Forms Of Racial Discrimination In Every Day American Life

47 min readNov 8, 2021

Yet racism is still called fake — The following are excerpts taken from various articles from different writers, publications, and across very time periods. UN Human Rights Though this list is in no way exhaustive, it should be demonstrative of the compounded barriers that all marginalized persons face, but particularly Black Americans who always face the worst conditions across all spectrums of life. Amnesty International Yet We still continue to be ignored by our own government as though it’s 1621 rather than 2021 and we still have not protections. UN Women

The Insurance Industry Confronts Its Own Racism (investopedia.com)

By JIM PROBASCO

Published September 01, 2020

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Racial discrimination has been part of the insurance sector landscape for more than 250 years.
The NAIC has begun an intensive member-led effort to combat racial discrimination in the insurance sector.
Early forms of discrimination, such as race-based premiums and redlining, have been replaced with the subtler damage from coverage discrimination and rates based on big data.
Lack of minority representation in the insurance sector has alienated minority consumers and exacerbated the problem of discrimination.
Regulation of big data, consumer education, and increasing minority participation in the insurance industry are some remediation efforts suggested by NAIC.

Credit-based insurance scores

Redlining, Klein says, gave way to a more implicit type of discrimination using credit scores as measures of risk in the 1990s.8 According to NAIC, that practice, started by the Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO), continues today in states where it is legal.10 Although Klein and others consider credit-based insurance scores discriminatory, FICO says its insurance scores are “completely non-discriminatory and use no data on gender, nationality, ethnicity, address or income.”

Discriminatory underwriting guidelines

Birny Birnbaum, executive director of the Center for Economic Justice, mentions two types of discrimination with historic roots based on underwriting guidelines that made it difficult, if not impossible, for minorities to obtain either auto or home insurance in Texas. In the first case, underwriting guidelines required anyone seeking auto insurance to have had previous insurance. Many members of minority groups did not because it was not required until 1991. Underwriting guidelines for home insurance were based on age and value which, regulators discovered, was a proxy for race given past discrimination in the neighborhoods where these homes were located

Current Challenges

Research continues to be the basis for NAIC findings of continued discrimination. Insurance Commissioner of Connecticut Andrew N. Mais notes the importance of this research in uncovering practices such as the use of big-data, algorithmic-based underwriting models (proxy discrimination), and others that disadvantage minority groups when it comes to access to affordable healthcare, as well as to other insurance products.13

Effect of big data and algorithmic models

Consumer advocate and retired insurance executive Sonja Larkin-Thorne has testified before Congress on her concerns about big data, including unregulated use; lack of privacy, accuracy, and transparency; unreliable sourcing; and unintentional bias and discrimination.

She notes that these unregulated datasets collect information on shopping habits, driving patterns, race, age, occupation, education, voting history, marital status, work salary, and Facebook friends, among others. This, in turn, she says, produces “unregulated algorithms that insurance companies are using in rates and underwriting.”

Ultimately, Larkin-Thorne says, what is needed is federal and state regulation, and laws requiring companies to unlock the data and resulting algorithms so consumers know what’s being collected and how it’s being used to underwrite and price insurance products.12

In the first half of 2019 (before COVID-19), more than 27% of Hispanics and over 13% of Black Americans did not have health insurance compared to 9.8% of White Americans.14

Access to affordable quality healthcare

Dr. Dora Hughes, Associate Research Professor of Health Policy & Management at the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University suggests that the number of Americans without health insurance, which stood at 30 million before COVID-19, is undoubtedly higher now. That population is disproportionately made up of members of minority groups.

Discrimination, Hughes says, has moved from preexisting conditions, discriminatory pricing, and longer waiting periods, which are now illegal, to practices that amount to coverage discrimination through charging more for conditions that are more prevalent among some groups. These prevent patients — often minority-group members with complex health issues — from obtaining appropriate medical care.

An additional form of discrimination comes when certain drugs used to treat diseases more common to minorities are placed on the highest formulary tier. Finally, Hughes notes, that physicians in high minority population urban areas tend to receive lower private insurance reimbursement rates, discouraging medical professionals from serving in those areas.

In addition to problems related to the use of big data, Dr. Hughes suggests that policymakers address health equity, which she defines as care tailored to each minority group. Insurance coverage must take those needs into consideration, she says. This includes the implementation of value-based insurance that offers lower copays for chronic conditions to help bring the overall cost of treatment down.

U.S. Auto Insurance Industry Admits Systemic Racism — Streetsblog USA

”Cities and towns with majority Black residents experience among the highest quote prices compared to cities of any other racial makeup, regardless of how clean their driving record is,” the report states. “A driver with a clean record living in a majority-Black neighborhood pays almost 20 percent more for car insurance on average than a driver living in a majority-White neighborhood who has prior driving offenses.”

As the report tells it, the industry practices a form of “redlining,” the long-illegal practice in which banks used to deny or charge more for loans to homeowners in Black areas — although it doesn’t use the term: “A similar pattern holds for homeownership and credit score, with a 13-percent increase in car insurance costs for homeowners in Black neighborhoods compared renters in White ones and a 24-percent increase for car owners with excellent credit in Black neighborhoods compared to poor credit in White neighborhoods,” the report says.

The report, “Insuring the American Driver: Trends in Costs and Coverage,” from virtual insurance agent and trend-tracker Insurify, follows a number of legislative and institutional developments aimed at undoing racist insurance practices.

How Structural Racism Affects Healthcare (stkate.edu)

Racial Discrimination in Healthcare: How Structural Racism Affects Healthcare

Tuesday, June 15, 2021

Racism permeates every aspect of society — healthcare included. Numerous studies have documented disproportionately negative health outcomes for people of color, and worse, medical care can exacerbate existing social factors that lead to poor health for disadvantaged groups.

Combating systemic racism in healthcare systems starts with understanding the many forms of racial discrimination and prejudice embedded in them. A crucial first step entails identifying and understanding how multiple forms of racial injustice affect patients, healthcare professionals, and healthcare providers — and what changes can make healthcare inclusive and equitable.

Discrimination and Racial Bias in Healthcare

Discrimination against patients of color limits their access to healthcare and the quality of their treatment.

To root out structural inequalities in healthcare, we should look to the ways that implicit bias affects both interpersonal dynamics (such as those between a patient and a clinician) and organizational dynamics (such as dynamics within healthcare institutions).

Implicit Bias and Interpersonal Dynamics

Medical practitioners take an oath to “do no harm,” but evidence shows that doctors and the greater population exhibit the same levels of implicit bias.

Implicit bias is the tendency to unconsciously associate groups (for example, people of color) or category markers (for example, Blackness) and a negative evaluation (implicit prejudice). In a seminal report by the Institute of Medicine in 2003, “Unequal Treatment,” a team of physicians, behavioral scientists, public health experts, and other health professionals concluded that even when access-to-care barriers (such as income and insurance) were controlled for, racial and ethnic minorities received worse healthcare than white people received.

