WashingtonCummings, Washington, USA – 07 Aug 2019Patrick Semansky/AP/ShutterstockEven with the deaths of our elders today and the 400th anniversary of chattel slavery, we are often reminded that this terrible American past is within the reach of our oral, recorded history. Elijah Cummings, who died Thursday at 68, was the grandson of sharecroppers, the black tenant farmers who rented land from white owners after the Civil War. Cummings once recounted to 60 Minutes that, when he was sworn into Congress in 1996 following a special election in Maryland’s 7th District, his father teared up. A typical, uplifting American story would be a son talking about his dad’s pride at such a moment, and there was that. But Cummings’ father, Ron, also asked him a series of questions. Isn’t this the place where they used to call us slaves? “Yes, sir.”Isn’t this the place where they used to call us three-fifths of a man? “Yes, sir.”

Isn’t this the place where they used to call us chattel? “Yes, sir.”Then Ron told his son Elijah, according to the story: Now I see what I could have been had I had an opportunity. Forget the Horatio Alger narratives; that is a story of generational ascendance that actually sounds relatable to me as someone who has grown up black in America.Sixty-eight should be too early for anyone to die in the era of modern medicine, but it somehow didn’t feel premature for Cummings. It wouldn’t feel premature for me, either. Racism kills us black men and women faster, that much has been documented.

Cummings had seen the consequences of racism in the mirror every day since he was 11, bearing a scar from an attack by a white mob when he and a group of black boys integrated the public (and ostensibly desegregated) pool in South Baltimore. Perhaps a shorter life was simply an American reality to which he had consigned himself. Or, he had just read the science.

When speculation rumbled about whether he would run for the Senate in 2015, Cummings spoke openly about his own life expectancy.“When you reach 64 years old and you look at the life expectancy of an African-American man, which is 71.8 years, I ask myself, if I don’t say it now, when am I going to say it?” Cummings said, referring at the time to combative rants and snips at Republicans whom he perceived to be wasting the public’s time and money with nonsense like the Benghazi hearings.

He continued to speak up for what he considered was just, not just when president did wrong but also when it involved the police. The bullhorn seemed to never leave his hand and his voice never seemed to die out in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death at the hands of Baltimore cops in 2015. His willingness to speak up not just in defense of America but of us black Americans is why the passing of Cummings was a puncturing wound for anyone hoping for this nation to be true to what it promises on paper to all of its people. Worse, Cummings’ death leaves a void.

Only a few members of his own party have been as willing to speak as frankly as Cummings, or take as immediate action against the grift and madness that Republicans pass off as governance. “We are better than this!” was one of his frequent exhortations, and I am not sure that we were.It is tempting, and lazy, to encapsulate the Cummings legacy within the last few years. Pointing to his deft handling of his Republican “friend” Mark Meadows’ racist call-out of Rashida Tlaib in February or his grace in dealing with President Trump’s petulant insults about his beloved Baltimore even as he used his House Oversight powers to help begin perhaps the most significant impeachment inquiry yet launched into an American head of state. But there was more to the man and his patriotism than his pursuit of a corrupt president.Cummings was, as his widow, Maryland Democratic Party chairwoman Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, put it in her statement, working “until his last breath.”

In a memo just last week, as he was ailing, Cummings stated he planned to subpoena both acting USCIS Director Ken Cuccinelli and acting ICE Director Matthew Albence to testify on October 17, the day he would later pass away. (Both men agreed to testify, voluntarily, but the hearing has been postponed until the 24th.) Cummings also signed two subpoenas driven to him in Baltimore hours before his death, both dealing with the Trump administration’s coldhearted policy change to temporarily end the ability for severely ill immigrants to seek care in the United States. One of the young immigrant patients who had testified to a House Oversight subcommittee about this draconian Trump measure, a Honduran teenager named Jonathan Sanchez, told the assembled lawmakers, simply, “I don’t want to die.”

Cummings knew all too well that this is a country that kills people with its racism, and saw this president trying to do it. He went to his deathbed trying to change that America. His untimely death left that work undone, but that task is ours now.

