By Sikivu
Hutchinson
White people have
started to return to South Los Angeles. They
can be seen watering lawns, walking dogs, and frequenting local restaurants. Legend has it that there are a few white families
that never left during the postwar mass exodus that magically transformed what
was once Southwest L.A. into “South Central”—that internationally notorious, mythic
den of drugs, drive-bys and destruction that launched a thousand gangsta rap careers
and corporate parasites rolling to the bank on the backs of “bitches” and “hos.”
Back in the day all
of the “bad” black and brown schools in Compton, Watts, and Inglewood were
teeming with whites. Americana Leave it
to Beaver mom icon Barbara Billingsley even graduated from a local ‘hood school
in the 1930s. But these new white transplants
are merely symbols of the turbulent real estate market, not inner city
missionaries slumming for an ethnographic high.
They’re canaries in the coalmine of negative equity. Priced out of the “better”
(read white) areas of the city some white homebuyers have been forced to
venture back into the hood. Snapping up
Spanish or Craftsman-style bungalows in savvy short sales they’re rediscovering
the “quaintness” of Black neighborhoods that their forebears escaped decades
ago courtesy of government programs like the GI Bill and FHA mortgage lending. Touring the streets wide-eyed with their
travelogues some register surprise at the area’s suburban aura, the “tidiness”
of the homes, the “unexpected” pride in ownership that the natives demonstrate.
But having the luxury to move back to the “ghetto” they built through
generations of apartheid housing policies is part of whites’ democratic birthright.
White American
democracy has always meant the bliss of segregation and the willful ignorance
of the bodies that get displaced. It’s
ladled out in cultural initiations like being warned to keep the car windows up
when driving through Black areas or having a nifty cell phone app nicknamed
“Avoid Ghetto.” Even in the era of rampant
“Main Street” foreclosure and negative equity white American democracy still
means the privilege of mobility. When
whites move into neighborhoods that residents of color have been forced to
leave due to plummeting home values and high unemployment it’s called
gentrification. It is only cause for
national political action and reform when white middle class homeowners are
impacted by imploding housing bubbles. Bipartisan
political rhetoric that fixates on the “middle class” (as the default
category), while marginalizing disproportionately asset poor working class people of color, merely reinforces a
colorblind class myth where struggling white people have it “just as bad” as
people of color.
This is true, because, for the party of the Religious Right,
poor people don’t work and they don’t pay taxes. God’s pecking order does not favor being on
the dole and accepting handouts. American
exceptionalism is validated by the specter of the Black ghetto as den of
immorality. According to this narrative
African Americans have squandered the advantages of living in a democratic
society in which everyone has an equal chance at economic mobility. Black poverty is only immoral insofar as it
reflects a certain cultural indolence and pathology on the part of shiftless
blacks. While “cultures of poverty”
corrupt, cultures of success, based on capitalism, free enterprise, and hard
work, uplift and moralize. Systemic discrimination
has never been deemed immoral in the American mainstream. For the Right, systemic discrimination is a
quaint oxymoron, vestige of a primitive era when the U.S. was presumably less
evolved. The moral universe consists of
getting ahead through a mish mash of Darwinian manifest destiny; the way God
wanted it, free of the fetters of restrictive public policy that rewards the
sloth of homeowners of color.
In 2011 former
mortgage giant Countrywide was found guilty of engaging in predatory lending which
targeted Black and Latino homebuyers. Last
week lending titan Wells Fargo settled a lawsuit
after it was accused of steering over 30,000 Black and Latino homebuyers to
subprime loans. The class action stemmed
from a Baltimore city lawsuit in which former employees alleged that Wells Fargo
“loan officers referred to minority borrowers as ‘mud people’ and called
subprime mortgages ‘ghetto loans.’” During
the lending boom Wells Fargo officials regularly conducted “wealth building” seminars
in communities of color, (often headlined by talk show host Tavis Smiley) where
reps secretly peddled subprime loans.
So while homebuyers
of color were essentially taxed for being black or brown; white homebuyers “bootstrapped”
their way to the American dream with lower interest rates and better terms
handed to them by the big banks. “Homebuying
while white,” many of them had the same credit scores and incomes as applicants
of color. What they didn’t have was the
same capital and asset holdings. Not only is Black and Latino wealth a fraction
of white wealth but the vast majority of it is based on home equity; home
equity that has been pillaged by Wells Fargo, Countrywide, Bank of America and
other lenders. As Yuan Miu of the Washington Post argues, the housing bust
has “left a scar on the finances of black America…(it) has not only wiped out a
generation of economic progress but could leave them at financial disadvantage
for generations to come.”
Yet mainstream
narratives on the housing meltdown tend to revolve around irresponsible
homebuyers lapping up variable mortgages they couldn’t pay off or vulnerable
homebuyers sacrificed on the altar of Wall Street’s credit default swap morass.
After President Obama finished bailing
out the big Wall Street banks his rhetoric turned to shoring up Main Street. To hear Obama tell it, the brunt of the
crisis was squarely centered in Middle America.
Urban neighborhoods devastated by the TKO of predatory lending, foreclosure,
job discrimination, and mass incarceration barely registered on the radar of
the administration or the mainstream media. There was little mass outrage over the immoral
systematic disenfranchisement of Black and Latino homebuyers by the banking crooks. Neither GOP lawmakers, nor prominent Democrats,
other than a few in the Congressional Black Caucus, rushed to criticize the
lending industry’s white affirmative action. Nor did they condemn the racist
practices of bankruptcy attorneys who refer debt-ridden Black consumers to more
costly Chapter 13 bankruptcy
filings.
Being against “big government” or social welfare for working
class communities of color has always been about morality. It is reflected in right wing venom against
public employee unions and health care reform which are both overwhelmingly
supported by people of color. It is amplified
in racist discourse around illegal immigration, spearheaded by Christian
fascist states in the Bible Belt and the Southwest. As the white population and white births
continue to decline nativist propaganda against racial, social, and gender justice
has become more unabashedly Christian fascist.
It’s the wages of white affirmative action that have always defined American
democracy—model for the civilized world.
Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Moral
Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars and the
forthcoming Godless Americana: Race and Religious
Rebels.
