Racism creates economically unequal communities

Wendell is a second-year medical student.

By Osborne Wendell

I was quietly eating my lunch when I came across a submission in
the Viewpoint section written by Matt Kennedy (“Economic
advantages more significant than race,” Daily Bruin,
Viewpoint, Nov. 20) that reminded me of the neoconservative
ideology that has been rampant since the civil rights struggles to
turn back the clock on the ideals of equality. Kennedy’s
basic argument is that certain groups in our society are not
successful due to their lack of hard work and that racism is just a
petty excuse since, “Any hard worker can make a class
shift.”

Kennedy’s arguments lack credibility in that there is no
basic historical analysis to back up his claims. He argues that
modern-day segregation is not rooted in racism but on market
forces. But it is no accident that children of color have to be
bused into UCLA from neighborhoods that are generally poor and
located southeast of Westwood to get a glimpse of the privileged
campus population, containing few people like them. In order to
understand modern-day segregation we must go through a brief
history.

The Federal Housing Administration’s practice of
redlining, and real estate practices of steering and blockbusting
were some of the methods used to force non-whites into undesirable
living conditions in poor communities. Redlining, which began with
the New Deal politics of the 1930s and continued on through the
1970s, is a practice enforced by banks and private lenders that
denied loans based on racial criteria where white people benefited
in comparison to non-whites.

This process which aided segregation and stifled integration,
led to asset accumulation among whites, and most importantly,
racialized space by keeping people of color confined to the poorest
areas of the city. Real estate practices continued the trend of
segregation by way of racial steering and blockbusting. Racial
steering was a way of ensuring that white customers only saw white
neighborhoods and non-white customers only saw non-white
neighborhoods, thus ensuring segregation. Blockbusting was a
profitable scheme by real estate agents who used fear to get whites
to move out of neighborhoods and buy property somewhere else when a
non-white person moved into the neighborhood.

After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968,
there were wide spread uprisings throughout the urban ghettos of
this nation. Out of these uprisings came the Anti-Riot Bill along
with the Fair Housing Act. The Anti-Riot Bill was strictly
enforced, but the Fair Housing Act which claimed to ban
discrimination in housing, was not implemented to the same
degree.

Title XIII of the Fair Housing Act allowed citizens to make
complaints. Authorities receiving such complaints could only
persuade the law-breakers to comply with the law. If the matter
went to court, the plaintiffs had to pay their own legal costs and
court costs. The maximum a citizen could receive in punitive
damages was $1,000. Out of the thousands of complaints less than 30
percent led to mediation and less than 50 percent of these lead to
compliance.

Since the time of its implementation between 1968 and 1986 only
five victims were given punitive damages. Regardless of these
“changes” and the so-called endorsement of the
principle of racial equality by many whites, fair housing has yet
to be implemented.

In order to comprehend the effects of this inequality I will
discuss wealth disparities between blacks and whites.

Melvin Oliver, a professor at UCLA, and Thomas Shapiro in
“Black Wealth/White Wealth” analyze wealth using two
indicators: net worth and net financial assets. Net worth is the
value of all assets minus any debts. Net financial assets excludes
equity accrued in a home or vehicle from the calculation of a
household’s available resources.

In the research generated using these variables, it was
demonstrated that African Americans in comparison to whites when
controlling for human capital endowments such as education, jobs,
income and skills ““ “a potent difference of $43,143 in
home equity and financial assets still remains.”

This difference, in large part, is due to generational transfers
of wealth (inheritance), which were mainly accrued through asset
accumulation in the housing market discussed earlier. Therefore
today, on average, when a person of color goes to the bank to
secure a home loan to move to the economically privileged
neighborhoods, he or she is denied the loan since they do not have
enough equity to be approved, thus perpetuating segregation.

This is not as simple as “money talks.”
Kennedy’s argument that Asian Americans are an example of
people of color that have made it due to their cultural values is
shortsighted. On the one hand he argues that inequality is due to
economic advantages when it comes to explaining disparities, but
when it comes to explaining the Asian success story he uses their
culture to explain their success. In order to explain this Asian
myth it is important to look at immigration policy.

Immigration from Asia, as designed by immigration law, allowed
substantially more professionals to come to the United States (50
percent of Asian immigrants versus 24 percent of all immigrants
between 1961-1977) in comparison to other countries.

According to Ivan Light, in “Immigrant Entrepreneur:
Koreans in Los Angeles 1965-1988″, more than half of Korean
immigrant entrepreneurs arrived in Los Angeles with assets ranging
from $60,000 to $250,000. During this same time period in Los
Angeles, an estimated 75,000 heavy manufacturing jobs (jobs that
paid a living wage with benefits unlike the jobs in the service
sector which are the main cause of the lowest unemployment rates
for African Americans and Latinos today) that were concentrated in
African American and Latino communities were lost.

Based on these statistics it is a fallacy to assume that because
a bigger portion of the Asian population in the United States is
successful, other people of color don’t work hard. In fact,
many Asian Americans are not well off. In Los Angeles the poorest
group financially are Southeast Asians, which I can assure you, do
not lack cultural values.

I will assume that Kennedy most likely was not aware of these
issues. Most likely he is a product of the American value system
that believes in the American dream, which for the poor is an
American nightmare. It is time we reeducate ourselves and question
the educational system that neglects to mention the truth behind
inequality but instead is part of the hegemony used to justify
it.