Racial and ethnic minority populations experience health disparities — differences in health outcomes that reflect social inequalities. Asian Americans, Black or African Americans, Hispanics or Latinos, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, American Indians, and Alaska Natives all suffer from the effects of implicit bias in healthcare, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Nearly 20 years since the publication of “Unequal Treatment,” the study’s results have been replicated again and again, confirming that implicit bias by medical practitioners and within the healthcare system plays a role in negative health outcomes for people of color. Implicit bias tests show, for instance, that physicians are more likely to provide requested pain treatment for white patients compared with Black patients. Repeated studies show that American healthcare workers, even those who are avowedly anti-racist, demonstrate a significant implicit bias against patients of color and a preference for white patients, as reported by Scientific American.

How can this be? On the one hand, healthcare providers may consciously condemn racism in healthcare and negative stereotypes associated with disadvantaged groups (including those to which such medical professionals may themselves belong). On the other hand, our culture consistently depicts people of color in stereotyped and pejorative ways.

While researchers continue to theorize how cultural depictions perpetuate stereotypes and prejudice, the effects of implicit racial bias in medicine are clear.

Case Study in Implicit Bias: Pain Treatment

Well-documented studies show patients with darker skin tones of all ages receive lower doses of pain medication compared with white patients in the United States. One cause for this inequality is unconscious racial bias that originated in the era of chattel slavery.

In a 2016 study, many white medical students surveyed wrongly assumed that Black patients had a higher pain tolerance compared with white patients, according to studies by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America cited by Medical News Today. When asked to provide justification for their decision to offer less pain medication, these medical students repeated unsubstantiated misconceptions that Black people had thicker skin or less sensitive nerve endings. These biased beliefs can be traced back to racist doctors in the 19th century who used these “facts” about people of color to justify violence and unethical medical testing on slaves.

Medical myths such as these persist to this day in healthcare as unconscious, implicit biases. The effects? Patients of color receive worse care than their white counterparts receive. For example, today, Black children with appendicitis are less likely to receive appropriate pain medication compared with white children. This is true also for people of color with recurring cancer compared with white people with the same disease.

Even when doctors disavow racism, medical professionals may still carry unconscious bias that they must actively resist. One way that hospitals have begun to combat implicit bias is through standardizing care procedures and practices. The hope with standardized procedures and practices is that no patient, regardless of race or ethnicity, will receive worse care than any other patient receives.

Racial Inequities in Healthcare

People of color die sooner and suffer more preventable illnesses in our healthcare systems compared with white Americans — even in controlled studies that allow for variables such as age, location, education level, socioeconomic status, and total income.

The statistics reflect racial inequities in healthcare:

A recent Cigna study found higher rates of cancer, diabetes, childhood obesity, and heart disease among Black Americans linked to the lack of economic resources, limited access to healthcare, and delay in treatment.
Compared with white Americans, Black Americans die prematurely from all types of diseases, including diabetes, hypertension, strokes, and, more recently, COVID-19.
Metrics such as the infant mortality gap and the maternal mortality gap reveal legacies and current practices of racial exclusion and discrimination in our health systems. Black newborns die 250% more often than white newborns in the United States. Black mothers are at least three times more likely than white mothers to die due to complications in childbirth.
Black Americans between the ages of 18 and 49 are twice as likely as whites to die from heart disease.
Predominantly Black ZIP codes are 67% more likely than other ZIP codes to lack adequate numbers of primary care physicians (PCPs), according to a 2012 study.
Black Americans ultimately wait longer than white patients for life-saving treatments, such as initial EKGs.

These gaps reflect who has access to adequate medical care, employment, adequate pay, and safe environments — and who does not.

Racism in the Insurance Marketplace

Business models in healthcare drive broad inequities. For example, the U.S. healthcare system offers services to patients based on their insurance access. The multilevel structure of access to insurance tiers the quality of care that patients receive, and data shows that it racially segregates the care that patients receive.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) made more people eligible for Medicaid federally, but many U.S. citizens continue to go uninsured in states that opted out of the Medicaid eligibility expansion. By estimate, 46% of Black working-age adults live in the 15 states that refused to implement the ACA’s expanded Medicaid benefits.

Moreover, around 20% of Black adults and 35% of Latinx adults can not access health insurance compared with 10% of white and Asian adults, according to a study cited in Medical News Today. This leaves working-class people to pay for their own medical care out of pocket.

When unemployment rises, so does the racial disparity in medical insurance. In states that expanded eligibility for Medicaid, the ACA covers 36% of unemployed adults, whereas in states that did not, only 16% of unemployed adults are covered.

8 examples of racist technology | Complex

BYFELIKS GARCIA

Feliks Garcia is a writer in Brooklyn, NY, with two cats and a Twitter. He contributes to the Daily Dot and edits for The Offing.

2. Infrared technology

This viral video, uploaded to YouTube in September, shows an automatic soap dispenser at an Atlanta hotel failing to work when a black man places his hands under the nozzle. When his white friend does the same, however, the nozzle dispenses foamy soap into the man’s palm.

Although there’s humor to the video, it exposes a glaring flaw in how modern technology favors lighter skin. Here’s how the dispenser works: An infrared beam shoots out from an LED just under the nozzle, and in order to trigger the dispenser, the beam has to be reflected back to the sensor. If light is absorbed, the soap is never dispensed. That’s what happens when someone with darker skin puts their hand under the nozzle; on the contrary, lighter skin reflects the LED beam more easily. To avoid these kinds of problems, companies should test their technology on a variety of skin tones.

3. Photo apps

Flickr and Google came under fire earlier this year when images of black people in their photo apps were labeled with the tags “ape” and “gorilla.” Both companies promptly apologized and removed the offensive tags, but many believe that this shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

“We’re appalled and genuinely sorry that this happened,” Google said in a statement. “There is still clearly a lot of work to do with automatic image labeling, and we’re looking at how we can prevent these types of mistakes from happening in the future.”

For Google’s part, much of the problem stemmed from the fact that few photos of black people were uploaded to the app during development, and few black people were involved in product testing, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. This speaks to a larger problem of underrepresentation of minorities in Silicon Valley.

4. Cameras

Joz Wang bought a new camera, the Nikon Coolpix S630, for her mother in 2009. It boasted a special facial-detection feature that was designed to improve the quality of portrait pictures. The only problem? The camera kept telling Wang, a Taiwanese-American, that she was blinking her eyes.

“Did someone blink?” the camera prompted on its screen.

“Racist Camera! No, I did not blink…I’m just Asian!” Wang responded in a blog post.

However unintentional, the S630’s technology seems to favor white faces.

5. Social networks

Nextdoor.com launched in 2011 as a private social network “for you, your neighbors, and your community.” Its “crime and safety” section allows residents to report “suspicious activity,” but East Bay Express reported that this mostly affects black or Latino residents living in gentrified neighborhoods. Indeed, the newspaper found that users will report a black person even if they only have a few details about them, such as “black” or “wearing a hoodie.”

Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia recently acknowledged his app’s racial-profiling problem, and is working with Oakland-based community group Neighbors for Racial Justice to improve it. For starters, Tolia promised to add a buttonthat lets users flag posts for racial profiling.

A similar app called GroupMe, based in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., yields the same results. GroupMe was started by Georgetown businesses and the D.C. police to help stop shoplifting, a growing problem for local stores. However, the Washington Post reported that of the of the 3,000-plus messages retail shops sent via GroupMe since January of this year, nearly 70 percent of the people reported were black. “The employees often allege shoplifting. But other times, retailers don’t accuse these shoppers of anything beyond seeming suspicious,” according to the Post.

