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    My KinjaMichael Harriot
    4/25/19 6:45pm

    Hm, did not expect Michael’s voice to sound like that.
    Keep up the good fight sir.

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      BadOmbreMy Kinja
      4/26/19 1:16am

      He sounds like my people from the area of South Carolina he’s from; he sounds like my grandfather did, though the accent, of course, it not nearly as strong as his was.  But you can hear it.

      I enjoyed this piece. I knew a lot of it, but not all.

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      myopicprophetMy Kinja
      4/26/19 10:22am

      I couldn’t even pretend to be that personable. I’d be ranting through that presentation, but Michael makes you feel like you’re receiving good news.

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    FuckYourRacismYouSCUMMichael Harriot
    4/26/19 8:27am

    Red-lining is one of the most insidious, on-the-nose racist policies ever enacted. It ensured an artificial socioeconomic depression upon black communities, and the lack of funding for education and healthcare (as well as crumbling infrastructure) directly leads to crime and gave police and lawmakers an excuse to “crackdown” on those neighborhoods. It’s why whenever right wing troglodytes say things like, “It’s their own fault that their communities are in bad shape,” not only are they wrong, they’re creating a narrative to allow it remain unchanged. They are protecting the status quo, and moderates who view things like “inner-city crime” as issues isolated in those communities (and not born out of policy by white policymakers) are only helping them by dismissing the reality of things like red-lining.

    It’s why I will never fault the black community for distrusting anyone in power, politicians or otherwise, and why they remain skeptical of even the most progressive white person. They have never been given a good reason to trust a white person in power.

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      FuckYourRacismYouSCUMFuckYourRacismYouSCUM
      4/26/19 9:38am

      To the right wing gaslighting troll: De-regulation means lack of accountability and oversight, which means more abuses. But red-lining is not about “regulation”, it is about systemic racism tied into policy. That’s the sort of thing Trump is in favor of. Regardless of oversight, he can and will help pass laws and policies that will negatively impact people of color, especially black people.

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      mrs oh'pleaseFuckYourRacismYouSCUM
      4/26/19 12:36pm

      Yes! It’s always been about the narrative for racists. That’s what they live by.

      The only way racists can try to deny their racism...is to try to justify it.

      Racists are always in a constant battle within themselves to prove that they actually deserve everything that they had to cheat to get.

      And the keyword is = cheating.

      Racists can’t admit that they had to cheat to get to where they are because that would mean having to admit...that they are not in fact superior.

      That one admission of not being superior ruins their whole fairy tale that they are doing the minorities a favor by allowing them to stay on the land that their ancestors the colonizers stole.

      And they envy the fact that the descendants of raped slaves could still make it thru HELL...without the white people who profited from racism.

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    GGTrainMichael Harriot
    4/26/19 6:15am

    Weeks ago in his weekly Wall Street Journal op-ed, Karl Rove mocked Congresswoman A. Octavio-Cortez for calling FDR-era housing policies racist. Rove engaged in a diabolical misdirection of history.

    Thanks Mr. Harriot for bluntly presenting the truth.

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      BiturbowagonGGTrain
      5/02/19 9:01pm

      As is so often the case, the truth is far more nuanced than the rhetoric, especially the rhetoric spewed from the right wing.

      As with many other New Deal programs such as Social Security, FDR’s housing programs needed political support from many corners. To secure the support of the white racist Southern votes (at the time, usually Democratic, although not exclusively). For certain programs, such as Social Security, the racist aspects insisted upon by the Southern congressmen were temporary, ameliorated within a few years, and eventually purged. For others, such as housing, the racist elements were pervasive and enduring. It was certainly not a goal of FDR or his close advisors to make racist policies, but in many cases the racist policies were the price paid to get *something* enacted. In the case of redlining, those effects redound to us today, but in a very bad way.

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    BiturbowagonMichael Harriot
    5/02/19 8:42pm

    I have had to describe redlining to many people. Even all these decades later, it is an insidious force in our society, in part because it is not discussed often enough. How can we correct current inequities, when we won’t focus on (or, in certain cases, even acknowledge) one of the major historical roots of them?

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    Minimum MausMichael Harriot
    4/25/19 5:12pm

    So basically the US government made sure that black neighbourhoods didn’t get any of the bootstraps that racists and conservatives keep insisting people pull themselves up by.

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    MWCMichael Harriot
    4/26/19 10:12am

    Redlining is deplorable and a true national scandal along with interning Japanese Americans during World War II and breaking treaties with Native Americans every time gold was found anywhere Native lands. How do we fix this problem? It would seem the only way to resolve the problem is for the value of homes in previously red lined communities to go up. This would then allow more property tax dollars for majority Black schools. The problem with this is that the trend of homes gaining value in formerly red lined neighborhoods will cause a substantial complaint or concern of the neighborhood gentrifying. The best way to end this dynamic is simple-but politically impossible-ending the funding of public schools through property taxes. 

    Reply