re: Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry bans teaching of critical race theory in schools

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specifically education in America.

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Redlining? Never happened

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Redlining Practices before 1968

The federal government played a key role in institutionalizing and encouraging redlining through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The FHA was the architect of federally sponsored redlining from 1934 until the 1960s. Other federal agencies, such as the Federal Reserve, regulated the banks and thrifts that originated or bought FHA-insured loans. Of the interactions between the Federal Reserve and the FHA, not much has been written. Fed Chair Marriner Eccles was intimately involved in drafting the legislation that created the FHA but left little record of his views about the FHA's redlining practices. One biographer of Eccles concludes that redlining was "one major failing of the FHA that Eccles, and very few others at the time, even bothered to mention."2

The FHA was tasked with insuring "economically sound" loans, as part of an overhaul of the system of residential mortgage finance that had been decimated by the Depression. The FHA began redlining at the very beginning of its operations in 1934, as FHA staff concluded that no loan could be economically sound if the property was located in a neighborhood that was or could become populated by Black people, as property values might decline over the life of the 15- to 20-year loans they were attempting to standardize. For example, the FHA's 1938 Underwriting Manual emphasized the negative impact of "infiltration of inharmonious racial groups" on credit risk. To limit that risk, it recommended restrictive covenants that prohibit "the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended," which had become increasingly common in the 1920s. For the next few decades, the FHA generally favored loans on new construction in suburban areas rather than urban areas with older housing stocks or Black residents.3

Prior to the creation of the FHA, many banks were highly restricted in the amount of mortgage loans they were allowed to make.4 Mortgage loans were historically considered risky by those who had crafted federal banking law. Regulators such as the Federal Reserve feared that banks could be unable to pay depositors on demand if their funds were locked up in mortgages, especially since the secondary market for mortgages was limited historically. The advent of FHA insurance in the 1930s led to new federal bank regulations that encouraged banks to hold FHA-insured loans. FHA-insured loans were viewed as relatively safe given the federal insurance and because the uniform nature of FHA-insured loans supported a secondary market that made the loans relatively easy to sell if needed. As a result, banks originated roughly half of the mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration from 1935 to 1941.5

Federal policy reflected segregation in American society at large. While the FHA institutionalized redlining, the practice did not originate with the federal government, and public and private redlining were fundamentally intertwined.6

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War on drugs/mass incarceration? Black commit more crimes.

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Don’t worry, it was never going to happen.

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Blacks are arrested more.

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There is no way of knowing who commits more crimes, only who is arrested at higher rates.

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Blacks are arrested more. There is no way of knowing who commits more crimes, only who is arrested at higher rates.

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