Source: Elijah Cummings’ Death Leaves at Void – Rolling Stone

What Elijah Cummings Meant to Baltimore | The New Yorker I Jelani Cobb

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U. S. Representative Elijah Cummings  1951- 2019

” . . . One other thing: democracy. Cummings, in his speeches, particularly those he gave in the past few years, insistently invoked it, and not in the inert way that elected officials tend to. He spoke of democracy as something vital and fragile and valuable, an inheritance that had to be safeguarded for future generations. When he spoke of HR-1, the exhaustive election-protection bill that the Democrats introduced in January, as their first piece of legislation of this Congress, he mentioned his ninety-two-year-old mother, who had died a year earlier. She was a former sharecropper, who implored him, “Do not let them take our votes away from us.” He viewed his chairmanship of the House Oversight and Reform Committee as part of the battle to protect voting rights. His death unleashes a flurry of speculation about whom the Democrats will choose to next lead the committee—Representative Carolyn Maloney, of New York, will serve as the acting chair—and how that person will oversee its portion of the impeachment inquiry. Those matters will be resolved at a future date. What remains clear is the void that Cummings’s absence leaves in his district and his country. This would have been the case at nearly any point in his quarter century in Congress. But it’s even more acute in this one. In a fiery bit of oratory delivered at the introduction of HR-1, he pledged to “fight to the death” in defense of voting and, thereby, democracy. It was a promise that he made good on.”

Source: What Elijah Cummings Meant to Baltimore | The New Yorker   

Rep. Cummings was a Baltimore native and attended Howard University, where he obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science and served as student government president.

“Congressman Cummings has dedicated his life of service to uplifting and empowering the people he is sworn to represent,” his official biography says.

“He began his career of public service in the Maryland House of Delegates, where he served for 14 years and became the first African American in Maryland history to be named Speaker Pro Tem,” it says. “Since 1996, Congressman Cummings has proudly represented Maryland’s 7th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.” At the time of his death, he served as the Chair of the US House Oversight Committee.

He died on Oct.17,2019.

Jelani Cobb is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.”

The Abusive Behavior of Ex-Mount Sinai Doctor David Newman  II The Cut

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Arriving at the bathroom, Aja was still sifting through mental images, trying to get a grip. “You going to go out there and accuse him of this?” she says she asked herself. “Nobody’s going to believe you. You are clearly still drugged, and you’re not in a position to go out there and say something and then pass out. But I know I’m in danger. And I’m like, You’ve got to get out of here.”

It would be four more hours before Aja left the Emergency Department, alone. Hospital video shows her dressed in her winter coat and fedora-style hat, moving unsteadily toward the exit. In her left hand, she carries a large plastic bag into which she had stuffed her hospital gown and the bedding, to be used, she hoped, as forensic evidence.

Last June, a study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine found that the incidence of sexual harassment within academic medical centers was unparalleled in any surveyed profession except the military. “Hospitals are basically hotels,” says Tim Johnson, an OB/GYN at the University of Michigan who worked on the study. “You’ve got beds and people staying in the beds. You’ve got cleaning people. You’ve got food service. You’ve got doctors wandering through the place late at night. It’s kind of like a hunting ground. Hospitals are like hunting grounds.” Although the NASEM report did not tally sexual abuse or assault of patients by doctors, an investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution found 450 such documented cases from 2016 to 2017. In half of those, the doctors are still practicing medicine. Last year, 17 women sued New York-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital for damages, claiming their gynecologist, Robert Hadden, had touched them inappropriately, often without gloves, and given them prolonged breast exams. In 2016, Hadden was convicted for sex crimes but received no jail time.

Source: The Abusive Behavior of Ex-Mount Sinai Doctor David Newman

Freedom Rider: Botham Jean, Joshua Brown and Antonio Williams | Black Agenda Report

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“Black lives don’t matter in New York, Dallas or anywhere else.”