The controversy surrounding these apps followed outrage over SketchFactor, a now-defunct app launched by two white developers to rate neighborhoods based on their “sketchiness,” which some consider to be code for lower-income black communities.

6. Apple Watch

Perhaps the biggest hardware release since the iPhone, gadget enthusiasts everywhere highly anticipated the Apple Watch’s release. One of its noteworthy features is the heart rate monitor, which uses a device called the “pulse oximeter” that emits infrared light through a user’s wrist to measure the oxidation of their blood. The oximeter determines a user’s heart rate based on how much light is absorbed through the skin and blood cells. The problem with this technology, however, is that it doesn’t work on dark or tattooed skin.

During product testing, only Apple executives are allowed access to teams involved in the development. So in the Apple Watch’s case, it’s possible that executives — the top 10 of whom are all white — didn’t consider testing on a variety of skin types early on. Although the company addressed the tattoo issue, which also affects Apple’s heart-rate monitor, it has yet to mention the device’s issue with darker skin.

7. Stock photos

Search any human body part in Google Images, and one pattern quickly emerges: Virtually all of the stock photos that pop up show white bodies — whether you search “leg,” “arm,” “handsome man,” or “beauty.”

We know that there is no single ideal standard for beauty, yet these results suggest whiteness is the norm. Search images of black people, however, and hypersexual caricatures that play on white stereotypes of black culture emerge. (Suggested image groups when searching for “black person” in Google Images include “eating chicken” and “watermelon.”)

Online photo searches also perpetuate the whitewashing of media images. When Daniel Villarreal of pop-culture news site Unicorn Booty entered “black woman large dog” into Google Images, the results mostly produced images of white women with large dogs.

8. Gaming apps

All too often, gaming apps invoke stereotypical images of people of color, and although many of the apps that previously stirred controversy are no longer around, racist portrayals in games persist.

Of the folded apps, Mexicans were the butt of the joke in Mariachi Hero Grande and I-Immigrate. The former features a cigar-smoking, gun-slinging mariachi who stomps on cockroaches and shoots tequila bottles, while the latter depicts a Mexican rat named El Queso.

Two offensive apps that are still around are Illegal Immigration: A Game and Pocket God. Illegal Immigration is a mock immigration test that associates undocumented immigration with 9/11 (according to the game’s description on iTunes, it “was developed by two individuals affected by the 9/11 attacks”). In Pocket God, the user is an “all-powerful god that rules over the primitive islanders” — that is, cartoon “pygmies” with bones in their hair.

Of course technology perpetuates racism. It was designed that way. | MIT Technology Review

Charlton McIlwain is a professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University and author of Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter

Uncivil rights

In 1960, Democratic Party leaders confronted their own problem: How could their presidential candidate, John F. Kennedy, shore up waning support from black people and other racial minorities?

An enterprising political scientist at MIT, Ithiel de Sola Pool, approached them with a solution. He would gather voter data from earlier presidential elections, feed it into a new digital processing machine, develop an algorithm to model voting behavior, predict what policy positions would lead to the most favorable results, and then advise the Kennedy campaign to act accordingly. Pool started a new company, the Simulmatics Corporation, and executed his plan. He succeeded, Kennedy was elected, and the results showcased the power of this new method of predictive modeling.

Racial tension escalated throughout the 1960s. Then came the long, hot summer of 1967. Cities across the nation burned, from Birmingham, Alabama, to Rochester, New York, to Minneapolis Minnesota, and many more in between. Black Americans protested the oppression and discrimination they faced at the hands of America’s criminal justice system. But President Johnson called it “civil disorder,” and formed the Kerner Commission to understand the causes of “ghetto riots.” The commission called on Simulmatics.

As part of a DARPA project aimed at turning the tide of the Vietnam War, Pool’s company had been hard at work preparing a massive propaganda and psychological campaign against the Vietcong. President Johnson was eager to deploy Simulmatics’s behavioral influence technology to quell the nation’s domestic threat, not just its foreign enemies. Under the guise of what they called a “media study,” Simulmatics built a team for what amounted to a large-scale surveillance campaign in the “riot-affected areas” that captured the nation’s attention that summer of 1967.

Three-member teams went into areas where riots had taken place that summer. They identified and interviewed strategically important black people. They followed up to identify and interview other black residents, in every venue from barbershops to churches. They asked residents what they thought about the news media’s coverage of the “riots.” But they collected data on so much more, too: how people moved in and around the city during the unrest, who they talked to before and during, and how they prepared for the aftermath. They collected data on toll booth usage, gas station sales, and bus routes. They gained entry to these communities under the pretense of trying to understand how news media supposedly inflamed “riots.” But Johnson and the nation’s political leaders were trying to solve a problem. They aimed to use the information that Simulmatics collected to trace information flow during protests to identify influencers and decapitate the protests’ leadership.

They didn’t accomplish this directly. They did not murder people, put people in jail, or secretly “disappear” them.

But by the end of the 1960s, this kind of information had helped create what came to be known as “criminal justice information systems.” They proliferated through the decades, laying the foundation for racial profiling, predictive policing, and racially targeted surveillance. They left behind a legacy that includes millions of black and brown women and men incarcerated.

Reframing the problem

Blackness and black people. Both persist as our nation’s — dare I say even our world’s — problem. When contact tracing first cropped up at the beginning of the pandemic, it was easy to see it as a necessary but benign health surveillance tool. The coronavirus was our problem, and we began to design new surveillance technologies in the form of contact tracing, temperature monitoring, and threat mapping applications to help address it.

But something both curious and tragic happened. We discovered that black people, Latinx people, and indigenous populations were disproportionately infected and affected. Suddenly, we also became a national problem; we disproportionately threatened to spread the virus. That was compounded when the tragic murder of George Floyd by a white police officer sent thousands of protesters into the streets. When the looting and rioting started, we — black people — were again seen as a threat to law and order, a threat to a system that perpetuates white racial power. It makes you wonder how long it will take for law enforcement to deploy those technologies we first designed to fight covid-19 to quell the threat that black people supposedly pose to the nation’s safety.

If we don’t want our technology to be used to perpetuate racism, then we must make sure that we don’t conflate social problems like crime or violence or disease with black and brown people. When we do that, we risk turning those people into the problems that we deploy our technology to solve, the threat we design it to eradicate.

Racism in technology: how our tools acquire bias — Parker Software

Harmful algorithms

Facebook, YouTube and Google all use algorithms that control what information we see. These algorithms create ‘filter-bubbles’. This means you see more of what you agree with and less about the other side. Unfortunately, this makes these algorithms prone to recommending increasingly radical content. This then begins to promote discriminatory views.

Redlining is also an issue. For apps like Pokémon Go, or for delivery algorithms, the areas of availability are another instance of racism in technology. That is, key areas such as minority neighbourhoods suffer from redlining. This means that they’re excluded from participation due to their location. For example, there are fewer PokéStops in minority neighbourhoods.

Biased AI

Perhaps the most obvious (and concerning) tool displaying the racism in technology is artificial intelligence. As AI rises in use and ability, racial bias could grow into a major issue.

