It's become pretty common, among a certain set of people, to blame those who are dealing with poverty, lingering joblessness, limited education and a deteriorating community for their own plight.
We constantly here that, "gee, if Oprah! can pull herself up from food stamps to billionaire, what exactly is everyone else's excuse for not becoming at least millionaires even if they started off homeless and underfed?" We hear that if you're over 30 and still working at minimum wage you must be "A Loser."
So then, someone like Michael Brown clearly deserves our contempt because he didn't manage to turn himself into a CEO with his own shaved-ice stand yet. He was an "animal" that needed to be "put down", even if the cigarillos he was alleged to have taken were worth about $5 total, not $38.
Rather than look at the environment lived in by Michael Brown and so many others in depressed and disenfranchised communities like Ferguson—which exist all over this nation—we instead blame him for his own lot in his short life.
However, contrary to this view, there is a new study from the Economic Policy Institute titled "The Making of Ferguson" which suggests that conditions in towns like Ferguson are not random or accidental, but are instead the result of nearly a century of bigoted public policy and private biases against black people.
Follow over the fold to read more.
The study's author Richard Rothstein spoke with BillMoyers.com this week:
Rothstein: The segregation that characterizes Ferguson, and that characterizes St. Louis, was the creation of purposeful public policy. We have a segregated nation by design.
The St. Louis metropolitan area was no different from most metropolitan areas of the country. The ghetto in the central city of St. Louis was redeveloped for universities, and for a number of other uses, and the African American population in the central city was shifted to inner ring suburbs like Ferguson.
It was done primarily with two policies: First, public housing was segregated, purposely, by the federal government, so that what were previously somewhat integrated neighborhoods in urban areas were separated into separate black and white public housing projects.
And then, in the 1950s, as suburbs came to be developed, the federal government subsidized white residents of St. Louis to move to the suburbs, but effectively prohibited black residents from doing so. The federal government subsidized the construction of many, many subdivisions by requiring that bank loans for the builders be made on the condition that no homes be sold to blacks.
Because black housing was so restrictive, there were so few places where African-Americans could live in St. Louis. So what was left of St. Louis’ African American community became overcrowded. City services were not readily available. The city was zoned so that the industrial or commercial areas were placed in black neighborhoods but not in white neighborhoods. So the industrial areas, where African Americans lived, became slums.
This view is further described in the executive summary of the Study.
Governmental actions in support of a segregated labor market supplemented these racial housing policies and prevented most African Americans from acquiring the economic strength to move to middle-class communities, even if they had been permitted to do so.
White flight certainly existed, and racial prejudice was certainly behind it, but not racial prejudice alone. Government policies turned black neighborhoods into overcrowded slums and white families came to associate African Americans with slum characteristics. White homeowners then fled when African Americans moved nearby, fearing their new neighbors would bring slum conditions with them.
That government, not mere private prejudice, was responsible for segregating greater St. Louis was once conventional informed opinion. A federal appeals court declared 40 years ago that “segregated housing in the St. Louis metropolitan area was … in large measure the result of deliberate racial discrimination in the housing market by the real estate industry and by agencies of the federal, state, and local governments.” Similar observations accurately describe every other large metropolitan area. This history, however, has now largely been forgotten.
Rothstein describes the difficulties of a black engineer with McDonnell Douglas named Adel Allen who in the '70s was financially able to purchase a middle-class home in the white suburb of Kirkwood, rather than the overcrowded ghetto of Ferguson, but was prohibited from doing so by law and the practice of private realtors.
He first chose to move back to Kansas when faced with the situation, but then was able to get a white friend to act as a proxy for buying a house in Kirkwood. At the time there were 30 white families living on that block, but within seven years it was 30 black families and two white families remaining.
