I am still composing my thoughts on the Coates article. Here is Part I:
As I said, I found the Coates essay very thought provoking. The part that was new to me was the systematic complicity of the Federal Housing Administration in redlining, visually seeing it on a map, and the high-interest contract loans that filled the void.
For the context of this article, I don’t think we can talk about reparations without talking about inter-generational effects. I knew that inter-generational effects exist even before reading this essay. My parents were very poor when I was in elementary school, moving towards middle class when I became financially independent after high school, and became wealthy later. I am financially successful, but even if were destitute, I could call on my parents to help me and my children. That is an immense security that I have, even though I don’t ever expect to call upon it.
Yet inter-generational effects do not continue forever. I have been told that I am descended from royalty about five generations ago, yet that did not prevent my parents from being poor when I was young. The old story about rags to riches to rags in three generations has a great deal of truth to it.
For this reason, I disagree with the idea of reparations for slavery. Slavery itself ended about 6-7 generations ago and the direct effects of this original sin have long past IMHO. Yet a formal apology is very long overdue.
Of course we know that government supported racism continued on for over another 100 years. That will be my next part.
Before I start Part II, I should mention that I believe everyone is biased, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The NY Times is biased. The WSJ is biased as well, but in a different direction. This exemplary essay by Coates has its own set of biases, and since Coates is not acting as a journalist here, his biases are stronger. I will touch upon that later.
I lean conservative, but I strongly believe that a key role of government is to provide an equal playing field for all its citizens. In this I completely agree with the following in the article:
And post-slavery, the US government failed to do that in many ways ranging from “separate but equal” school systems to FHA redlining. Let’s focus on the redlining here.
I cannot defend redlining. But the US also failed in not regulating the contract loans that filled the void due to redlining. So that’s two failures on the part of the government. The question I have is: Were the sellers of the contracts racist, or were they simply sharks that would take advantage of anybody? Coates’ bias is that they were the former, but I don’t explicitly see evidence supporting that here.
So are reparations due for contract loans? And if so, who is responsible? For this, I could see a case where reparations make sense. We can determine who was harmed and who performed the harm (I place the blame on the US government, not the immoral but apparently legal people who sold the contracts). And we are now within two generations of when the harm occurred, allowing inter-generational effects to still make a difference.
But there are some things where I differ significantly with Coates – that will be in Part III, which might be tomorrow.
There are thousands of individuals who were forcibly institutionalized and sterilized in the United States that are alive today and have tried to sue for reparations. They have gotten no where. A handful of states have paid a pittance but the largest offender, California, is basically just staying silent until the last of the people die off.
So no, I’m not entirely sure they could “probably sue and win.” We as a country tend to not own up to our atrocities until well over a century down the line (and even then, we largely ignore or glaze over huge swaths of history).
I knew about redlining and the GI Bill and restrictive covenants, but not about the contract loans. As part of some research I’ve been doing about our town’s development I’ve come across a bunch of ads from developers. The language is mostly coded, but they made it clear they would sell only to the “right” people.
I’d agree with you if slavery had been all of it and then everything had been hunky dory after that, but as you should know, having read the article, for all practical purposes society found ways to make sure African-Americans were little better than slaves via share cropping, lynching and all the other abuses the article details. It’s not just reparations for slavery it’s the continued abuse as well.
And of course the sharks were targeting African-Americans because they had no choice, everyone else could get a real mortgage.
I’m very sorry for slavery - truly I am - but as someone whose ancestors arrived well after the Civil War, never lived below the Mason Dixon line, whose ancestors never engaged in any nonsense like back of the bus or separate water fountains, whose ancestors all fully supported the civil rights movement and were disgusted by the crowds in Little Rock throwing tomatoes at young girls just trying to get an education, I’m not sure what collective responsibility I bear such that I would owe reparations. That’s what makes the G solution so “clean.” The “wrongdoers” are clearly identified, and so are the “wronged.”
Regarding redlining, there has been a sea-change in the way financial institutions handle loans in majority-minority areas. At the beginning of my career I visited a bank which had a map of the city with different census areas redlined. I asked what the map was for, and was told that those were poor areas that the bank did not make loans. For the most part, the map corresponded with the then-black parts of the city.
Recently, I visited a similar institution, and it had a similar map on the wall with the same census tracks highlighted in black. I asked what the map was for, and was told that, as directed by the bank regulators, those are areas of high priority lending and that the bank was to make all possible attempts to make loans in those areas. In fact, they informed me that loan specialist received a $500 per loan bonus for making loans in those specific areas. They were pretty much the same areas that were redlined 30 years ago.
As for Georgetown, this seems to be a reasonable attempt to resolve the issue.
@Zinhead , I am admitting I don’t know what is going on in the housing market.
I am hearing mixed messages. 3 percent downpayment loans are back. Then I am hearing that lenders are very strict.
The way the government and the fed handled the housing crisis were terrible. Standards were tightened as home prices dropped. Should have been the opposite.
I do some hard money lending in the housing market where I and others receive decent interest relatively speaking because the home lending market is tight. I think some of the borrowers should be able to borrow at 3 3/4 interest rates but they can’t. This isn’t minorities borrowing money.
So…moving to minority borrowing, I have my doubts that blacks are getting these loans in former reedlined districts.
I would love to see some numbers so my doubts could be erased.
@dstark - I don’t know the loan volumes in these formerly redlined areas, but if the bank was giving a $500 bonus to the originators, they weren’t making much on these loans. It was clearly driven by need to prove to the regulators that they were not redlining.
As for regulators, they frequently over-react to a crisis that they helped to cause.
Just want to point out that Colin Powell is Jamaican and certainly the descendant of slaves brought there from Africa. Same slave trade, just not brought to the US (though CP was born in NYC, in Harlem).
Correct. But even Colin Powell himself is on record about the cultural differences (and tensions) between Carribean blacks and American blacks.
The cultural and historical journey of black Americans goes from Colonial slavery through Jim Crow through the civil rights movement to today. And they’ve always been a racial minority in the U.S.
For slaves that landed in the Caribbean, the journey includes becoming citizens of independent island nations where blacks are the majority. Plus the experience of voluntarily coming to America as immigrants.
In some parts of NYC which were redlined like Bushwick, Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, Harlem, etc…many folks receiving loans to buy into those areas are White college grads or real estate developers who are knowingly/unknowingly acting as agents of gentrification and in the process, increasingly pushing out poorer non-White long-term residents due to skyrocketing real estate prices driven by their actions.
Saw similar effects in Boston area neighborhoods such as Roxbury and Mission Hill in the early to mid '00s.
I understand that this is a super-complicated issue. However, with regard to selling homes on land contracts, that was a more widespread practice in the past and it affected many people of limited financial means. I don’t doubt that it affected African-Americans disproportionately, but it was not limited to African-Americans. When my spouse and I were looking for our first house in the late 1970’s, one place we initially considered was being offered on a land contract. It had a lower advertised interest rate than bank loans at the time. My (white) in-laws adamantly warned us away from it, because another relative had lost a home in a land-contract deal.
@cj5555, They’re granting legacy status to a specific group – descendants of slaves who had connections to the college. It sounds like they kept records and were able to trace the famiies to the present.