AI has already demonstrated racism in its facial recognition technology. For example, Joy Buolamwini recently discovered that a robot recognised her face better when she wore a white mask. Another example is the webcam that couldn’t track non-white faces. Not to mention the AI slip-up that tagged an African American couple ‘gorillas’ in their photos.

It’s not just facial recognition AI, though. Machine learning, in general, is proving prone to discriminatory outcomes.

How is bias embedded in our tech tools?

Much of the racism in technology doesn’t come from malice, but ignorance. It’s born of the way tech tools, like AI, are trained and coded. It involves unconscious biases, the limitations of technology, and racial oversight.

The thing is, with IoT and the continued growth of AI, more and more tools have the potential to display bias. So, how exactly has racism in technology become reality?

• Biased data

AI needs data to learn how to do things. A lot of data. And if that data is biased, the output will be too. This is a problem showcased in facial recognition AI. Insufficient training data, then, leads to cameras that can’t recognise or identify people of colour.

For example, an AI tool that’s trained to identify people gets 100 images of faces to study. Only 10% of them represent people of colour. This means that the AI learns more about identifying white faces than it does any other race. So, to alleviate this instance of racism in technology, training data should be as diverse and free from bias as possible.

• Generalisations

Then, there’s the fact that algorithms can learn too much. A great example of this is Tay, the 2016 chatbot that learnt to tweet racist messages. But it applies to any algorithm.

Worse, this can lead to inappropriate sweeping generalisations. Prejudicial thoughts often have a foundation in generalisation. That is, they come from making general assumptions about a given type of people. When it comes to racism in technology, though, generalisation is a core part of how machines learn.

So, our tools are combining the wrong learnt data with sweeping generalisations. Is it any wonder, then, that outcomes are sometimes racist, sexist, or discriminatory in some way? Fixing this comes down to transparency in AI-powered decisions. We need to make clear the reasoning behind the AI output and be ready to tweak and adjust answers with human understanding.

• Limitations

Finally, there’s artificial stupidity and the limitations of technology. Look at the soap dispensers that wouldn’t recognise dark skin. This came down to the hardware itself being unable to detect infrared — which black skin doesn’t reflect.

Artificial stupidity is another technology limitation that contributes to racism in technology. This is the idea that artificial intelligence doesn’t know any better. It doesn’t have a moral compass. So, it’s not going to pick up the fact that it is being fed bias or alert us of biased results.

So, continuing to tune and track our AI-powered tools is a must.

The impact

Alongside being unethical and unfair, racism in technology poses multiple problems. It reduces the accessibility of everyday tools in life for people who aren’t white.

Indeed, there are few areas of life today that don’t involve software at some level. It’s how we communicate, how we see and interact with the world. As Marc Andreessen famously remarked, ‘software is eating the world’.

With tech tools so ingrained in modern life, racism in tech could stand to exacerbate prejudicial attitudes. For example, the impact of algorithms leading to radicalisation is already observable. Consider the labelling of the New Zealand terrorist attack as an act created ‘of and for’ the internet.

There are also several safety risks to consider. For instance, could a driverless car with racial bias pose a risk to pedestrians (and drivers) of colour? How about hygiene issues, as seen with the racist soap dispenser? If autonomous factory machinery holds a racial bias, could it put non-white workers at risk?

Welcome to ABHM! — America’s Black Holocaust Museum (abhmuseum.org)

How Social Media Feeds Racism. After Facebook realized in 2012 that 83… | by Raji Ayinla | His&Her Story | Medium

Timely posts on Facebook and Twitter only helps to spread the racialized perception of black bodies in the media, creating a hierarchy that places whiteness over non-whiteness. In #notracist: Exploring racism denial talk on Twitter, Sharma and Brooker write, “The rapid rise of social media appears to be proliferating racism and racialized expression (in addition to forms of misogyny and homophobia).” What Sharma and Brooker don’t mention in their analyzation of race talk through the use of #notracist tweets is that large corporations like Facebook are examples of institutions that allow these racial discourses to flourish due to naturalizing processes.

Rosa and Flores address how racial hierarchies are formed through“co-naturalization,” the way in which the past and present have embedded mythical notions of race and language into everyday discourse. Throughout the work varying degrees of whiteness is explored by breaking down the folk theory and revealing how whiteness is not racial, but a social construction that is emblematic of authority figures. Social media, because of its authority, is an institution of whiteness because of its ability to act as a perceiving object. They claim that:

Whiteness is also animated through nonhuman entities such as technologies and institutions infused with raciolinguistic ideologies that endow them with the capacity to act as perceiving subjects. These include voice-recognition technologies that often privilege languages, varieties, and pronunciation patterns associated with normative whiteness(Rosa and Flores 9).

Social media apps fall within the umbrella of technology and “nonhuman entities.” They are perceiving subjects that are designed by the dominant group. Flora and Rosa later mention that “[I]n addition to digital technologies, nonhuman actors including assessments and policies can function as powerful perceiving subjects that profoundly shape racialized populations experiences across contexts.”

According to its latest diversity report, Facebook has a workforce that is 5% Hispanic, 3% Black, and 1% Other. This lack of diversity in Facebook and other tech companies can result in implicit biases that rear their heads in new app policies. The absence of minorities in the technical field hits on an aspect of critical race theory of varying socioeconomic statuses due to the history of race and language.

A ready example of racism as a result of of white privilege is the incident in which Facebook’s staff repeatedly crossed out Black Lives Matter slogans on their signature board in favor of All Lives Matter. This microaggressive behavior implies that white lives matter more than black lives, which acts upon the “White virtue.” Those who perpetrated the act would claim that they were being more inclusive, only to forget that by crossing out “Black” means the erasure of black bodies. The issue of physical and political erasure finally forced CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg to release a memo:

What this memo shows is that the actions of the employees are performative. Hill Defines these as words that “have an active force” and that “they can can soothe or wound” (40). In this case, though the dominant group did not verbally communicate, their actions take on the spirit of speech. Therefore, despite what many whites may say, their actions can be called racist. Racism in a company like Facebook can spread to the technology itself.

Online racial discrimination: A growing problem for adolescents (apa.org)

Psychological Science Agenda | December 2015 SCIENCE BRIEF

Online racial discrimination: A growing problem for adolescents

Cyberbullying researchers are beginning to understand the race-related experiences of adolescents of color. By Brendesha M. Tynes, PhD

Prevalence of Online Discrimination

Using a sample of 340 African-American, Latino, Asian and biracial adolescents (drawn from a larger sample of 1028 sixth-12th grade students at year 1), online survey data from study one revealed that 42 percent percent of minority youth indicated that they had experienced at least one direct (individual) discriminatory incident in the first year, with 55 percent in the second year and 58 percent in the third year reporting such an incident in the third year (see Table 1). Sixty-four percent of minority youth indicated that they had experienced at least one vicarious discriminatory incident in the first year, with 69 percent the second year and 68 percent the third year. The most common direct discriminatory incident across the three years was “People have shown me a racist image online.” The most common vicarious discriminatory incident across the three waves was “I have witnessed people saying mean or rude things about another person’s ethnic group online.”

