True words

Brilliant insight.

"Racism continues to reflect a disparity of power and it is as egregious today as it was in the eighteenth century because the advent of less dramatic forms of dominance is not progress. More insidious in modern social relations is the fact that white people do not have to expressly target black people in order to exploit them. They only have to locate their interests in private and public policies that have disparate impact. Freed from involvement in color-specific political decisions and specific acts of racial oppression, white Americans can more easily imagine the injustices of their society to be natural or irrational."

- Craig Steven Wilder, A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn, p. 241.

Shitty time to be black in Memphis

Those banks and realtors have kept shifting their games to easily outmaneuver fair housing laws, making sure that housing in this country is still largely segregated and black people pay much higher prices to buy homes or rent apartments. And they've managed to do this while removing all explicit references to segregation (redlining), blockbusting and price gouging (high-interest/risk mortgages) from their rules, regulations and written guidelines for doing business. Memphis seems to be getting it about the worst right now. It's an old story, but it looks a little different these days, with black people actually having had some real money over the last couple of decades and being able to buy houses and keep them. The recession hurricane is taking care of that though:

For two decades, Tyrone Banks was one of many African-Americans who saw his economic prospects brightening in this Mississippi River city.

A single father, he worked for FedEx and also as a custodian, built a handsome brick home, had a retirement account and put his eldest daughter through college.

Then the Great Recession rolled in like a fog bank. He refinanced his mortgage at a rate that adjusted sharply upward, and afterward he lost one of his jobs. Now Mr. Banks faces bankruptcy and foreclosure.

“I’m going to tell you the deal, plain-spoken: I’m a black man from the projects and I clean toilets and mop up for a living,” said Mr. Banks, a trim man who looks at least a decade younger than his 50 years. “I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. But my whole life is backfiring.”

Tyrone Banks is fucked, and a lot of other people like him in Memphis are, too. They are experiencing serious downward class motion, completely against their will and largely not a product of their own doing:

The median income of black homeowners in Memphis rose steadily until five or six years ago. Now it has receded to a level below that of 1990 — and roughly half that of white Memphis homeowners...

Black middle-class neighborhoods are hollowed out, with prices plummeting and homes standing vacant in places like Orange Mound, Whitehaven and Cordova. As job losses mount — black unemployment here, mirroring national trends, has risen to 16.9 percent from 9 percent two years ago; it stands at 5.3 percent for whites — many blacks speak of draining savings and retirement accounts in an effort to hold onto their homes. The overall local foreclosure rate is roughly twice the national average.

Fucked, fucked, fucked. And look how little they have to fall back on:

For every dollar of wealth owned by a white family, a black or Latino family owns just 16 cents, according to a recent Federal Reserve study...As of December 2009, median white wealth dipped 34 percent, to $94,600; median black wealth dropped 77 percent, to $2,100. So the chasm widens, and Memphis is left to deal with the consequences.

As usual, there are some dirty banking criminals to be had, the types who will bleed people of everything they own and then lots more with no compunction:

The mayor and former bank loan officers point a finger of blame at large national banks — in particular, Wells Fargo. During the last decade, they say, these banks singled out blacks in Memphis to sell them risky high-cost mortgages and consumer loans.

The City of Memphis and Shelby County sued Wells Fargo late last year, asserting that the bank’s foreclosure rate in predominantly black neighborhoods was nearly seven times that of the foreclosure rate in predominantly white neighborhoods. Other banks, including Citibank and Countrywide, foreclosed in more equal measure...

Camille Thomas, a 40-year-old African-American, loved working for Wells Fargo. “I felt like I could help people,” she recalled over coffee.

As the subprime market heated up, she said, the bank pressure to move more loans — for autos, for furniture, for houses — edged into mania. “It was all about selling your units and getting your bonus,” she said.

Ms. Thomas and three other Wells Fargo employees have given affidavits for the city’s lawsuit against the bank, and their statements about bank practices reinforce one another.

“Your manager would say, ‘Let me see your cold-call list. I want you to concentrate on these ZIP codes,’ and you knew those were African-American neighborhoods,” she recalled. “We were told, ‘Oh, they aren’t so savvy.’ ”

She described tricks of the trade, several of dubious legality. She said supervisors had told employees to white out incomes on loan applications and substitute higher numbers. Agents went “fishing” for customers, mailing live checks to leads. When a homeowner deposited the check, it became a high-interest loan, with a rate of 20 to 29 percent. Then bank agents tried to talk the customer into refinancing, using the house as collateral.

Yes yes, dirty banks playing dirty, complex tricks on people. Also an old story. Such is capitalism, social Darwinism at its best:

Former employees say Wells Fargo loan officers marketed the most expensive loans to black applicants, even when they should have qualified for prime loans. This practice is known as reverse redlining.

