Understanding the Impact that prior Discrimination Against African Americans Has on the Condition of African Americans in Our Time
Ron Perritt was one of a dozen participants along with David Treppendahl in JustFaith Ministries series entitled: “Faith & Racial Equity: Exploring Power and Privilege. ” It required about 30 hours on Zoom and an additional 30 hours of reading. This experience significantly changed our perspective on the topic of race in America.
There are several factors necessary for accumulation of wealth in our economy, especially since WWII. These include opportunities for good paying jobs, education, and financial resources. In general, wealth in one generation is necessary to access to higher education and good jobs for the next generation. The disparity between black citizens and white citizens regarding these factors has always been enormous in America. When black people have had access to these requirements, they have indeed done very well. The general economic condition of the black community today is a result of being denied these success factors in previous generations. Certainly, no one can argue that the quality of the educational system for black people has been anywhere near that for whites until recently. Segregation resulted in a second-class education for most black children. For example, in 1930 there were just four black high schools in the entire state of Louisiana and black teachers were paid just over half of that paid to white teachers. Since white people owned most businesses, good jobs most often went to other whites. Redlining has prevented black families from access owning homes in good neighborhoods where they could accumulate wealth from the appreciation of home values. All these factors have resulted in less opportunity for blacks to accumulate wealth relative to whites.
Government programs in the not so distant past have been biased in favor of whites. Three example include:
(1)”One of the multiple programs a newly-elected Franklin D. Roosevelt established to stimulate the economy offered home-buying aid for Americans—but only white Americans. The Federal Housing Administration, operated through the New Deal’s National Housing Act of 1934, promoted homeownership by providing federal backing of loans—guaranteeing mortgages. But from its inception, the FHA limited assistance to prospective white buyers…The FHA had a manual which explicitly said that it was risky to make mortgage loans in predominantly Black areas, …And so as a result, the federal subsidy for home ownership went almost entirely to white people…The assistance program not only limited recipients to white Americans, it established and then reinforced housing segregation in the United States, effectively drawing lines between white and Black neighborhoods that would persist for generations. For example, in 1940, the FHA denied insurance to a private builder in Detroit because he intended to construct a housing development near a predominantly Black neighborhood. The FHA only wanted to insure houses in white neighborhoods.” For a fuller discussion of this topic, see https://www.history.com/news/housing-segregation-new-deal-program and The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.
(2) Benefits under the GI Bill program after WWII were denied to millions of black service men. Thus they were denied an opportunity to get a higher education, high paying jobs and accumulation of wealth which would benefit the next generation. “In 1947, only 2 of the more than 3,200 VA-guaranteed home loans in 13 Mississippi cities went to Black borrowers…These impediments were not confined to the South…In New York and the northern New Jersey suburbs, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI bill supported home purchases by non-whites…The original GI Bill ended in July 1956. By that time, nearly 8 million World War II veterans had received education or training, and 4.3 million home loans worth $33 billion had been handed out. But most Black veterans had been left behind. As employment, college attendance and wealth surged for whites, disparities with their Black counterparts not only continued, but widened.” If you want to read more, go to https://www.history.com/news/gi-bill-black-wwii-veterans-benefits
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(3) Although our government’s most basic responsibility is to ensure every citizen has a right to vote, it was only in 1964-65 that most black people had the opportunity to vote and change policies that were clearly detrimental. It took our predominantly white government 200 years to mandate the most basic constitutional right for everyone, a right that is continually under siege by white legislators at the state and federal level.
I was able to go to college because my father went to college on the GI bill and, as a result, got a good job which gave me opportunities that I would have never have had otherwise.
You miss the point if you think that David is arguing that the events of 200 years ago are the reason blacks are far behind economically. The government policies and the other factors I mentioned occurred in recent decades and they have drastically reduced the opportunity for black families to succeed compared to whites.
Perhaps the greatest challenge facing blacks today is that so many whites even now hold prejudiced attitudes about blacks that has changed little from 200 years ago. Many whites still, whether they admit it or not, perceive blacks as a whole to be lazy, dishonest, and dangerous. This perspective by those who dominate society continues to greatly disadvantage black people in virtually every possible way.