In Black America, Pretending to Be White Has Exposed the Truth of White Privilege – It Pays To be White-skinned

The NYT is reporting yet another discriminatory practice in housing.

We searched the news archive nationally to see if we could find a trend. We did. In 2021, Atlanta Blackstar reported on Erica and Aaron Parker. The black couple who knew something was wrong when an initial appraiser valued their Loveland home at more than $42,000 less than the sales price for which they’d agreed to sell it.

In 2020, the Hill reported on a mixed-race couple in Florida whose home in Jacksonville had initially been valued by an appraiser at $330,000 back in June said the same residence was valued at more than 40 percent higher at a second appraisal after they removed images of their Black family members.

Just last month, CBS’s Moneywatch reported that a Pennsylvania mortgage company owned by billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway discriminated against potential Black and Latino homebuyers in Philadelphia, New Jersey and Delaware, the Department of Justice said Wednesday in what the agency called the second-largest settlement ever over allegations of “redlining.” Earlier this month, a New York county judge, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Richard Latin sided with a 34-year-old mother of two who sued the owners of roughly 6,300 apartments the Bronx’s Parkchester complex in the eastern Bronx after she was denied an apartment because she did not earn at least $62,000 a year, even though the CityFHEPS voucher she received from the Department of Social Services (DSS) would cover the full rent. The woman, who has been sleeping on the floor of a friend’s one-bedroom Parkchester apartment with her 1- and 5-year-old children, said an income that high would have made her ineligible for a voucher in the first place.

There is a trend. And the history of it goes back to the Reconstruction Era, pre-Jim Crow, post-Civil War. In an interview with PBS, historian Eric Foner, recalls: the Supreme Court declares the Civil Rights Law of 1875 unconstitutional in the civil rights cases of 1883, because the Fourteenth Amendment had outlawed discrimination by state governments. The Civil Rights Law is geared against discrimination by private businesses. And the court will rule that Congress has no power, under the Fourteenth Amendment, to outlaw private actions that may be discriminatory. Again, that’s social equality, which cannot be legislated by Congress.

The social mobility of the Black American has been stalled from, Education, Financial Empowerment, Housing, Human rights, and Access by a white owned and operated establishment. When you hear activists chant “Black Lives Matter” it’s because they never will. Discrimination is engrained in the bedrock of American institutions. The only change that is promising is the power of the Black voter to take their power back. Or leave the United States and take their working-class power, elsewhere. American businesses are struggling to find ways to retain the millennial workforce because those millennials graduated from white institutions with tee-shirts that read, “Black Lives Matter!”