Discrimination Items

Time 1 (percent)

Time 2 (percent)

Time 3 (percent)

People have said mean or rude things about me because of my race or ethnic group2834 36People have shown me a racist image online324650People have cracked jokes about people of my race or ethnic group online485560People have said things that were untrue about people in my race or ethnic group465655I have witnessed people saying mean or rude things about another person’s ethnic group online556058People have excluded me from a site because of my race or ethnic group online9913People have threatened me online with violence because of my race or ethnic group10713

Table 1: Percentage Perceiving Discriminatory Incident via the Internet at Least Once in the Past Year (2010–2013)

Participant Descriptions of Experiences with Online Racial Discrimination

To complement survey findings, in the second study we (with Allana Zuckerman) asked African-American students in grades sixth-12th at year 1 about their worst online experiences. This question was included in the online survey about their online victimization experiences outlined in study one which 1028 students completed. The item was open-ended to allow students to provide details about this experience in their own words. African-Americans were chosen because follow-up interview data revealed they experience a particularly virulent form of online racial discrimination. Thematic and content analyses were conducted with open-ended responses across three waves of data. Narratives were coded and a word cloud with the most frequently used words was also generated using NVivo qualitative data analysis software. Thematic analysis showed emergent themes primarily revolved around the nature and content of online racial discrimination as well as the contexts in which they occur. Participants reported six primary types of experiences:

Racial epithets.
Statements that were untrue, stereotyping and implicitly racist statements.
Racist jokes.
Symbols of hate, such as the Confederate flag.
Threats of physical harm or death.
Graphic representations/actual images of dead black bodies.

Examples include the following:

“The worst thing that has happened to me on the internet is that someone threatened to kill me because of my race.”
“Almost everyday on Call of Duty: Black Ops (a video game) I see Confederate flags, swastikas and black people hanging from trees in emblems and they say racist things about me and my teammates.”
“The worst internet experience that I received was online scrolling down my Facebook stream and seen a picture of an Obama doll hanging by a nuce [sic] at a gas station… I showed it to my mom and my co-workers but really nothing we could do about it.”
“Me and my friends were playing Xbox and some kid joined the Xbox Live party we were in and made a lot of racist jokes I found offensive.”

Interestingly, experiences across time appear to account for current events and technological trends. For example, a female student reported seeing the President Obama effigy hanging during his second campaign and election year. Experiences also occur on the most popular online platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The word cloud below is from year three and reflects the most commonly used words in participant narratives, including the terms racist, black, online, page, people, picture, race, angry, game and Zimmerman (a reference to George Zimmerman, who killed 17 year-old unarmed teen Trayvon Martin in 2012 and was acquitted in 2013) (see Figure 1).

Implications of Findings for Adolescent Mental Health

As expected, the majority of the sample reported being victims of online racial discrimination and these reports increased across the three time periods. This is consistent with a general increase in online hate activity associated with the campaign and election of the first African-American president in the U.S. Despite claims of a post-racial America, the Simon Wiesenthal Center (2009, 2012) reported the numbers of extremist and hate sites rose from 6,000 in 2006, to 10,000 by 2009 and to 15,000 by 2011. Not only does this fringe element of society contribute to the racial discrimination that adolescents are potentially exposed to, but average internet users may also be more likely to engage in discriminatory behaviors online (Kahn et al., 2013). Given the perception of privacy online, perpetrators can feel as though they are in a large crowd of others with a low likelihood of identification, which arguably leads to less self-monitoring when expressing beliefs (Kahn et al., 2013). Moreover, research has shown that adolescents may be more likely to engage in discriminatory behaviors when they perceive they are not being monitored (Tynes, Reynolds, & Greenfield, 2004). Scholars posit that although the internet represents exemplary societal progress, online contexts often resemble pre-Civil Rights Era race relations in which prejudice is overtly expressed (Glaser & Kahn, 2005) and discrimination practices are common.

Wall Street*, the Government, and Racial Bias — Income Research + Management

Wall Street*, the Government, and Racial Bias

By: Brooke Anderson February 26, 2021

I recently learned that New York City’s Wall Street isn’t just the home of a famous stock exchange; the corner of Wall and Pearl Streets was the site of the City’s first slave exchange. From 1711 to 1762, Africans and Native Americans were bought, sold, and rented at this intersection. For each human sold, the City received transfer taxes, benefiting those in power. Much of New York City was built by slaves, including the wall on Wall Street and City Hall. Today, an inconspicuous plaque on Wall Street reminds us of the finance industry’s involvement in the slave trade.

Looking across the Pond, the London capital markets originally financed the slave trade, recycling earnings from US cotton and tobacco plantations and enabling a thriving market that resulted in increased enslavement. US banks funded plantation expansion, counting the enslaved as assets. Numerous large insurance companies sold insurance to protect slaveowners from potential losses derived from a sinking ship or desertion. Other transactions, which used enslaved people as collateral, were precursors to today’s asset-backed and collateralized lending industry.

Speaking of lending, in 1933, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) was created to mitigate home foreclosures during the Depression. HOLC, a federal agency, mapped neighborhoods using four colors that corresponded to credit risk, with red being the riskiest — the original “redlining.” Similarly, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) developed its own mapping system in the mid-1930s. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, Black households were often located in underfunded and overlooked neighborhoods, having congregated with families and friends in less desirable areas that were available to them after emancipation. The housing disparity contributed to racial inequity and the wealth gap today, given real estate’s role in generating wealth for homeowners.

Racial bias | Wall Street International Magazine (wsimag.com)

Racial bias Human races do not exist

3 AUGUST 2021, ANGELO TARTABINI

Unfortunately, slavery still exists today

Examples of racial discrimination are demonstrated every day, all over the world. Indicative of an indiscriminate attack, is the example of Senator for life, Liliana Segre who had the ‘guilt’ of surviving the holocaust in the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz. Despite the horrors of recent history, humanity has been taught nothing, in fact, the holocaust has been followed by other infamous examples in many parts of the world, although not all of them racially motivated, with millions and millions of deaths and hundreds of thousands displaced: from 1975 to 1979 the massacre of a third of Cambodia’s population by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, in 1994 the genocide in Rwanda, from 1989 to 2003 the civil war in Liberia and Sierra Leone, in 2011 the civil war in Syria, still on going, as is the civil war in Yemen that began in 2015. The horrors continue. All these wars, despite the fact that they were waged within the countries in which they began, even with indirect interventions by external forces, as in the case of the Syrian and Yemen civil wars, stem from religious hatred, fanaticism, the great diversity between rich and poor, ignorance and human vanity.

Today, more than ever, we are constantly seeing ugly racist movements. But where does all this come from? Let us try to make a historical and also psychological and social analysis of the issue. Historically we must not forget that it was the famous Swedish Taxonomist Linnaeus who in 1730 branded men ‘dark skin’ (who knows what he had in mind with the expression ‘dark skin’?) as indolent, lascivious and sizing (they are his words). But Linnaeus at that time was not alone in defining Africans and other peoples in this way. The German naturalist Johann Blumenbach wrote that the ‘blacks’, as he called them, were inferior beings, similar to animals and always highlighted. Blumenbach also made a sort of craniometric classification of beings as a shameless justification for his ‘scientific racism’. Shortly after, the academic Italian, Cesare Lombroso, was no more diplomatic. According to him, the criminal behavior of individuals was related to cranial measurements, as it was for Blumenbach. The strange thing about all this was that anthropologists, naturalists and ‘scientists’ classified the difference in this way! Let alone what ordinary mortals could have in mind at those times on the ‘difference!