“The psychological damage done to black people reverberates. So much so that a family would not stand in righteous and uncompromised indignation against the person who killed their loved one. Black elected officials are silent cowards and neither speak nor act on behalf of their people. The rest of us must be watchful and prevent ourselves from falling under the spell of insanity and treachery. Let us begin by remembering Botham Jean, Joshua Brown and Antonio Williams. No one will if we do not. Black lives don’t matter in New York, Dallas or anywhere else.”

.._..  .._..  .._..  .._..  .._..  .._..  .._..  .._..

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com . Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

Source: Freedom Rider: Botham Jean, Joshua Brown and Antonio Williams | Black Agenda Report

Brandt Jean’s hug of Amber Guyger spurs praise, derision, b[Black, white | LEONARD PITTS JR. II Miami Herald

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Forgiveness isn’t the problem. One-way forgiveness is. Who forgives black people?

Opinion BY LEONARD PITTS JR. OCTOBER 08, 2019

Brandt Jean hugs Amber Guyger, the former Dallas police officer who shot and killed his brother, at her sentencing hearing. APHere’s the thing about forgiveness.It’s not just something you extend to someone else. It’s also a gift you give yourself, permission to lay down the heavy burden of grudges and rage. And if you’re a Christian, it’s an obligation — albeit a hard one — of faith.One can believe all that, yet still be deeply conflicted by last week’s act of forgiveness in a Dallas courtroom: Brandt Jean, who is black, embraced and absolved Amber Guyger, the white former police officer who had just been sentenced to 10 years for killing his brother, Botham. Guyger had entered Botham’s apartment mistakenly believing it was hers.While some people considered these acts of grace, others, many of them African American, were furious.

Actress Yvette Nicole Brown retweeted a meme that said: “If somebody ever kills me, don’t you dare hug them. … Throw a chair, in my honor.” To which Brown added: “… and then dig me up and throw ME!” Others were angered that Guyger got “only” 10 years.The view from this pew is that none of us has the right to tell Brandt Jean how to grieve his brother or process the hell he’s living through.

As to Guyger’s sentence: It actually seems fair for a crime that was ultimately a tragic mistake, albeit one exacerbated by poor judgment.What makes it seem unfair is that we’ve too often seen black defendants receive far harsher sentences for far lesser crimes. Like Marissa Alexander who, in 2012, fired a warning shot as her reputedly abusive husband advanced on her. She got 20 years for shooting a ceiling.But if these issues are relatively clear cut, the larger one — forgiveness — is anything but. Especially since it sometimes seems that black people — not coincidentally the most religiously faithful group in America, according to a 2014 Pew survey — are forgiving to a fault.A white supremacist massacres nine people in their church. Family members forgive him. A white cop shoots a fleeing black man in the back. The victim’s mother forgives him.

In 1963, white terrorists killed Sarah Collins Rudolph’s sister Addie Mae Collins and three other girls in a bombing at 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Rudolph forgave them. And so it goes.Forgiveness, you understand, is not the problem. But one-way forgiveness is. Because who forgives black people? Forget forgiveness for wrongdoing. How about forgiveness for simply existing and trying to live unmolested lives? This is what Botham Jean was doing — eating ice cream in his own home — when he was killed by a white woman who blundered upon that prosaic scene and perceived a threat.In dying that way, Jean indicted cherished American myths about equality and unalienable rights. America — much of white America, at least — hates when you do that. One is reminded of what Hilde Walter, a Jewish journalist, was quoted as saying in 1968: “It seems the Germans will never forgive us Auschwitz.” Similarly, it sometimes seems much of white America will never forgive us slavery. Or Jim Crow.

