January 25, 2017
Page 7
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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.