Many years have passed since Linnaeus, Blumenbach and Lombroso and have things changed? Sadly, they are not much different. Racism is still very much alive, even if now in different forms than the past, for example, those of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States of America, or apartheid in South Africa, and we are not talking about centuries ago. Today, racism is much more subtle, and it is absolutely not true that it is ‘dark-skinned’ men who are always discriminated against.

A very important discriminating factor is money and political power, more than the colored of the skin, as demonstrated by the election to the American presidency of Barak Obama. I would like to quote a very symbolic anecdote told by a famous African-American actor, Denzel Washington. One day while he was inside an elevator, at one time, a lady of a certain age, classed we could say as, W.A.S.P (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). Wasp is an American or American descendant of the first British colonizers in America, especially if of ‘pure’ English descent. As soon as she saw Denzel, the lady hesitated to enter. Although she did, but she was clearly very reluctant. During the ascent, it happened that the two looked at each other in the face and Denzel said who he really was (maybe he did it on purpose). At that point (Mrs. Wasp) totally changed her attitude and she greeted him, shook his hand and with a big smile also asked him for an autograph. This anecdote is very indicative, but it is also a prophetic vision of our near future and so well described by the American writer Tom Wolfe in his literary masterpiece entitled: The Bonfire of Vanities, in which what matters is not the colored of the skin of the various characters, but how much money he has in the bank.

Racial Bias or Wall Street Greed: The New Role of Private Investment Firms in Federal Housing — Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly

August 15, 2016; The Real Deal

A nonprofit law firm in New York is suing the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and a private equity firm (that reports capital commitments of $65 billion). MFY Legal Services filed suit in Brooklyn, claiming the handling of foreclosures by HUD and Lone Star Funds in neighborhoods that include Canarsie and parts of Southern Queens, were racially biased.

HUD, a federal program created in the 1930s to provide housing to lower-income families and first-time homeowners, experienced a major increase in delinquent mortgages and foreclosures following the 2008 financial crisis and recession. A spiraling deficit within the agency caught the attention of Congress and by 2010, what is now known as the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program (DASP) was born. The new program not only opened a funding stream for HUD to become solvent, but it created a possible alternative to foreclosure for HUD borrowers. The loans in DASP, according to HUD spokesman Brian Sullivan, “are all headed to foreclosure — 100 percent of them — because they’ve exhausted their loss-mitigation options.” The new program allows them one more possible alternative through a new lender who is required to try to work with the borrower on loan modifications in order to keep them in their homes.

HUD is allowed to sell these mortgages in bulk at discounted rates to investors, and have done so through DASP for as little as 41 cents on the dollar. According to the Atlantic, “Wall Street is once again buying [thousands of] mortgages, and…instead of dealing with shady subprime lenders, they are buying…shaky loans from the government — at a significant discount.”

For investors, “there’s a substantial amount of profit to be made,” said Jack McCabe, who consults with investors on the real estate market. “Wall Street investors developed a thirst for non-performing loans, and DASP was an opportunity to unload mortgages while satisfying that thirst.”

If DASP is simply a new channel for sharks, New York City would be the prime location for a feeding frenzy. The Times article covering the MFY suit pointed out that the location is an additional lucrative win for investors, who would gain property ownership in one of most attractive and promising real estate markets.

This has been brought to light when despite HUD’s requirements that the private firms (typically hedge funds or private equity funds) not foreclose within the first year and provide alternate modifications to stay in the home, both the Atlantic and the recent lawsuit by MFY report unsettling practices. Modification negotiations by private investors have included large balloon payments and interest-only options that seem less like a focus toward supporting home ownership and more like a strategy to confiscate an asset over the long term.

MFY, which was founded on the principle of “equal access to justice through community-based legal representation of poor New Yorkers,” is not only bringing these concerns to light, but making a case against the implementation of DASP at an even deeper level. The firm believes the selling of delinquent mortgages to Lone Star Funds is disproportionately hurting black homeowners. Lawyers say the “concentration of the sales [in black communities] is putting black homeowners at greater risk of foreclosure and threatening to undermine decades of progress toward increasing homeownership in these neighborhoods.”

According to the lawsuit, sixty-one percent of the 1,100 delinquent mortgages in New York City sold by the Federal Housing Agency (parent agency of HUD) between 2012 and 2014 were in predominantly black neighborhoods. In an attempt to at least modestly intervene, the City of New York bought 24 of the 1,100 mortgages to prevent their sale to the private investors.

“We are fighting to help homeowners stay in the neighborhoods they helped build,” Mayor Bill de Blasio” said.

Since its inception, the program has sold over 100,000 distressed mortgage loans, and according to an “analysis of HUD’s sales results by the Center for Public Integrity, its fund moved from being $16 billion in the red to $4.8 billion in the black in just two years.”

While this is without question a considerable win for the agency and its mission, critics stress that the agency has significant work to do to better assure that private investors live up to the obligations and protections of the borrowers that HUD was designed to help. — Michelle Lemming

Wall Street an elusive dream for black Americans (nbcnews.com)

Wall Street an elusive dream for black Americans

Aug. 28, 2013, 4:23 PM EDT

By Dan Mangan

Fifty years to the day that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. told a crowd of 250,000 in Washington that “the Negro…finds himself an exile in his own land,” Wall Street is mostly a foreign country for black workers.

The difficult road that blacks still face in the heart of America’s financial capital was underscored by news on Wednesday that brokerage giant Merrill Lynch has agreed to pay $160 million to settle racial discrimination claims by black brokers.

Despite what would be the biggest race-discrimination lawsuit payout ever by an American employer, Wall Street-based or otherwise, King’s dream remains just that for blacks trying to get hired, promoted and paid well in the financial industry.

A lawyer for the 700 Merrill Lynch brokers who sued said the alleged pattern of under-hiring black brokers, and Merrill’s practices of allocating customers that allegedly made it more difficult for those brokers to build business are not unique to that firm.

“They filed this lawsuit for all the right reasons. To not only change Merrill Lynch, but also to change Wall Street,” said the lawyer Suzanne Bish of Chicago-based Stowell & Friedman. “It was not an issue that was limited to Merrill Lynch, the under-employment of African-Americans and revolving doors of African-Americans.”

She noted that her firm had previously filed and ultimately resolved a class-action lawsuit claiming sex discrimination by Merrill Lynch against female employees.

When a black Merrill broker named George McReynolds retained Bish’s firm to sue for race discrimination, “We were kind of stunned to realize the predicaments for African-American financial advisers were even worse,” she said.

Bill Halldin, a Merrill Lynch spokesman, declined to comment when asked to confirm either the settlement being reached, or the $160 million figure.

But observers said the long-standing culture on the Street has frustrated efforts to get employment levels and compensation for both women and blacks in line with their numbers relative in the overall population.

A 2010 Government Accountability Office report noted from 1993 until 2008 “overall diversity at the management level in the financial services industry did not change substantially from 1993 through 2008, and diversity in senior positions remains limited.”