Source: Brandt Jean’s hug of Amber Guyger spurs praise, derision, black, white | Miami Herald   

LEONARD PITTS JR. II Miami Herald  II @LeonardPittsJr1

Author, The Last Thing You Surrender

Theater of Forgiveness ll Hafizah Geter

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As a child, though I could never quite name the offenses of white people, I could sense the wounds they had left all over the Black people who surrounded me. The wounds were in the lilt of Black women’s voices, in the stiffened swagger of our men; it was there in the sometimes ragged ways my boy cousins would be disciplined. And I knew this work of forgiving had somehow left bruises on my aunts so deep it made their skin shine. In church, we prayed and forgave white people like our prayers were the only thing between them, heaven, and damnation.It’s left me wondering: Does forgiveness take advantage of my people?***

Being Black in America means having a historical relationship to forgiveness. If the law of Audre Lorde holds true and “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Christian forgiveness was never designed to tackle white supremacy, only pardon it. Christianity emerged from our slave masters. We were forbidden to read, but could pray. In the face of this new, white god, our ancestors looked for solace and hope. Slaves were entitled to nothing, not even their anger. Performing forgiveness became a crucial aspect of slaves’ lives. They held forgiveness in their mouths as both salve and armor. But if Christianity is the master’s tool, then surely white supremacy is its house and the Christian ideal of forgiveness will never be able to address, dismantle, or truly forgive white supremacy. So what happens when the performance of Black forgiveness gets repeated through several generations until it becomes ritualized and transformed into tradition?How, in the 21st century, do we escape the theatre of forgiveness?

If the law of Audre Lorde holds true and ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,’

Christian forgiveness was never designed to tackle white supremacy, only pardon it.I am trying to trace the trickle-down effect of suppressing Black rage through forgiveness in my family. How my enslaved ancestors must have chewed on their rage like cud until it was unrecognizable enough to be called forgiveness. How that rage tumbled through our bloodstream, generation after generation. How it made our men mean and our women the only thing America would possibly let them get away with breaking. How our women raised other people’s children by themselves, and arrived home too tired or too shattered to save their daughters from the grown men they themselves loved. How rage has sent us imploding.

How rage grips my father’s people, turning our men into tripwires until both our traumas and our resilience are passed down from generation to generation. Over and over, I see how white supremacy and altered expectations of justice have forever molded the Black American side of my family.***In 1990, I was standing in Aunt Sarah’s basement, her linoleum floor corners peeling beneath the damp, dim light, her basement a ghostly type of cold. Being in Aunt Sarah’s basement often felt like being in a bunker. It always smelled wet like old snow resisting thaw, the ceiling low enough to give a tall man a backache. Thin layers of dust glimmered beneath the Morse code of flickering fluorescent lights, gripping the wood lacquer of the entertainment console.Aunt Sarah’s basement was filled with board games and decks of cards that neighborhood children would often come by to play with. Monopoly? Too vast in its pieces. The tiny colored discs of Connect Four? Too loud in their dropping clinks. Being 6, I trusted myself enough to accurately consider risk, weigh all options. It was simple, though. These games were not for me. Aunt Sarah and I both knew it. The contract between Aunt Sarah and me consisted of only two agreements: I would remain silent and invisible in her house.I knew the danger of the wrong game.I don’t know how cruelty finds us, but cruelty I incited in my Aunt. It seemed that every little thing I did set her off. I the flint, she the firecracker. If I spoke, her eyes would beat me like a switch pulled from a backyard tree. If Aunt Sarah wanted to teach me anything in this world, it would be my place.Easter breaks, when we were released from our Catholic school uniforms into the ether of our lives for two weeks, my parents would load my sister and me in the car and drive to Dayton to drop us off at my Aunt Sarah and Uncle Rodge’s.

On those trips, I’d sit in the back, the synthetic velvet curtains of our Dodge Caravan windows splayed open as I considered escape routes, what it would take to disappear, anxiously rubbing my fingers against the curtain’s grain.Throughout our childhood, these drives from Akron to Dayton were a regular occurrence. My father’s mother and both his sisters lived there. Strife and the years my grandmother spent trying to get her children out of Alabama had banded the four of them together like cement. During my father’s and aunts’ youths, the extended family and community around them had been filled with men who found relief in the bruises they left on women, who . . .

Source: Theater of Forgiveness  

Hafizah Geter | Longreads | November 2018