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.

So this guy walks into a bar...

and then gets kicked out strictly for being black, and the new Republican senatorial candidate (as in he won the Republican primary and it's now between him and the Democratic candidate, come November) from Kentucky, Rand Paul (Ron Paul's son, yes that Ron Paul) says (through what he refuses to say) that it's ok. This is what suave racism looks like. This man is a white supremacist in a business suit. And he tells you it's not a big deal.

HE FUCKING DOES NOT SUPPORT THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964.

And then goes on to say that anyone discussing it is "not an issue...a red herring...a political ploy...brought up as an attack weapon from the other side."

This is such insane bullshit. He views segregation and physical, exclusionary discrimination as "free speech." They aren't even related. Segregation and the refusal to serve people in a place of business based on race, gender, sexuality, or whatever, is not in any way related to speech.

The entire time, he keeps reiterating that discrimination, segregation and racism are "a stain on our history" and other such bullshit. He also "would have marched with Martin Luther King." Then he goes on to lie and sanitize King, like people so often do, and says that most of the things that Dr. King was fighting "were laws, he was fighting Jim Crow laws, he was fighting legalized and institutionalized racism." True, he did fight those things, but he also went after things that were not inscribed in law, such as segregated housing, a lack of jobs (after all, the famous August 28th, 1963 "I have a dream" speech was given at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom) and the Vietnam War among many.

According to Rand Paul and his continual use of a "free speech" defense, the issue is that black people would go into restaurants and the waiter would say, "Hey, nigger, what do you want?" when in reality, the waiter said, "Hey, nigger, get out," which had definite physical consequences for disobedience. The former represents a free speech issue. The Civil Rights Act had nothing to do with speech. It had nothing to do with prohibiting "hate speech" as Paul cites. Segregation was physical and economic, not verbal. Fucking stupid.

Then he keeps talking about how if you maintain the federal laws that force owners of restaurants, stores and whatever else to serve black people, you have to also force them to allow people to carry weapons of any and all varieties into bars. What a fucking ridiculous reduction. Here is a very simple way to look at that - refusing service to people demonstrably harms them in a variety of ways. Refusing to allow guns into a business harms no one.

The Civil Rights Act did not say that if you own a business, you now have no rights. It said if you own a business, you now have no right to exclude people based on physical traits.

The only real reason people support shit like this (segregation) is because they will never be the ones excluded. What kind of place is going to say, "Hey, rich white piece of shit, get the fuck out of here, your kind's not wanted!"? The Crimethinc Convergence? A black nationalist bookstore? Perhaps a basement show? No place a rich white piece of shit would want to go, that's for sure.

Additionally, a refusal to serve is not an issue that stops there. It means that people cannot buy things that they need, it means that people are prohibited from doing things that they enjoy, and it means, fundamentally, that groups of people, based entirely on physical traits, are excluded from many aspects of daily life. They become second-class citizens, at best. Refusal to serve also creates extensive economic problems, because people are not able to earn money (a place that won't serve black people sure as hell isn't going to pay them a decent wage) and thus are not able to spend it.

Finally, segregation is not dead. Far from it. Read Denton and Massey's American Apartheid.

Pigs in New York are still racist

As per their training. This story is so fucking old. No matter how many people get shot, beaten down, maimed, violated and locked up for bullshit like selling weed, it doesn't change in meaningful ways. Years and years of the same bullshit for being black and Puerto Rican in New York:

Blacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by the police in New York City in 2009, but, once stopped, were no more likely to be arrested.

NINE TIMES. But arrested just the same. They carry the suspicion of being guilty. The police explain it on their reports as looking guilty. Not kidding.

Of the reasons listed by the police for conducting the stops, one of those least commonly cited was the claim that the person fit the description of a suspect. The most common reason listed by the police was a category known as “furtive movements.”

Do you know what "furtive moments" means? Furtive means characterized by stealth or looking shifty. So they got stopped and frisked for looking like they were up to something. Well here's a fact - they were up to something. They were trying to avoid getting hassled by some pig fuck. Cause they know it's coming. It's a self-perpetuating cycle.

