The protests in Ferguson over the murder of Mike Brown may have decreased in size and number since they began in early August, but the question remains for the community of Ferguson and in fact, for the entire country - how could "this" have happened again? This week we look at this question through the lens of federal housing policy and predatory lending, from community activists who have been living and organizing around structural inequality, and how surplus military gear finds its way into thousands of towns like Ferguson across the country.
Despite fifty years of federal housing policy, many communities are just as segregated as ever. Nikole-Hannah Jones, investigative reporter for ProPublica and author of the new e-book, Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law, explains how federally mandated redlining following the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing Act actually created new segregation and gave rise to the myth of black neglect leading to disinvestment: "There suddenly became a financial disincentive to have an integrated neighborhood and so this kind of truism that black people brought property values down, which we still believe, it wasn't because black people weren't caring for their property, it was literally the federal government would not insure a loan in a neighborhood so property values did go down."
The Great Recession further exacerbated the problem of segregation and the persistent lack of opportunity in low-income communities that we see today. The federal policies that reproduce segregation work in lockstep with the predatory lending practices of the big banks, creating great wealth for those at the top. "It’s actually working as it’s designed to work. It means that there are winners and there are losers and the winners are the big banks and the losers are ordinary Americans: the consumers, the borrowers and taxpayers," reflects Jennifer Taub, law professor at Vermont Law School who has written extensively about the 2008 financial crisis. Jennifer's new book is Other People's Houses: How Decades of Bailouts, Captive Regulators, and Toxic Bankers Made Home Mortgages a Thrilling Business.
"Segregation was created by social engineering. We were fine with it then. It’s using social engineering to undo it is what seems to be the problem," adds Nikole.
Check out the whole interview, as well as our Chew on This segment with Ferguson activists and this week's "F' Word on Military Surplus. For further discussion on ideas for challenging these unequal structures in our communities, check out our interview with Chris Mackin, and to learn more about structural racism, check out our interview with Mab Segrest.
