Have you ever seen people talk about how the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution outlaws slavery "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted", leading to the modern prison-industrial complex that overwhelmingly targets black Americans with arrests for petty crimes and traps them in The System? https://sites.lib.jmu.edu/civic/2020/09/17/slaves-of-the-sta...
The ECOA makes it illegal for lenders to discriminate for home mortgage loans, which would lead to reduced racial segregation (following the Fair Housing Act of 1968), reduced discrimination against unmarried/divorced women, and many other nice things. The exception is that discrimination is still totally legal if the person just can't afford the home. As Atari once told me, Do The Math: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OEHRENWBSHNO
> The exception is that discrimination is still totally legal if the person just can't afford the home.
It's also important to remember how this applies to school districts. If you exclude the poor from your neighborhood, you also exclude them from your school district. (This explains part of the otherwise unexpected opposition to school vouchers by college-educated affluent Democrats and the support for them by rural Republicans in bad school districts, when the vouchers would allow students to escape bad school districts.)
Interestingly the steep curve on the graph is caused in large part by misguided policies claimed to increase home ownership (which is not really possible without increasing the housing supply). You can clearly see the "give mortgages to everybody regardless of whether they can afford it" policies leading up to the housing crisis, followed by the housing crisis, followed by more than a decade of near-zero interest rates inflating housing costs.
It looks like we had completely reinflated the housing bubble by 2016 and have only gone up from there, so that's... not ideal.
Though artificial housing scarcity is still a separate and real problem that compounds with this.
What's super disgusting is charging mothers who can't afford to live in your district but still wanted to give their child the best education she could, so she used her dad's address...
> This explains part of the otherwise unexpected opposition to school vouchers by college-educated affluent Democrats and the support for them by rural Republicans in bad school districts, when the vouchers would allow students to escape bad school districts.
I'm aware of wealthy families wanting the voucher to throw toward private schools (they were never going to send their kids to public schools regardless). Wealthy families are of both political leanings.
Then there are the conservatives that dislike public schools because the teachers are in a union, or they believe teachers are liberals, or that they indoctrinate their kids into anit-Capitlist thinking, etc....
Really unfamiliar with the scenarios you paint.
> You can clearly see the "give mortgages to everybody regardless of whether they can afford it" policies
Or was it the de-leveraging of the banks, credit default swaps, derivatives and other shady practices by Wall Street?
> I'm aware of wealthy families wanting the voucher to throw toward private schools (they were never going to send their kids to public schools regardless).
The people rich enough to pay for private school tuition without any government subsidy have their own neighborhoods with their own school districts, where everyone else in the district is also that rich and sends their kids to private school and the property taxes are correspondingly less or spent on other things. They've already solved it for themselves.
The people who want school vouchers are the people who want to get into those schools but don't have the money to pay for it after the government takes it from them in property taxes and refuses to let them use it for anything other than sending their kids to a bad school district.
> Then there are the conservatives that dislike public schools because the teachers are in a union, or they believe teachers are liberals, or that they indoctrinate their kids into anit-Capitlist thinking, etc....
These are just specific examples of things that cause a school district to be low quality, e.g. when unions prevent bad teachers from being fired, and cause parents to want a way out of the broken system for their kids.
> Or was it the de-leveraging of the banks, credit default swaps, derivatives and other shady practices by Wall Street?
Recall that all of those things were justified on the basis of "increasing liquidity" etc., i.e. making it easier to own a home, and that their consequence was "give mortgages to everybody regardless of whether they can afford it" because if the bank was going to sell the mortgage to someone else as a derivative or use a CDS then they didn't care if the borrower could pay it back.
That raises a question. How do other impoverished groups escape the poverty trap more quickly? Historically Chinese and other immigrants's needs were served by their own official and unofficial institutions. What can be done to keep dollars within a community to grow wealth within?
I feel like it goes way beyond "impoverished" when the oppression and exploitation of free labor from a particular group is woven into hundreds of years of cultural DNA of the country, right from the very beginning written into the founding documents of South Carolina in the 1660s: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp (section 110)
There are so many intersecting social issues too, like America's experiment with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s and anti-prostitution laws that to this day are endangering women, enabling trafficking, and being used as justification for ever-increasing surveillance. You can guess which types of "open minded" businesses back in the day tended to host jazz music and be more welcoming to blacks. Most people in San Francisco, for example, know of the Fillmore District but probably not of Terrific Street: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrific_Street#Demise
I can't speak to cultural DNA. But I guess we could test it by looking at kids who at a young age moved to a different country and whether that cultural DNA sticks.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I think the media and entertainment have a hand in this and the establishment does not care --they want cheap labor. So on the one hand it's Fast Times at Ridgemont High, on the other we big tech and others want American kids to be dedicated to study like Chinese or Indian kids.
