Thread by @michaelharriot

My favorite part about this video is that Bloomberg thinks redlining denied loans to poor people.

The entire POINT of redlining was to empower poor whites while denying $ to ANY black person.

A thread about the 2nd most racist policy in history (Slavery is still #1)

https://twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/1227757529859526656

Almost every calculable form of economic inequality that still exists can be tied to redlining. I'mma show you how, but first we need to understand what it is.

Luckily @TheRoot did a video!

https://twitter.com/TheRoot/status/1121491118368198657

But I should go deeper because a lot of people equate redlining with segregation or denial of loans. Not quite. How did redlining work? Well, after the great depression, the gov't wanted to stop people from losing their homes.

But banks calculate interest rates by risk.

If you're poor, your interest rate will be higher. But the government had a plan.

They told banks to give money to borrowers to refinance their homes. The gov't guaranteed the loans, so the interest rates were low. Then they started allowing to build homes with the loans.

BUT, to minimize risk, the gov't created color-coded "residential security maps"
Green—>A—>Great neighborhood
Blue—>B—>Good Neighborhood
Yellow—>C—>Risky
Red—>D—>Bad neighborhood

The govt wouldn't guarantee loans in red areas

The red areas were ALWAYS where black people lived

You also must remember that Jim Crow was still the law , so black people couldn't move to white neighborhoods. Because of redlining, they couldn't get a loan in a black neighborhood.
When the American suburbs were being built, black people were excluded in this form of wealth.

It got worse.

After WWII, because of redlining maps, black veterans were denied mortgages that were GUARANTEED by the GI Bill>

In NY and Penn. ouf the 67,000 mortgages given to veterans, less than 100 were black

In Miss. TWO black veterans got GI Bill-backed home loans

There was so much more. There is an exercise I like to try sometimes. Whenever I hear about a failing school, a lot of violence or even police brutality, I go to look at the original redlining maps at dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redli…

For instance, when you overlap the original redlined map of Baltimore, you also get to see where police arrest more people for drug, here's the redlined map along with the maps for marijuana and crack arrests

To be clear, those aren't the areas where people USE more drugs (blacks and whites use drugs at about the same rates)

In fact, the National Institutes of Health say the number of black people in a neighborhood directly coincide with how police patrol it, regardless of drug USE

It also correlates with bail amounts. In MD, 13 of the zip codes with the highest bail amounts are in Baltimore's redlined neighborhoods.

The same goes for school funding.

Remember, these maps weren't drawn for every city. But 83 of the worst school districts in America were in formerly redlined areas.

The other seventeen?

They were cities that didn't have redlining maps.

School districts are funded by property value. A home in a white neighborhood is worth $48,000 more than the identical home in an identical white neighborhood, according to Brookings Institute.

This is why black schools are underfunded.

So, if living in a formerly redlined neighborhood automatically gets you an unequal education, why not just move?

Didn't I just tell your ass that a home in a white neighborhood costs $48,000 more?

Plus, you're probably gonna have to go to white cookouts.

This is where Michael Bloomberg sent cops to stop-and-frisk. Compare the stop and frisk map to NY's redlining map

(The blue dots are black people, orange dots are Hispanic, green dots are white people )

What's funny about these maps is that, this doesn't happen in poor white neighborhoods. ONLY in black neighborhoods.

Remember I said, blacks and whites use drugs at the same rate (If you take out marijuana and alcohol, whites are WAAAY ahead)

But here's the last thing about redlining:

A few months ago an entirely different story popped in the news about an murder that happened in a notoriously "bad" neighborhood. So I decided to look it up on the redlining map.

The scene of the murder happened in census tract D50.

The map noted that the neighborhood was fine. It even said that the residents took care of their property. The ONLY thing that was wrong with it was that it was filled with "Negro and Japanese."

Accordingly, it was red

Tract D50 met tract C120 at the scene of the murder.

C102 was called a "melting pot" but one part of it was filled with black people. Therefore, the map noted, it was a perfect place for a (I shit you not) slum clearance project.

It was yellow.

For some, like the man who died that day, this could lead to an opportunity. Because banks wouldn't invest in the area, the real estate in the neighborhood suffered. He was able to buy some of the real estate, including the place where he died

For others, redlining is death.
It created poor schools that created a lack of opportunity that engenders unemployment which foments a crime market which creates gangs which leads to incarceration which creates animosity. All because no one invests in "bad" redlined neighborhoods

Census tract C102 meets D50 in LA, at the corner of Crenshaw Blvd and Slauson Ave. The site of Marathon Clothing where Nipsey Hussle was killed.

It is easy to think black people are in this position because of gang banging, single-parent homes & choosing the wrong role models.

And it's easy to dismiss violence as random acts that has nothing to do with injustice. I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory. You know why?

BECAUSE IT IS A MOTHERFUCKING CONSPIRACY!

You know what else is a conspiracy?

Thinking you can disenfranchise and disempower black people for a century but all you need to do to fix the problems you created is for cops to stop black men and pat them down.

All the stopping and frisking in the world won't cure the world of white supremacy.

Ask Mike Bloomberg

*By the way, I also like the way Bloomberg thinks banks have "salesmen" who go sell mortgages in neighborhoods.