Webb A. Brewer, a Memphis lawyer, recalls poring through piles of loan papers and coming across name after name of blacks with subprime mortgages. “This is money out of their pockets lining the purses of the banks,” he said.

For a $150,000 mortgage, a difference of three percentage points — the typical spread between a conventional and subprime loan — tacks on $90,000 in interest payments over its 30-year life.

That's a lot of money. Banks love money, or more accurately, the people who run them do. They also seem to love white people:

A study by the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project and six nonprofit groups found that the nation’s four largest banks, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase, had cut their prime mortgage refinancing 33 percent in predominantly minority communities, even as prime refinancing in white neighborhoods rose 32 percent from 2006 to 2008.

Sure, some black people bought big houses that they could obviously not afford because they were being greedy and materialistic and the bank would give them a loan, just like a bunch of Americans did, especially over the last decade or so. I don't believe that to be the case in much of what's going on in Memphis, or anywhere else across the country. Looking at Wells Fargo's foreclosure rates in Memphis' black neighborhoods (again, seven times higher than white neighborhoods), it's just not possible to say that black people made those kinds of really bad purchases at seven times the rate of white Memphis residents, and only with one bank.

It's easy to blame people for taking on these loans that they ultimately couldn't afford. Even if we put aside the charges of banks altering applications without applicants' knowledge and refusing to disclose all details of a loan, the fact of the matter is that many black people in this country, historically, have not had and still do not have substantial choice of where to live. Their choices are deeply circumscribed by banks and realtors, who literally determine, to a great extent, the ethnic makeup of neighborhoods. Black people were and are denied mortgages in many parts of town, or entire towns, and common racial hostility takes care of the rest.

For the greater part of the last century, racial discrimination crippled black efforts to buy homes and accumulate wealth. During the post-World War II boom years, banks and real estate agents steered blacks to segregated neighborhoods, where home appreciation lagged far behind that of white neighborhoods.

Blacks only recently began to close the home ownership gap with whites, and thus accumulate wealth — progress that now is being erased. In practical terms, this means black families have less money to pay for college tuition, invest in businesses or sustain them through hard times.

“We’re wiping out whatever wealth blacks have accumulated — it assures racial economic inequality for the next generation,” said Thomas M. Shapiro, director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University.

What it really comes down to is that, for many black people, if you want to own a home, a high-interest/risk mortgage is basically your only option:

“The more segregated a community of color is, the more likely it is that homeowners will face foreclosure because the lenders who peddled the most toxic loans targeted those communities,” Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, told a Congressional committee.

Imagine there being only certain places you could realistically live, regardless of how much money you have? It's an unstated apartheid, and it's entirely a product of banking, realty and federal policy. This stuff is all laid out very well in a whole host of books, such as When Affirmative Action Was White, American Apartheid, Family Properties, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, and American Babylon, among many.

Additional thoughts on Dr. Gates' Op-Ed

His explanation runs unfortunately close to one of boys will be boys. "You know how those Europeans are. That's just what they do."

Assigning equal responsibility would require the people in Africa who sold other people to place conditions on their sale, i.e. "You must treat them lower than animals," "Please whip and rape them," "Do not allow them to practice their cultural traditions," "Do your best to keep them as uneducated as possible, and make sure that they die young." No, Europeans created that system all on their own. Ridiculous.

Were there not a single native slave trader in Africa, Europeans would have gotten their slaves anyway. It likely would have taken longer and perhaps the numbers would have been lower, but European kingdoms and nations and militaries, especially around that time, were not ones to take no for an answer. They simply found an easier way to do it - they got other people to do much of the dirty work. Taking all those people by force would have been such a messy venture and cost many European lives. They would have been facing the military resistance of whole societies. When they employed some African people to do it for them, they saved themselves a whole lot of work. Those are some cunning people, aren't they? And they promised riches, technology and power in return. Who could resist?

There was no equal footing here. The mere fact that Dr. Gates mentions European "military outposts" on African soil should tell us something about what was going on.

Also, the European slave trade in the Atlantic world was a streamlined, well-devised, state-run scheme. The profits from it were obscene. Those profits built up Europe and the settler societies in the Americas (both North and South) and Caribbean. Of course, slaves also literally built the settler societies in these places. And this slave trade and its effects, including the physical colonialism that eventually came to Africa from Europe fucked the African continent into right now. So many people stolen (well over ten million, perhaps upwards of thirty million, whether by Europeans or Africans) from their societies, systematically, over hundreds of years, will have an indefinite effect.

"Complicit alike," he says. How?

