Quotes About Race

The zone plan drafted by Whitten and published by the Atlanta City Planning Commission in 1922 explained that "race zoning is essential in the interest of the public peace, order and security and will promote the welfare and prosperity of both the white and colored race.

in Rollingwood ten years earlier, one of the federal government's specifications for mortgages insured in Milpitas was an openly stated prohibition on sales to African Americans.

State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance.

ALONG WITH THE real estate industry and state courts, the FHA justified its racial policies—both its appraisal standards and its restrictive covenant recommendations—by claiming that a purchase by an African American in a white neighborhood, or the presence of African Americans in or near such a neighborhood, would cause the value of the white-owned properties to decline.

Indeed, the study confirmed that because African Americans were willing to pay more than whites for similar housing, property values in neighborhoods where African Americans could purchase increased more often than they declined.

It is obvious from a glance at the . . . transit plans that an attempt is being made to eliminate the Negro and Puerto Rican ghetto areas by . . . building highways that benefit white suburbanites, facilitating their movement from the suburbs to work and back.

The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red. A neighborhood earned a red color if African Americans lived in it, even if it was a solid middle-class neighborhood of single-family homes.

For example, many African American World War II veterans did not apply for government-guaranteed mortgages for suburban purchases because they knew that the Veterans Administration would reject them on account of their race, so applications were pointless.

until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live.

The existence of black ghettos is a visible reminder of our inequalities and history, a reminder whose implications are so uncomfortable that we find ways to avoid them.

One of the more important books on American race relations of the past decade or more is Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, published in 2010.

Richard Rothstein

We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate

The value of white working- and middle-class families' suburban housing appreciated substantially over the years, resulting in vast wealth differences between whites and blacks that helped to define permanently our racial living arrangements. Because parents can bequeath assets to their children, the racial wealth gap is even more persistent down through the generations than income differences.

The USHA manual warned that it was undesirable to have projects for white families "in areas now occupied for Negroes" and added: "The aim of the [local housing] authority should be the preservation rather than the disruption of community social structures which best fit the desires of the groups concerned.

One leaflet, distributed in white neighborhoods but pretending to be addressed to African Americans, suggested that a vote for Frankensteen would bring black families to white communities. It read: NEGROES CAN LIVE ANYWHERE WITH FRANKENSTEEN MAYOR. NEGROES – DO YOUR DUTY NOV. 6.

Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean. (When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don't characterize those whites as inner city families.)

We don't hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in Eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as the inner city, yet everyone knows what we mean. (When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don't characterize those whites as inner city families.)

God says, Which one of you fuckers can get to me first?

but where's the checkered flag we all expected, waving in the distance, telling you you're home again, home?

About one in 16 White males can expect to go to a state or federal prison during his lifetime, yet for Black males this lifetime probability is one out of three (Bureau of the Census 2010a:Tables 320, 346, 615; Gaines 2005).

Criminal Justice A complex, sensitive topic affecting African Americans is their role in criminal justice. It was reported in 2010 that Blacks constitute 4.7 percent of all lawyers, 14.1 percent of police officers, 14.9 percent of detectives, and 28.6 percent of security guards but 39 percent of jail inmates.

On racial issues, though, he made no effort to adjust to modernity.143 When asked if he had seen the film Carmen Jones, a musical with a black cast, he replied that he had walked out early on as he didn't like 'blackamoors'.

Yet although he was undoubtedly sincere in his intention that all races should be treated with justice, that notion was perfectly consistent in his mind with the concept of white supremacy. For him, there was a duty incumbent on the superior British race to safeguard and improve lesser ones. That, indeed, was part of the justification for imperial rule.