Black Reparations for Twentieth Century Federal Housing Discrimination: The Construction of White Wealth and the Effects of Denied Black Homeownership
Boston University Public Interest Law Journal, Volume 29, Issue 135 (Winter 2019)
This paper examines the U.S. government’s instigation, participation, authorization, and perpetuation of federal housing discrimination against black-Americans from the 1930s to the 1980s and the damage that such discrimination caused and continues to cause today. Delving into the U.S. government’s twentieth century federal housing practices, this paper discusses how the government effectively barred black-Americans from obtaining quality housing and from investing in housing as wealth, while simultaneously subsidizing and endorsing white homeownership, white suburbs, and white wealth. Quantifying the U.S. government’s discriminatory practices with current wealth gaps between white- and black-American communities, this paper discusses the effects of twentieth century federal housing discrimination and argues that such government-initiated wrongs justify black reparations.
Part I examines the U.S. government’s housing practices—from the New Deal until the 1968 Fair Housing Act and its 1988 Amendments—to reveal that although the New Deal’s national housing programs revolutionized homeownership and home equity in the United States, the U.S. government’s federal housing programs were racially discriminatory. Specifically, and quite shockingly, the U.S. government actively created and promulgated racist neighborhood rating systems that constructed black neighborhoods and black property as unstable, volatile, hazardous, and not worthy of investment. Using these racist rating systems, the federal government endorsed racial covenants and invested federal money into the creation and accumulation of white wealth, the value of whiteness, white suburbia, and white homeownership. Meanwhile, the government denied blacks federal housing funding, fueling black stigma and barring black-Americans from the invaluable twentieth century opportunities of homeownership and home equity.
Understanding the U.S. government’s discriminatory housing practices, Part II discusses and quantifies the effects of the government’s housing discrimination on black-American households and communities.
Finding that approximately 120 billion 1950s dollars—or more than 1.239 quintillion 2019 dollars—were invested to subsidize and create white-American wealth through homeownership, Part II discusses both the quantifiable and the less quantifiable effects of twentieth century federal housing discrimination. Mapping the impact of the U.S. government’s discriminatory housing practices to the black-white wealth gap, Part II argues that the black-white wealth gap may be attributable, at least in part, to twentieth century federal housing discrimination.
In conclusion, this paper argues in favor of black reparations for the discriminatory U.S. housing practices that persisted from the 1930s to the 1980s—and whose remnants pervasively continue to damage black-American communities today. At a minimum, this paper argues that the U.S. government should compensate black-Americans for the
1.239 quintillion dollars of discriminatory federal housing spending.
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the first documented arrival of Africans to the United States, which resulted in the enslavement of approximately 4 mil
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This is government dependence.
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