Renegade Latino

To begin, I want to state that I am talking about Affirmative Action in theory, not as it exists in practice. I’m not talking about “reverse discrimination” which, if it exists, exists because of the idea of A.A. being put into practice. I am only talking about A.A. as a societal system in which something is done to ameliorate the disparity between Whites and minorities in this country. That being said…

Minorities have been discriminated against in this country for years. To this day there is still institutional discrimination present in this country. It is not right to have oppressed a peoples for so long and then to just say everything will be ok if we are color-blind. Yes, we all know Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech in which he hopes for a day when his children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”, but that day is not today. Let me use the post World War II era in which many of our war veterans were looking for homes and the government decided to help as an example.

Through the Federal Housing Administration and the GI Bill, the U.S. government financed a substantial percentage of all mortgage loans between 1945-1960. While this sounds good, it was devastating to minorities seeking homes.

“The Federal Homeowners Loan Corporation played a key role, starting in the 1930s, in establishing standards for evaluating the risk of mortgage loans. It defined black, integrated, and racially changing neighborhoods as credit risks, and drew maps coloring these neighborhoods red. “Redlined” neighborhoods were deemed non-creditworthy. The FHA, VA and private banks accepted these maps as guidelines for making their own loans, thus for decades effectively depriving all but segregated white neighborhoods of access to mortgages.”

Therefore Whites got access to these homes but minorities did not. While whites moved into suburbia, minorities were moving into Cabrini Greens.

“Redlining” was put to and end when the government no longer allowed the FHLC to use race as a factor when giving loans and the like. But the discrimination did not stop. White flight began and realtors then used “block-busting” to make money. They would go to white families living in suburbs where a minority family had recently moved in and played on their fear of minorities to purchase their home for well below market price, then in turn sold it to a minority family for well over market price.

So now there have been Whites who were living in these suburban neighborhoods while their minority counterparts were in substandard living conditions. Now consider does the major source of equity come for a family? − in home ownership. Whites could use their homes as collateral for loans and access to credit while their minority counterparts had no such collateral (you don’t build equity paying rent) and no access to any credit. Not to mention that since school funding comes from local tax money, the schools near suburbia were much better off then the schools in the inner cities where the government had set up public housing; in other words White schools had more resources then minority schools. So Whites could pass on their homes and their money to their children who would again build on this but minorities had nothing to pass onto their children for them to build on. So not only did Whites start ahead of minorities because of racist government practices (a.k.a. Institutional Racism) the disparity grew as time went on. “Today, the net worth of the average Black family is about 1/8 that of the average white family.”

So my point is that the disparity that exists between Whites and minorities cannot be overcome by just believing in color-blindness. Minorities have been systematically oppressed for years and that puts them at a huge disadvantage today. You cannot expect an oppressed people to be able to compete with their oppressors.

Now whether the way Affirmative Action is in place today is correct is a discussion for another day.