Although blacks account for about 14 percent of overall U.S. population, they held just 2.8 percent of senior positions in financial services companies, where white males held 64 percent of the top jobs.

“I believe there’s still discrimination against African-Americans on Wall Street, just like we’ve seen with women,” said Wall Street securities lawyer Jacob Zamansky. “There’s a glass ceiling, and the compensation is not the same for them.”

“It’s still a white man’s game. Women and blacks are not invited to the right level at firms and I think that’s insidious,” Zamansky said.

“There’s quite a bit of discrimination that takes place on Wall Street,” Sells said. “I’ve been involved in cases where racial epithets have been used. I’ve been involved in cases where nooses have been used . . . racist jokes have been used, where individuals have been called racist names.”

“It’s still startling to see the number of overt acts that occur in the workplace, particularly when so much attention has been focused on workplace discrimination and harassment,” he said.

In a case Sells filed this year in New York, his client Dabotubo Horsfall, an African-American vice president at Morgan Stanley, claims he was not properly compensated for work he did. The suit claims he was denied significant bonuses, even after helping close a deal that earned the firm in excess of $150 million in profits. Horsfall’s suit alleges “blatant discriminatory treatment on account of his race.”

A Morgan Stanley spokesman told CNBC, “Morgan Stanley does not tolerate discrimination based on race or any other factor.”

Sells, without speaking directly about Horsfall’s case, said the defenses he’s heard from firms that he’s sued for discrimination in hiring and promotion is “well, they’re not qualified.”

“It’s always, ‘The performance is poor,’ or, ‘They’re not meeting expectations’,” Sells said.

But Sells said those explanations are sometimes undercut during litigation, when he gets access to employment records and sees that his client have been passed over for promotion in favor of white employees “whose qualifications are less” than black candidates.

“When you see this pattern repeated over and over again, then you know things aren’t as they should be,” Sell said.

“I think, in one sense, the country has come a long way, obviously, when the president of the United States for a total of two terms is an African-American man,” Sells said.

But Wall Street, he added, remains and “old-boys’ network to a large extent.”

Danny Sarch, a financial executive headhunter at Leitner Sarch Consultants, said that sensitivity to the Wall Street tradition of being an old-boys’ network “is much greater than it was” in terms of making advances in hiring both blacks and women.

“I think that’s better,” Sarch said. ‘I’m not going to say it’s universally perfect.”

“I’ve certainly seen more minorities in senior positions than there were,” he said.

Sarch said that “to a great extent Wall Street is still a meritocracy,” and he believes that people who can earn their firms money tend to be justly rewarded for that, regardless of their race.

But he said that to the extent that some people still may discriminate, “if these types of settlements” — referring to the Merrill Lynch case — “don’t make you learn, then you’re an idiot.”

A Look At Housing Inequality And Racism In The U.S. (forbes.com)

Dima Williams Jun 3, 2020,11:17am EDT

“Housing security is a matter of justice, as structural racism puts communities of color unfairly at risk of being rent burdened or homeless,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, during a webinar hosted by the National Low Income Housing Coalition on Tuesday.

Referring to the posture assumed by the Minneapolis cop who pinned Floyd, Pelosi said, “[O]ne knee to the neck just exploded a tinderbox of injustices to address and one of them is housing.”

And, addressing housing spills into other related aspects of life such as health, education and job security. For instance, communities of color often grapple with poverty and sub-par schools.

Brief history of racial discrimination in U.S. housing policies

Housing inequality and segregation was the norm in the 20th century, even if the Fair Housing Act of 1968 sought to erase racial discrimination.

In a 2019 article, the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning public policy research organization, states that federal government actions and institutions played “a critical role” in the creation and endurance of racist housing policies.

The Great Depression, which led to the establishment of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and the still operational Federal Housing Administration (FHA), prompted a “two-tier approach” to housing.

The latter promoted residential segregation, argues Michela Zonta, senior housing policy analyst with the Center for American Progress. It did so by shunning investments in city areas where people of color lived and by placing so-called restrictive covenants to keep middle-class neighborhoods white.

After the passage of the Housing Act of 1937, low-income public housing projects mushroomed in inner cities, replacing slums and consolidating “minority neighborhoods.” Major road construction and suburbanization further segregated American cities.

At the same time, black Americans as well as other citizens of color found it extremely hard to qualify for home loans, as the FHA and the Veterans Administration’s mortgage programs largely served only white applicants. Those discriminatory practices prevented people of color from accumulating wealth through homeownership.

“African American families that were prohibited from buying homes in the suburbs in the 1940s and 50s, and even into the 1960s, by the Federal Housing Administration gained none of the equity appreciation that whites gained,” says historian and academic Richard Rothstein in the film Segregated by Design, which is based on his acclaimed book, The Color of Law.

Buying a home while being a person of color

Even after the 1968 passage of the Fair Housing Act, black Americans and other minorities have continued to experience housing inequalities.

In the first quarter of 2020, the Census Bureau reported that black households had the lowest homeownership rate at 44%, nearly 30 percentage points behind white households.

In a report published this month, the Urban Institute cites multiple prior studies that show that if homeownership were racially equalized, the racial wealth gap would diminish.

“We also know that homeownership benefits accrue differently to white homeowners than to homeowners of color,” write Urban Institute’s Michael Neal and Alanna McCargo. “Some reasons for this are that black homeowners are more likely to cycle between homeownership and renting, which has implications for how much housing wealth they can build relative to white homeowners.

“In addition, black homeowners are more likely to take on more debt to purchase homes that are less expensive, becoming more leveraged than white homeowners, while Hispanic homeowners live in higher-cost markets, taking out debt with lower down payments and having higher debt-to-income ratios.”

To that point, the National Association of Realtors finds that in 2019, compared to their Hispanic and white counterparts, black home buyers purchased residences with the lowest median price of $228,000. Black home shoppers also had the lowest median household incomes at $75,000. As a result, their homes are also the smallest — at 1,800 median square feet.

Black home shoppers as well as their Hispanic peers are also most likely to initially pay the least toward the purchase of their residences. In a Pew Research analysis of 2015 data from the American Housing Survey, more than half of black and Hispanic households reported down payments equal to or less than 10% of their home’s value (compared to 37% of white buyers and 31% of Asian shoppers). On the flip side, only 12% of black households and 17% of Hispanics said they made down payments of 21% of more (one fourth of whites and Asians did so).

Because black and Hispanic home buyers put smaller down payments, they usually pay higher interest rates than their white and Asian peers. In 2015, according to Pew, less than two-thirds of black and Hispanic households held home loans with rates below 5%. Some 73% of white and 83% of Asian households had such mortgages.

Why high interest rates saddle black and Hispanic homeowners has also been the result of racial discrimination by lenders, especially after the creation of mortgage-backed securities.

In the housing boom leading to the Great Recession, predatory lending — characterized by unreasonable fees, rates and payments — zeroed in on minorities, pushing them into risky subprime mortgages, according to a 2010 study that Reuters reported on. Even if black mortgage applicants had credit scores and debt ratios similar to those of white borrowers, they would still receive unfavorable mortgage terms.

