of Housing and Urban Development settled with a California apartment complex that discriminated against Mexican applicants by refusing their forms of identification while accepting a Canadian’s ID. And this sort of discrimination has been going on for a long time: favoring white renters while turning away black renters, for instance, is pretty much what was happening in some of President Trump’s apartment buildings back in the 1960s and 1970s—and which ultimately resulted in a settlement with the Department of Justice.
The housing collapse wiped out trillions of dollars in family wealth nationwide, but the crash hit African Americans and Latinos like a tidal wave. And the hit was doubly hard because these were the families that, generation after generation, had already been aggressively discriminated against in housing. Restrictive deeds, land sales contracts, redlining—American history is littered with examples of housing laws and lending strategies that were designed to deny black and Hispanic families mortgages and that prevented them from building housing wealth.
For most middle-class families in America, purchasing a home is the best way to build financial security. A home isn’t just a place to live; it’s also a retirement plan: pay off the house and live on Social Security. A home provides financial credibility and reassures a banker that someone is a good risk to start a business. A home provides a way to help the kids make it through college and a safety net if someone gets really sick. And, if all goes well and the grandparents can stay in their home until they die, a home can give the next generation a boost. Selling that home can provide a family with the money needed to move up the ladder, which, in turn, means that the grandchildren will have better chances in life.
That was the big and brilliant idea. Start with homeownership, build a little more security, and then build a little more and a little more. Diversify into retirement savings, maybe get a better job or start a business, help the kids, and then the grandkids—and keep the ball rolling forward. And it worked that way, one generation after another, for much of the twentieth century, at least for white Americans. But for black and Latino Americans, it was like swimming with rocks in your pocket: possible, but a lot harder.
Housing discrimination isn’t the only way systemic racism pulls black and Latino families down. Discrimination has been thoroughly documented in criminal justice, in employment, in education, in auto lending, in access to bankruptcy relief, and in health care—even in access to stores that sell fresh produce. The cumulative impact of decade after decade of discrimination becomes painfully obvious in just a handful of economic snapshots:
Among those who work full-time, African Americans earn 59 cents and Latinos earn 70 cents for every dollar earned by whites.
For each dollar a college degree adds to the income of a black or Latino graduate, the same degree adds about $11 to $13 for whites.
Compared to whites, African Americans are 80 percent more likely to be unemployed; for Latinos, that figure is 37 percent.
Compared to white families, black families are 68 percent more likely, and Latino families twice as likely, to have nothing in retirement savings.
The financial crash pounded all families, regardless of race. The devastation wasn’t, however, evenly spread out. Everyone—blacks, Latinos, whites—got cheated on mortgages, but a much higher proportion of blacks and Latinos got cheated. And when they got cheated, everyone—blacks, Latinos, whites—often got wiped out, but a higher proportion of blacks and Latinos had nothing else to fall back on. Blacks and Latinos had lower incomes and less in savings, and they got less help from other family members. The lesson is clear: economic racism makes every other problem worse.
Michael will never get over the 2008 crash. The memory of the day he and his family packed up and moved out will be with him forever. Whatever else happens in his life, he will always recall shoveling the snow and mowing the lawn and checking on the robins long after the bank had taken away his home.
A handful of Wall Street insiders boosted their companies’ short-term profits and pumped up their own fat bonuses by selling financial grenades with the pins pulled out, and millions of people like Michael ended up with their lives blown apart. I know life isn’t fair, but how did our country get to the point where this much unfairness became business as usual? Surely we are a better people than that.
YOUNG DREAMS
In the spring of 1966, when I was sixteen, I started going home every day for lunch. The house was empty, because Mother was working at Sears and Daddy was out selling fences. But I wasn’t there for company; I just wanted to check the mail.
I had found two prospective colleges, one by searching through a book in the high school counselor’s office and one through a boy I knew; both schools bragged about their debate scholarships. I was a good debater—on my way to the state championship—and I figured that was my chance. So I’d taken the cash from babysitting and waitressing and bought two money orders from the 7-Eleven to cover the two application fees, then played the waiting game. I was putting all my chips on the hope that one of those places would give me a big enough scholarship to make it possible for me to go to college. And now I was praying that one of them would come through.
By that spring, college was all I could focus on. Ever since I’d been a little girl, I had wanted to be a teacher. And no one gets to be a teacher without a college degree.
For weeks, nothing turned up. Friends were getting their acceptances and starting to talk about which dorms they would live in or what majors they would declare. And I kept going home for lunch.
One day I dashed out of history class the instant the bell rang. As I came around the corner onto our street, I saw the red flag up on the mailbox, signaling that we had mail. Inside lay two fat envelopes, one on top of the other. I stood in our front yard and tore into each one. The first letter was from Northwestern. The university was offering me a scholarship, a work-study job, and a student loan. I quickly did the calculations and saw that I would still need to come up with maybe another $1,000 or so each year—an amount I could just about cover with a summer job. This was it: I could go to college. For sure.
Then I ripped open the second letter, from George Washington University, and—wow!—it was offering a full scholarship and a federal loan. That was all I needed to know: then and there I decided to become a GW Colonial. I had never seen either school, and I didn’t know how I’d get to Washington or where I would live, but even so, I was headed to GW!
I sprung it on my parents that night. They already knew about the applications, but no one had said anything for months. We’d all been waiting, just tiptoeing around until the news came in. Now I was dancing around the kitchen big-time, waving the forms and talking about the humongous size of the scholarship (or, at least, that’s how it seemed at the time). Daddy grinned. Good on you, punkin.
Mother was more shocked, but she recovered. College—and a way to pay for