Movies and Media pretty much indoctrinate kids to be carefree and do what you want without consequences. (If media had no influence on people, people would not call for diversity in role models, etc)
> I think the media and entertainment have a hand in this and the establishment does not care
I agree, but I think the establishment does care quite a lot. That's what I was getting at when describing my personal view of the "establishment" as a kind of conscious entity, not exactly what I would call human, but conscious all the same. Like a corporation where harmful decisions end up being no particular individual's "fault" because every individual contributed but a sliver of the final thoughtform, individuals doing their best but who exist in a space where the scope of possibility is already narrowed for them in a way they might not even notice.
That's also why the US media industry and cultural exports are so important here. My personal view of a country is descriptive rather than prescriptive, that borders are implicit based on the speed that ideas can travel, and the US media-exported culture was the dominant one when global instant communication became possible. Makes me think about the esoteric outcomes of the copyright wars too. The big bad RIAA/MPAA get to be the boogeyman and absorb all of my nerd-hate-energy, but the outcome ensures that only current-generation media with establishment-approved themes makes it to our eyes and our ears.
That is a great question and one that the book speaks about. Some points to consider without going too deep:
- Italians and other European communities also faced with xenophobia and racism. Italians even founded 'the bank of Italy' (which is now BofA) because there were lack of institutions who financed and provided debt to them. Some laws have deliberately pushed to integrate white europeans to 'white american' society.
- Blacks had and still have to face systemic ('redlining' districts, 'G.I Bill, 'Civil Rights', etc) and unofficial racism. As a result, Black-owned banks typically face larger cost of debt, have larger liquidity requirements (small deposits and shorter withdraw periods) and more strict mortgage rules. We all know what happened.
PS: there is still a lot of poverty traps for other immigrants and minority groups. We are still far away from what needs to be done
Also of note are the Landsmanschaft and Jewish mutual aid societies, especially prevalent in early 20th century NYC. Contrary to stereotype many Jewish immigrants came here poor and Talmud encourages (requires?) an observant Jew who is able to lend money interest-free to help others get on their feet.
Not living in an environment where everything can be taken away from you through one bad interaction with say, a policeman helps. Having a stable family with positive role models, preferably one not torn apart by brushes with the justice system helps, too.
These kinds of problems get inherited from generation to generation, even if (a damn big if) the current generation were not directly subjected to any of the original racist cases thereof.
I think unfortunately for multi-generational Americans there is a weird stigma when you come from certain backgrounds --some people escape them, but not most. Immigrants don't usually have this stigma and burden. They come for the opportunity which they believe comes with putting in hours or work and study. If you're second generation and greater, you assume many Americanisms like you're entitled to American things without the hard work. Immigrants are willing to sacrifice a generation so that the next might succeed. Quite a few of my HS cohort didn't have it in them to put in hard work. They wanted to hang out, play, skip school, go to the mall, smoke weed, get beer, etc. Kids of recent immigrants were not like that, by and large.
You hit a note with me about your American upbringing because I've had the same thoughts about mine but hadn't seen it hit it on the head like you have. American youth culture doesn't really value hard work and intellect. I know media like movies has a hand in this portrayal but I'm not sure it's really intentional like you allude to. I still wonder what it really is that some of us make it out into well paying careers while most of my HS cohort also mostly coasts on lackluster degrees and jobs. Race hasn't been any common thread in outcomes I've seen intra-high school, whereas the biggest differences seem to occur between high schools.
> American youth culture doesn't really value hard work and intellect.
They would be foolish to value those things when they can look around the world at large and see how success vs failure is pretty much some combination of luck and network/nepotism.
Kind of... 1st gen Americans retain the drive from their parents’ cultures and do better. But rivers flow downhill.
While I’m not advocating the Chinese entrance exam system, we’re the polar opposite where being lazy is cool. Look at all the youth drifting to LA dreaming of making it big. Some of that is going to YouTube/Instagram type platforms but it’s still a one in a million shot at glamorous success rather than steadfast hard work for a steady career (we do have physicians and lawyers and MBAs who resemble the steadfast attitude but it’s a small slice of society) we’re just not good at instilling this culture in our youth as well as other cultures do.
The ECOA makes it illegal for lenders to discriminate for home mortgage loans, which would lead to reduced racial segregation (following the Fair Housing Act of 1968), reduced discrimination against unmarried/divorced women, and many other nice things. The exception is that discrimination is still totally legal if the person just can't afford the home. As Atari once told me, Do The Math: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OEHRENWBSHNO
Bonus points if we use the fear from the inevitable housing insecurity to make discriminated populations want to segregate themselves: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gentrification...