Redlining was clearly a horrible practice that was systemically racist, but also required actual racists committing racist acts. While this is now illegal, the consequences persist in other forms of systemic racism. For example, education is heavily dependent on property values (or income, if attending a private school). Because of redlining, black folks were forced to rent rather than buy decades ago, and thus missed the opportunity to accumulate wealth and property and pass this down to their children, who now live in the same low-income communities, with overcrowded schools and substandard resources. Because of the practice of redlining years ago, many black children are getting a poor education today. That is systemic racism. It doesn't mean that parents in rich neighborhoods, teachers, principals, or anyone involved in education is necessarily racist or has ever done anything racist... it just means that way the education system has a propensity to penalize black children.
In my opinion, part of the problem with the woke movement is that it seeks atonement for systemic racism... when they should really be recruiting people to help them fix broken systems.
“The second factor offered as an explanation for the wealth gap is the exclusion of blacks from a set of New Deal policies designed to promote homeownership, income growth, and wealth accrual. After World War II, whites received the vast majority of government-backed mortgage loans.4 By the time the civil rights gains of the 1960s made these loans available to blacks, it was too late—the crucial economic boom of the previous two decades, during which housing values rapidly appreciated, had already passed, and blacks, reeling from the effects of redlining and income suppression, couldn’t enter the housing market at its new prices.5 Wealth—in the form of property and inheritances transferred from parent to child—became a birthright for whites. Meanwhile, deprived of such wealth transfers, poverty became a permanent trap for blacks.6
But this story, though based in truth, has been massaged to give the false impression that benevolence from the state is a prerequisite for wealth accrual. The account even contains some factual errors. Rothstein, for instance, falsely claims that “African American incomes didn’t take off until the 1960s,”7 and that “black workers did not share in the income gains that [white] blue collar workers realized” in the mid-twentieth century.8 Although it is true that the median income of white men more than tripled between 1939 and 1960 (rising from 1,112 dollars to 5,137 dollars), the median income of black men more than quintupled (rising from 460 dollars to 3,075 dollars).9 Black women, too, saw their incomes grow at a faster rate than white women over the same timespan.10 Baradaran makes the same mistake in her description of life for blacks in the 1940s and 50s: “poverty led to institutional breakdown, which led to more poverty.”11 But between 1940 and 1960 the black poverty rate fell from 87 percent to 47 percent, before any significant civil rights gains were made.12
The prevailing progressive narrative also gives short shrift to the history of immigrant groups succeeding in the face of racist hostility and without help from the government. Baradaran, for instance, criticizes the “pervasive myth that immigrant success was based purely on individual work ethic.” To the contrary, she claims, “most immigrants’ bootstraps had been provided to them by the government.”13
But history tells a different story. Starting with the California Alien Land Law of 1913, fourteen states passed laws preventing Japanese-American peasant farmers from owning land and property. These laws existed until 1952, when the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional. Add to this the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II, and it’s fair to say that the Japanese were given no bootstraps in America. Nevertheless, by 1970 census data showed Japanese-Americans out-earning Anglo-Americans, Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Polish-Americans.14 For Asian-Americans on the whole, an analysis of wealth data from 1989 to 2013 predicted that their “median wealth soon will surpass the white median level.” If wealth differences were largely explained by America’s history of favoring certain groups over others, then it would be hard to explain why Asian-Americans, who were never favored, are on track to become wealthier than whites.”
Sydney. London. Toronto.
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