Institutional Racism In America

Perhaps it is a function of privilege, but when most of us consider institutional racism, I doubt that Roosevelt’s New Deal immediately comes to mind. It should, though, as the regulations enforced by our government against blacks during that era led to institutional racism throughout the housing market, entrenching discrimination so deeply that it persists today. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a truth about our society that more clearly proves the Jeffersonian ideal that all people are born equal—and that there exists an equality of opportunity—to be mere illusion (Race, by Micah Johnson). The situation is summed up quite well in The Asset Value of Whiteness: Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap:
“Research probing the causes of the racial …show more content…
During an interview with NPR, Richard Rothstein explained:
“…the term red-lining…comes from the development by the New Deal by the federal government of maps of every metropolitan area in the country. And those maps were color coded by the…first the Home Owners' Loan Corporation and then the Federal Housing Administration and then adopted by the Veterans Administration. And these color codes were designed to indicate where it was safe to insure mortgages. And anywhere where African-Americans lived, anywhere where African-Americans lived nearby were colored red to indicate to appraisers that these neighborhoods were too risky to insure mortgages (Gross, 2018).”
It seems to me that privilege is a seesaw; when the balance of power rises for the group on one end, it must also lower for the group on the other. This means that when the redline maps and regulations of the New Deal were carried out, African-Americans were disadvantaged as the privilege of wealth through home ownership was granted solely to white citizens. This imbalance became generational; white children had property of value to inherit, while their counterparts were left with nothing. Even as policies were updated over the following decades, discrimination over mortgages remained—and the wealth gap widened (Mukherjee, 2018). According to The Roots of the Widening Racial Wealth Gap: Explaining the Black-White Economic Divide, “in 2009, a representative survey of American households revealed that the median wealth of white families was $113,149 compared with $6,325 for Latino families and $5,677 for black families…” (Shapiro, Meschede & Osoro,

Show More