This was the result of a real estate practice known as "blockbusting." Normally, black families were dissuaded from entering a white community, and a realtor who sold to a black family in such a neighborhood could have his or her license revoked by the state commission. But once such a sale did take place realtors would go door-to-door scaring white homeowners that their property values were about to plummet. Once panic set in they were able buy these homes at bargain prices, then resell them to African American clients at inflated prices because they had so few options available to them.
Within a few years a white neighborhood would become black, and soon afterward city services would begin to decline. White neighborhoods had sidewalks and curbs, black neighborhoods didn't.
All of this in addition to the forced income gap during the entire 20th Century created by job discrimination and segregation. For example, construction unions blocked African Americans from benefiting from the housing boom of the '50s and '60s. And the thing here is that we now know, due to many studies, that inter-generational income mobility is functionally stagnant in this country.
Contrary to fairytales Oprah!, most people who have low-income parents, remain at a low income throughout their life. Those with middle-class parents are more likely to remain the middle class, and those with wealth are more likely to remain wealthy.
When you do everything you can, for centuries, to hold back particular groups from a chance at prosperity—it has an impact. The theft of jobs, income, education and opportunities for your parents, and your grandparents, makes a difference in the ability of you to be upwardly mobile today. The argument that these are merely policies "of the past" that are not still in practice, even though they very often are still ongoing when it comes to housing and lending, is not valid when you consider how the loss and denial of home equity can affect families' ability not just to support their children, but also to educate them and give them a better chance at a prosperous career.
The circumstances of housing and red-lining described by Rothstein sound, to my ear, very similar to the argument made earlier this year by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his seminal article for The Atlantic, The Case for Reparations. The type of predatory loan agreements that he describes being used in urban Chicago are exactly the same types of agreement described by Rothstein in Ferguson.
Today, those same homes that sold for $8,000 in the 1950s sell for $400,000, which is about six or seven times national median income. So today, working families, whether white or black, can’t afford to buy in Kirkwood. Fifty years ago, when whites similar to them in every other respect except their race were populating the suburbs, African American families were not permitted to do so, so the legacy of that discrimination continues to this date. Poor African Americans got crowded into ghettos—into all black, low-income neighborhoods like Ferguson.
And because the Federal Housing Administration refused to guarantee mortgages for African-Americans and would only guarantee mortgages for whites, black people who could afford to buy homes couldn’t get mortgages for them. So speculators sold those homes to them on contract, like on an installment plan. And if they were ever late with a payment, their house would be immediately repossessed and resold again on contract to someone else. In order to be able to make these contract payments, which were very high because the demand for housing was so great relative to the supply available to African Americans, families doubled up, they subdivided their homes, they rented out parts of their homes. That’s a great example of how public policies led to the formation of slums.
This then became a multigenerational problem.
This is how Coates describes how this policy worked in Chicago:
Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought “on contract”: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself.
While white families were able to gain equity with the purchase of their home, black families—not just in Ferguson, but all over the nation—were not. This circumstance is not just something from the '50s, or even the '70s as Rothstein describes. It continues even to today with the discriminatory practices used in the
housing bubble of 2008:
Rampant lending discrimination during the housing bubble exposed black and Latino communities to the harshest consequences of the economic crisis. The link between race, subprime lending, and devastating rates of foreclosure has been crystal clear for some time. Researchers at Princeton have found, for example, that "the greater the degree of Hispanic and especially black segregation a metropolitan area exhibits, the higher the number and rate of foreclosures it experiences." That same study found that these disparities are due in large part to the disproportionate chance that minority borrowers will receive subprime loans.
This is not to say that all of the problems of communities like Ferguson can be laid at the feet of racism. Personal responsibility and choices can, of course, make a difference in ones life. There is indeed, an Oprah! to show us all how it's supposed to be done.
Of course, I've yet to see anyone else, anyone, do what Oprah has done—so it's not exactly a "roadmap" that has proved successful for anyone who has attempted it. Everyone has tried it. Only Oprah has done it.
But one thing you can't say, is that racism and bigotry don't still happen and don't still matter. They do.