What’s most incisive about this Trevor Noah clip about Bloomberg is the moment when Noah said “he makes it seem like ‘Black is crime, when in fact Black is most affected by crime.’”
Noah may not mean to, but he gets at the problem of elite impunity …
Noah may not mean to, but he gets at the problem of elite impunity …
… that so thoroughly curdles our politics at the moment.
Let me explain. Bloomberg has also said, as was discussed the other day, that lending to supposedly unqualified people of color caused the 2007-08 financial crisis.
His claim is bogus, but … apnews.com/8cbb1fafbb4faf…
Let me explain. Bloomberg has also said, as was discussed the other day, that lending to supposedly unqualified people of color caused the 2007-08 financial crisis.
His claim is bogus, but … apnews.com/8cbb1fafbb4faf…
… what bears repeating amid the hullabaloo is that multiple banks, Wells Fargo among them, systematically steered Black and Latino borrowers into subprime loans — at frequencies well above white borrowers with similar finances. citylab.com/equity/2013/08…
We have federal laws against housing discrimination, including the law that Bloomberg scapegoated for the implosion of the housing market. Yet discrimination still took place — and families of color took the brunt of it. slate.com/news-and-polit…
So after the housing crisis, a Black person would have watched banks go all but unpunished for pillaging Black borrowers’ wealth — and a billionaire mayor of New York who dismissed those abuses while turning state power against … city residents of color. cnn.com/2020/02/11/pol…
(And that comes before we get to the matter of foreclosure — both the heightened foreclosure rate against borrowers of color versus similarly situated white borrowers, and the lagging standard of care provided for bank-owned homes in minority communities.) thinkprogress.org/how-racial-dis…
That’s what I mean here by ‘elite impunity’: a circumstance in which major financial institutions can violate federal law on a massive scale, while law enforcement conspicuously turns its energies against … the same communities hurt by those institutions.
But we have a discourse that treats the violation of law Black borrowers experienced as a matter for debate — with influential voices, Bloomberg’s among them, quibbling with the law rather than caring about the people the law was written to protect.