Meanwhile, according to the NAR, a little over 13% of black home shoppers were rejected for a mortgage loan last year, in contrast to 4% of Latino buyers and 5% of white shoppers.

Homeownership and wealth

Low housing equity (due to small down payments and modest median home values) translates to less overall wealth for both black and Hispanic households, which rely more heavily on their homes to accumulate wealth, the Urban Institute says.

Black households have nearly 57% of their net worth tied in the value of their homes, while Hispanic homeowners carry about 67% of their wealth in their homes. As a share of net worth, housing amounts to only 41% for white homeowners.

The Urban Institute also states that people of color are more likely than white people to lose wealth during economic downturns through job layoffs and home foreclosures. Such adverse consequences played out during the Great Recession and seem to be manifesting again during the coronavirus-prompted economic slump.

According to listing site Zillow Z +3.1%, Covid-19-spurred job losses are disproportionately impacting Latino, Asian and black workers, who make up the majority of the workforce in the hospitality, tourism and service industries, which have borne the largest economic brunt of the pandemic so far.

Compounding the impact of job losses is the fact that people of color shoulder higher housing costs as a portion of their incomes, while earning less than whites.

Historically, once the economy rebounds, though, the racial gaps in income, home equity and wealth do not shrink, the Urban Institute says.

Systemic Inequality: Displacement, Exclusion, and Segregation — Center for American Progress AUTHORS Danyelle Solomon Connor Maxwell Abril Castro

American public policy systematically removes people of color from their homes and communities

In 1845, the term “manifest destiny” emerged to describe the commonly held belief that white settlement and expansion across North America was inevitable and even divinely ordained.3 But long before then, this ideology provided the justification for ethnic cleansing and systematic displacement. In many ways, it continues to inform policymaking to this day. This section considers examples within Native American and Black communities.

Centuries of displacement have destabilized Black communities and undermined their access to opportunity

While Native Americans have long been the primary target of government-sponsored land redistribution, other communities of color — especially Black communities — have experienced and continue to experience displacement as well. For Black communities in urban areas, public policies have often been enacted under the guise of creating new public spaces, combating urban blight, or bolstering economic development.17 But over time, these policies have stripped Black communities of the wealth and financial stability found in property ownership and affordable rental housing.18 For example, in the early 1850s, New York City lawmakers used eminent domain to destroy a thriving predominantly Black community in Manhattan, displacing thousands of residents in order to create the public space known today as Central Park.19 And just 30 years ago, Atlanta lawmakers demolished the United States’ oldest federally subsidized affordable housing project, displacing more than 30,000 predominantly Black families to create Centennial Olympic Park.20 These are just two examples of the countless policies that have displaced Black communities for the so-called benefit of the greater population. But there is scant evidence that Black Americans see long-term benefits from these revitalization efforts.21

For much of the 20th century, federal, state, and local policies subsidized the development of prosperous white suburbs in metropolitan areas across the country.22 They also constructed new highway systems — often through communities of color — to ensure access to job opportunities in urban centers for primarily white commuters.23 Over time, however, changing tastes and growing displeasure with congested roadways have resulted in middle-class and wealthy white households’ relocation to cities.24 As lawmakers rush to redevelop previously neglected urban neighborhoods, many of the same communities of color that were denied access to suburban homeownership and displaced by highway projects are again being forced from their homes to make room. Indeed, although lawmakers could construct more affordable housing units and create programs to insulate longtime city residents from the disruptive effects of gentrification, many appear to draw heavily from the ideology of manifest destiny — that white settlement and expansion are inevitable — in their responses to such rapid redevelopment.25

Merriam-Webster defines gentrification as “the process of repairing and rebuilding homes and businesses in a deteriorating area … accompanied by an influx of middle-class or affluent people and that often results in the displacement of earlier, usually poorer residents.”26 Over the past 50 years, this process, which sometimes involves government investment, has taken root in dozens of cities across the country.27 Increasing demand for housing, along with reduced levels of housing production, has contributed to staggering increases in rental and purchase prices in urban areas across the United States.28 While some experts cite the economic benefits of gentrification, many recognize its role in exacerbating racial inequality, as well as in the suburbanization of poverty as low-income people are forced to relocate from cities to the areas outside them.29

Nowhere are the effects of gentrification more noticeable than the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. Between 1970 and 2015, Black residents declined from 71 percent of the city’s population to just 48 percent.30 The city’s white population increased by 25 percent during the same period.31 From 2000 to 2013, the city endured the nation’s highest rate of gentrification, resulting in more than 20,000 African American residents’ displacement.32 Today, almost 1 in 4 Black Washington residents — 23 percent — live in poverty.33 By contrast, just 3 percent of white Washington residents live in poverty — a lower white poverty rate than in any of the 50 states.34 Without intervention, present trends will likely persist, further diminishing homeownership and affordable rental opportunities for long-time Washington residents.

American lawmakers have long touted the importance of property ownership, affordable housing, and economic development.35 However, policymaking has too often coincided with the systematic removal of people of color from their homes and communities. Historic and ongoing displacement has destabilized communities and exacerbated racial disparities in economic indicators of well-being.36 These government policies, combined with the exclusion and segregation discussed in the following section of this report, are causes and consequences of entrenched structural racism in the U.S. housing system.

Federal, state, and local policies have fortified housing discrimination

For decades, governments and private citizens have employed exclusionary tactics to prevent African Americans and other people of color from building wealth through homeownership and affordable housing. Whether through formal policy decisions or a persistent failure to enact and enforce civil rights laws, government action and inaction continues to undermine prosperity in communities of color.

Exclusion from federal homeownership programs undermined Black families’ wealth accumulation in the 20th century

As noted in a recent Center for American Progress report, “Racial Disparities in Home Appreciation,” the federal government established several programs in the 20th century that were designed to promote homeownership and provide a pathway to the middle class.37 However, these programs largely benefited white households while excluding Black families.

While federal intervention and investment has helped expand homeownership and affordable housing for countless white families, it has undermined wealth building in black communities.

Lawmakers have abdicated their responsibility to enact and fully enforce civil rights protections

For much of the 20th century households of color were systematically excluded from federal homeownership programs, and government officials largely stood by as predatory lenders stripped them of wealth and stability.

Racial segregation is the direct result of intentional government policy, not individual choice

More than 50 years after the Fair Housing Act’s passage, most American communities remain segregated by race.66 Existing residential patterns are largely not the result of personal preference among people of color to live in ethnic enclaves, but rather centuries of policies enacted by lawmakers on every level. Racial segregation has contributed to persistent disparities in access to public goods — such as parks, hospitals, streetlights, and well-maintained roads — and has undermined wealth building in communities of color nationwide.

Long before redlining offered an economic incentive to segregate communities, local governments relied on, among other policies, zoning ordinances to keep races apart.

Across the country, historic and ongoing displacement, exclusion, and segregation prevent people of color from obtaining and retaining homeownership, as well as accessing safe, affordable housing.85 Even when they succeed in purchasing their own homes, people of color — especially Black people — often experience lower returns on their investment. They are also more likely to experience foreclosure, often due to predatory lending practices. In addition, the cost of rental housing has outpaced wages and destabilized longtime residents’ ability to afford their homes.86