Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Portland observer. (Portland, Or.) 1970-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 25, 2017)
January 25, 2017 Page 7 Opinion articles do not necessarily represent the views of the Portland Observer. We welcome reader essays, photos and story ideas. Submit to news@portlandobserver.com. O PINION Without Housing, King’s Dream Isn’t Reality The vision for economic justice k enneth W orleS Not long ago, I saw a comment on an on- line article about the rise in protests for civil rights by black Ameri- cans. “We gave you a president,” wrote the commenter. “We gave you your damn Oscar. What more do you want?” Never mind the White House. What many black people still long for is any house at all. In 1966 at Chicago’s Soldier Field, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. expounded on this dream. “We are tired of living in rat-infested slums,” he said. “Now is the time to make real the promises of de- mocracy. Now is the time to open the doors of opportunity to all of God’s children.” by That door to opportunity is home ownership — which, for most Americans, is their single most valuable asset. Yet more than half of African Americans don’t own homes. A recent re- port by the Institute for Policy Studies highlights that only 41 percent of black families are home- owners, compared to 71 percent of white families. White people don’t own homes at greater rates because they picked themselves up by their bootstraps while black people sat around. After the Great Depres- sion, the federal government start- ed subsidizing housing for white folks to help them get back on their feet. Wealth inequality expert Chuck Collins, a coauthor of the IPS re- port, explained on NPR’s Market- place: “In the decade following World War II, our nation made unprecedented public investments to subsidize debt-free college ed- ucation and low-cost mortgages. These wealth-building measures benefited millions of mostly white households.” But if you weren’t white, you missed the boat. In fact, the re- port notes, just 2 percent of Fed- eral Housing Administration loans went to non-white households in the years following World War II. Meanwhile, discriminatory housing practices have held Afri- can Americans back. Throughout the 20th century, realty associations and discrimi- natory financial institutions con- spired to disenfranchise would-be black homeowners. Real estate agents, explains Morehouse pro- fessor Marc Lamont Hill, “fol- lowed an unwritten edict: Sell homes in white neighborhoods to black buyers and you will lose your license.” Even when some blacks were beginning to successfully build wealth, it was taken away. Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “slum clearance” measures spread rapidly throughout the country, leading to widespread demolitions of black middle-class homes. In the name of expanding pub- lic housing, many black families literally lost the roof over their heads. More recently, subprime lend- ing has emerged as the most dan- gerous attack on African-Amer- ican homeowners. Thanks to predatory mortgage practices, black families lost three to four times as much wealth during the Great Recession as white fami- lies. This may have been no acci- dent. Federal investigations after the crash revealed that Wells Far- go loan officers referred to black customers as “mud people” and called black mortgages “ghetto loans.” To reverse these trends, we need to create a housing boom for low-income and first-time minori- ty homeowners, invest in financial literacy and career readiness pro- grams, and bring middle-class and high-wage jobs into newly devel- oped black neighborhoods. “A society has a moral obliga- tion to make a large, aggressive investment,” President Obama said recently, “in order to close those gaps” between black and white Americans. A truly “aggressive invest- ment” would ensure not only eq- uity for African Americans in this country, but would also expand middle-class America, reduce crime in America’s major cities, and improve schools in urban communities. Without that, Dr. King’s dream is still deferred. Kenneth Worles is the Newman Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Imagine Russia Blackmailing a Sitting President Serious matter deserves investigating J ill r ichardSon The week lead- ing up to the presi- dential inauguration brought streams, if not floods, of pee jokes. You might even say it was the number one opportunity for scat- ological humor since the poop cruise of 2013. My heart goes out to parents who have to find an appropriate way to explain this to their chil- dren. The occasion for the pee jokes was a leaked, unverified report by on Russian anti-Trump intelli- gence. Someone described as a former British intelligence agent claims the Russians have been cultivating Trump for years, in part by gathering compromising information on him to hold over his head. In one especially lurid example, the source claims, Trump allegedly paid sex workers to engage in lewd urination-related acts in a Moscow hotel known “to have microphones and cameras in all the main rooms.” For those who support Trump, it’s a heinous and untrue case of scurrilous journalism. For those who oppose Trump, it’s an oppor- tunity to laugh at him. And laugh and laugh and laugh. If any of the allegations are true, though, it’s no laughing matter. Surprisingly, the two media outlets that got it right on this story are Saturday Night Live and Teen Vogue. Saturday Night Live made a lot of jokes, but they also portrayed Vladimir Putin using a tape of the “Big Russian Pee Pee Party” to blackmail Trump. Teen Vogue put the issue in less funny terms: “If allegations are true, and the Russian govern- ment does have compromising fi- nancial and personal information about Donald Trump, then we should be more concerned about whether or not this will have an effect on his foreign policy — and not laughing at his sexual preferences.” In other words, there are two possible scenarios. The better one, no doubt, is that there is no tape, there was no pee pee party, the Russians have nothing on Trump, and the whole thing was made up. Another fake news crisis is the last thing we need, but it’s better than the other option. Imagine what Russia could do if it were actually able to blackmail a sitting president of the United States. “Don’t interfere with us in Ukraine or we’ll release the tape.” “Let us do what we want in Syria or we’ll release the tape.” “Keep NATO out of countries near Russia or we’ll release the tape.” And so on. Trump has lashed out against the claims, calling them a “politi- cal witch hunt.” But rather than attacking any- one who mentions the allega- tions, Trump should take them seriously. If a foreign country has damaging material it could use to blackmail a U.S. president, that’s a serious matter that the president should investigate. And he shouldn’t handle it by disparaging or disbelieving his own intelligence agencies whenever they give him news he doesn’t like. As for the rest of us, there’s no harm in making jokes, so long as we remember that the real issue is blackmail, and not just a sala- cious (if unverified) story that’s good for a laugh. OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is the author of Rec- ipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It. Distributed by OtherWords.org.