The pigs say, "you look guilty of something, so we will hassle you." The people say, "why are you hassling us, we didn't do shit." The people become quickly accustomed to getting fucked with by pigs on the streets, in businesses, in their homes, and on the subways, so they get anxious when the pigs come around, and look hyperaware, because they know they have a good chance (nine times the chance, as it turns out) of getting bothered and violated. Then the pigs use that awareness as a justification to bother them. I'm reminded of Tupac at this time - "Instead of a war on poverty, they've got a war on drugs so they police can bother me." So fucking true.

Here's some more bullshit about how they generally don't even claim to have a legitimate justification for fucking with someone:

In examining the stated reasons for the stops, as checked off by police officers on department forms, the center found that about 15 percent of the stops last year cited “fits a relevant description.” Officers can check off more than one reason, but in nearly half the stops, the category called “furtive movements” was cited. Nearly 30 percent of stops cited a category called “casing a victim or location”; nearly 19 percent cited a catchall category of “other."

Read what the crazy pigs try to sell us about their martial law-style tactics:

The police officials argue that the widespread use of the tactic has forced criminals to keep their guns at home and allowed the department to bank thousands of names in a database for detectives to mine in fighting future crimes.

Forced criminals to keep their guns at home? If you are going out with the intent to commit a crime with a gun, you are going to take your fucking gun. You got your mind on whatever the hell it is you are about to do, not whether or not a pig is going to frisk you. Also, FIGHTING FUTURE CRIMES. Do you understand how troubling that is? They plan on "fighting future crimes" by stopping random people on the street now who look guilty of something. Holy shit.

This is probably the best part. Although they stopped and frisked only 53,000 white people compared to the 490,000 black and Latino people last year, white people were more likely to be arrested and have weapons on them.

But once stopped, the arrest rates were virtually the same. Whites were arrested in slightly more than 6 percent of the stops, blacks in slightly fewer than 6 percent. About 1.7 percent of whites who were stopped were found to have a weapon, while 1.1 percent of blacks were found with one.

Also, there is nothing wrong with having a weapon on you. Self-defense is not a violent act.

I know that people rush to defend this crap. People love pigs, people love the government, or at least the idea of it and its form and ideology, and don't want to talk about how fundamentally flawed the economic and social systems they built are. They say really short-sighted things like "black people commit more crimes," a statement which is problematic for a variety of reasons, such as what counts as "crime" (selling drugs does, gambling people's mortgages does not - that actually gets you rewarded) and the fact that it completely ignores why poor people commit crimes.

After all, that is the issue at hand - poor people who happen to be black committing crimes. Stop looking at them as black for a minute and look at them as poor people in deliberately devastated neighborhoods who have virtually no opportunities for escape. What else should they do when they are bombarded with same brainwash consumer shit as everyone else, starve? Welfare gets cut and nothing pops up in its place. Schools are shit, jobs are either non-existent or psychologically destructive. So what do you do? Rob and sell drugs. Gotta get it however you can. Survival of the fittest, as they've always told us.

Policing addresses none of this. It really only makes it worse. Hassle people, which makes them angrier, more resentful, more alienated and even less interested in trying to join contemporary society. Then you send them to jail, where they learn to get along through violence and vice. It fucks you up invariably, and if you stay long enough, you will be completely unable to get by once you are back out. You have shitty prospects for employment (unless, of course, you are a white-collar criminal, whose individual crimes are far more destructive in terms of number of people affected and severity than any mass murderer) and so you go back to street crime. This is not a good answer to any problem.

Overwhelmingly, poor people commit property crimes and crimes in the pursuit of money because they have none and perceive no other way of readily getting it. That will continue to happen as long as their situations do not change. And changing their situations will have to come from outside, because the deep segregation they face (yes, still, today) precludes people in ghettoes from doing a whole lot themselves. They are isolated and on the lowest end of the political power spectrum. Organize them, and you pay. See what the FBI and local pigs did to the Black Panthers for reference.

What's the overall lesson then? Don't be fooled by ideas of change and progress. Just because a whole lot of different kinds of people collude to obscure ugly realities from us doesn't mean that they aren't there.