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.