Irresponsible assigning of responsibility

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the esteemed and much accomplished literary analyst and pseudo-historian (see his several televisions specials centered on Oprah Winfrey), published a fucked-up Op-Ed piece in the New York Times today. He ostensibly wrote to discuss reparations related to slavery, but all he really did was provide a slightly more sophisticated recapitulation of the argument to which white people love to cling, "I never owned any slaves, and besides, they sold their own people into slavery." Fuck.

Reparations aside, this is just a bunch of bullshit. Whose work is he doing? I guess you gotta be of a particular mindset for Harvard to have you.

It's really hard to get into in a blog, but I really can't stress enough just how off-base he is with all of this. Did Africans sell other Africans into slavery? Yes.

Consider this - "African" is not an ethnicity. It is an identifier of the continent from which you come. It's like telling the Chinese and Indian governments that they should get along better, as they are the same people. No, no one would ever say that. But they both are countries in Asia. Also, Africa is not a country.

There are (were) so, so many ethnicities in the African continent. Gates mentions that "the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups." If fifty is a few, then there were obviously a lot more. And, keep in mind, that African slaves in the Atlantic world tended to come from West Africa, leaving so many more ethnicities unaccounted for. So if there are presumably hundreds of ethnicities on the continent, there is no selling of "their" or "your" people into slavery. They were selling other people into slavery, people to whom they had no more connection than Germans do with the French. Did people say that Europeans were slaughtering each other during WWI and WWII? No, of course they distinguished between them. It was not viewed as a civil war, nor is it today.

Was selling people into slavery fucked? Yup. The people who did it were garbage.

At the same time, as much as Gates tries to stealthily scuttle these arguments, it is a fact that the people running this trade in Africa were not aware of what slavery in the New World looked like, as there was nothing resembling it in Africa. "Slaves" in Africa had rights, were allowed families, did not have their status permanently, hopelessly inscribed upon them and often times would be integrated into the family/clan that had enslaved them. They also tended to be part of the spoils of war, not a commodity purchased at an auction house. Finally, slaves in African societies did not form the basis for the social and economic structures of those societies, like they did here.

Gates talking about "elite Africans" visiting Europe is a complete distraction from the discussion at hand. Firstly, the slavery we are discussing did not take place in Europe. African slaves, primarily, went to Brazil, the Caribbean, and America. Any talk about reparations, the supposed base for his article, doesn't have a fucking thing to do with slavery in Europe. It's about here, in the United States. It's about African slaves building the country, for free. It's about providing an otherwise impossible agricultural foundation for the country that allowed it to grow and prosper in bounds. It's about all that plantation labor down south and sending all those raw materials up north to be processed in those factories and sent all over the place for immense profits. The slave trade was European, but slavery, primarily, was not. And the slavery that did exist in Europe was decidedly not on the scale, ever, that it was in America. It was not the same thing. There are no rice plantations in England. Portugal does not have a long history as a cotton producing wonder.

And even if his claim is true, that Africans had witnessed slavery first-hand, so what? So what if a few Africans saw slavery first-hand. We are talking about hundreds of years and a whole lot of people being in charge of selling to Europeans. A few Africans seeing it is a piss in the ocean. What were they going to do, put it on Facebook?

There are a bunch of other things, like how Europeans played off different ethnicities against one another and provided some with guns, which allowed them to easily overpower and dominate nearby peoples of different ethnicities. As a result, the people under attack then had to acquire guns, which were only realistically available through Europeans, who were only really interested in slaves, not whatever things those particular people may have valued. As you can see, this would create a quickly worsening state of affairs that is a combination arms race/ransom/extortion situation. Europeans are good at that, provoking wars. And then they made sure that there were people in power in these societies who were very amenable to selling them people.

Finally, this discussion on culpability is fucking absurd for one reason - it rests on the premise that Europeans had no choice but to buy people and force them to work for free. Think about that.

If the Europeans who showed up looking to take slaves away weren't so fucking greedy and heartless, then those people in Africa who wished to sell other people into slavery wouldn't have been able to sell off a single person across the ocean in that middle passage hell. As though they created a market. As if, for countless centuries, there was just this teeming slave market on the western shores of the African continent waiting for buyers, until one day, the magnanimous Europeans came and saved their failed economic dream. Like they flew planes over Europe towing banners that said "AFRICAN SLAVES 2NITE - ALL U CAN BUY." No, Europeans came to them. And came, and came, and came, and came. For fuck's sake, this position almost pities the Europeans, like they were naive heroin addicts or something, victims of the African pusher.

Yes, some African people had responsibility for selling other African people into slavery. That's obvious. To act like their blame is equitable to that of European traders and buyers is truly insane and is nothing but a lie.