The first step was inventing what became known as “color-blind freedom” to justify discrimination. Per Wilson’s request, the national realtors’ organization created a secret action kit to oppose fair housing everywhere. The kit’s detailed scripts instructed realtors to “focus on freedom” and avoid “discussion of emotionally charged subjects,” such as “inferiority of races.” This kit, weighing a pound and a half and distributed to the local real-estate board in every American city, provided form speeches, Q&As, and press releases for their cause. Freedom, the kit explained, meant each owner’s right to discriminate, and realtors were in favor of “freedom for all”: the equal rights of all owners to choose whom to sell to. Realtors claimed that they, unlike civil-rights advocates, were color-blind.
Was this a reaction to affirmative action and racial quotas?
They frame it as if this all came out of nowhere, but I suspect they're intentionally leaving out key facts.
Term from the anti-racist narrative of the time one of their consistent tactics is to respin older anti-racist narrative as somehow suddenly being "racist".
Here's how it probably would have been written before they rewrote it:
The national realtors’ organization has created a sales kit that suggests realtors should focus on freedom and avoid discussion of negative emotionally charged subjects such as race. It provided form speeches, q&a's, and press releases to encourage people to move and buy houses. Freedom meant that you could own property and live where you wanted - a narrative that appealed to everyone including blacks who's ex-slave ancestors had been prohibited from owning property.
It's like a disease or something, they take their own anti-racism narrative and use it to claim their continued attacks.
Redlining is one of those cargo cult things that people say without fully understanding what it means. They just say it because they know they're supposed to say it. By the way they talk you'd think every realtor and banker in the country was constantly conspiring against the black man. You could call it a...conspiracy theory.
In reality, bankers exist purely to make money. It's as simple as that. If certain people are more likely to default on a loan, those people aren't getting money, and back then they made those decision on a neighborhood basis. If a neighborhood was determined to be a high risk area, they wouldn't give loans to people from that area.
Oftentimes those were black areas, but they weren't redlined because they were black, they were redlined because they were poor. If a black person was willing and able to make their payments, a bank would be happy to charge them exorbitant interest just like they do to the rest of us. Why wouldn't they? It's literally free money.
Within the first paragraph they concede that desire for freedom belongs entire to the right. That pretty much nullifies anything the rest of the article is about to say.
Freedom of Association, including freedom to not-associate with people you don't like, is fundamental.
If you can't choose to avoid associating with people you don't like, you're not free.
Was this a reaction to affirmative action and racial quotas?
They frame it as if this all came out of nowhere, but I suspect they're intentionally leaving out key facts.
Term from the anti-racist narrative of the time one of their consistent tactics is to respin older anti-racist narrative as somehow suddenly being "racist".
Here's how it probably would have been written before they rewrote it:
It's like a disease or something, they take their own anti-racism narrative and use it to claim their continued attacks.
Redlining is one of those cargo cult things that people say without fully understanding what it means. They just say it because they know they're supposed to say it. By the way they talk you'd think every realtor and banker in the country was constantly conspiring against the black man. You could call it a...conspiracy theory.
In reality, bankers exist purely to make money. It's as simple as that. If certain people are more likely to default on a loan, those people aren't getting money, and back then they made those decision on a neighborhood basis. If a neighborhood was determined to be a high risk area, they wouldn't give loans to people from that area.
Oftentimes those were black areas, but they weren't redlined because they were black, they were redlined because they were poor. If a black person was willing and able to make their payments, a bank would be happy to charge them exorbitant interest just like they do to the rest of us. Why wouldn't they? It's literally free money.
Within the first paragraph they concede that desire for freedom belongs entire to the right. That pretty much nullifies anything the rest of the article is about to say.