by Curtis Bunn
“We have to completely reimagine what justice looks like. And I think that is attainable.”
Her optimism comes from criminal justice reform rising to a hot-button political issue in recent years. The Biden administration listed it as a priority. “Where people who are impacted can help is by voting,” Barnett said. “We have to get into Congress and the Senate progressive thinkers who are open to change. It’s necessary for us to build a better nation.”
Wigenton points to voting—more specifically, voter suppression as legislation that has to be addressed. States have various laws for the same election.
“Why is that and how is that acceptable?” she asked. “We need to have uniformity that would make it clearer and a lot easier for people to vote. We need consistency in our laws.”
Republicans did not appear to agree. The most sacred liberty of an American, the ability to vote, remains under attack, especially for Black people. Democrats are seeking to pass H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Advancement Act—renamed the “John Lewis Voting Rights Act of 2020” after the civil rights icon who passed in July 2020.
Broken down, the bill would thwart an individual state’s plans to make changes to the original 1965 Voting Rights Act—changes that would make it more difficult to vote—without preclearance from the Justice Department. The Supreme Court in 2013 struck down the preclearance requirement, saying it singled out states with a history of racialized voter suppression at the time the act was passed, which is strange because they were the states that exercised voter suppression.
In any case, Democrats control Congress after Georgia delivered Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in runoff elections, giving them a possible path forward for the legislation.
There was also a bill that would create a commission to address a controversial subject: reparations for the African American descendants of slavery.
Formerly enslaved people and their descendants have long sought compensation for their immense suffering under slavery, segregation, and systemic racism that clouds every institution in America. These efforts have been stalled at every turn.
U.S. representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, wants to try again and reintroduced the bill, known as H.R. 40.
“The call for reparations represents a commitment to entering a constructive dialogue on the role of slavery and racism in shaping present-day conditions in our community and American society,” Lee said in a statement. “It is a holistic bill in the sense that it seeks to establish a commission to also examine the moral and social implications of slavery.”
The issue of reparations has been discussed by some Black Americans ever since United States Union Army general William Tecumseh Sherman promised forty acres and a mule to 4 million freed slaves in 1865.
But many Black Americans think that while reparations is an important issue to be considered, it is an unwieldy topic that is hard to quantify and manage. Some say reparations could cost the federal government trillions of dollars. The question that confounds many Black Americans is who would receive the money? And how would the cash be dispersed? And how much would people get?
“The reparations movement would be an amusing sideshow were it not for its damaging distractions,” Walter Williams, a professor of economics at George Mason University, wrote in a 2019 essay. “It grossly misallocates resources that could be better spent elsewhere.”
Author Ta-Nehisi Coates disagreed, saying: “The case I make for reparations is, virtually every institution with some degree of history in America, be it public, be it private, has a history of extracting wealth and resources out of the African-American community. I think what has often been missing…behind all of that oppression was actually theft. In other words, this is not just mean. This is not just maltreatment. This is the theft of resources out of that community.”
And that theft needs to be paid back, Coates argued. And the thieves need to make restitution.
Talk of reparations diminished some, as the focus by many Black Americans centered on shootings of unarmed Black men and women by police and enacting federal policies to support health care and combat the coronavirus pandemic. And the overpolicing of Black people. And fair housing and…
Indeed, the legislative concerns were plentiful, and the ratification—or failure—of bills would determine the opportunity for substantive change—or facilitate much of the same.
The Matter of the Wealth Gap
By Curtis Bunn
The protests around the country were about far more than the disturbing pattern of the killing of Black people at the hands of law enforcement. Like the uprisings in the 1960s, those horrific encounters served to elevate myriad points that crystallized the glaring disparities that stunt fairness and progress in the United States.
America’s wealth gap was a significant point of contention. Financial experts agree that home ownership is the most effective way to close that blatant chasm with the Federal Reserve indicating that the average homeowner’s wealth in 2016 was $231,400, while the average renter’s wealth was $5,200.
The Census Bureau reported that Black homeownership fell to a record low of 40.6 percent in the second half of 2019, affirming Black people’s ranking as the lowest in homeownership among all ethnic groups in America. Whites had a 2020 homeownership rate of 76 percent; Asians, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders 61.4 percent; and Hispanics 51.4 percent.
The Urban Institute—a Washington, D.C.–based think tank that executes economic and social policy research to “open minds, shape decisions, and offer solutions”—looked at one hundred American cities with the largest population of Black households, and did not find a single city that had a Black and white homeownership gap that is near to being close.
Minneapolis, for example, had an astounding 50 percent homeownership gap between white and Black residents. Measuring larger, more progressive cities such as Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., the gaps were still 25 percent and 20 percent, respectively.
It’s telling that the almost 30 percent gap across the country in white and Black homeownership of 2020 is larger than the 27 percent gap from 1960, when housing discrimination was legal.
How has this occurred? One reason is, according to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 2020, Black people were denied mortgages an astounding 80 percent more often than white applicants.
That outrage lines up with the gentrification phenomenon that has been seen across the United States. Washington, D.C., once proudly hailed as “Chocolate City” because of its predominant number of Black citizens, is vanilla now, with just 47.1 percent of its population Black. African Americans in Harlem, New York, which was 70 percent Black in the 1930s, are no longer in the majority.
In Chicago and Detroit, once famously Black cities, the numbers have dwindled each year. Indeed, in areas where Black residents were once dominant, research shows that homeownership levels have shifted in dramatic fashion because of gentrification and the increased housing costs that come with it. Atlanta maintains a predominantly Black population, but there are growing concerns that many people of color will be pushed to the suburbs as real estate prices continue to rise.
“If we look at where people end up if they move, poor residents moving from historically Black gentrifying neighborhoods tend to move to poorer non-gentrifying neighborhoods within the city,” the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act said, “while residents moving from other gentrifying neighborhoods tend to move to wealthier neighborhoods in the city and in the suburbs.”
An area was considered to be gentrifying if it experienced a significant increase, compared to other areas of the same city, either in median gross rent or median home value coupled with an increase in college-educated residents.
“Gentrification is reconfiguring the urban landscape by shrinking residential options within cities for disadvantaged residents and expanding them for more advantaged residents,” the study said.
A paradoxical problem with gentrification: Once white people move into communi
ties where Black people were the majority, investment in businesses and services come that had been previously absent. Which begs a question: Why was there not a quality grocery store, restaurants, banks, and other service-related enterprises when whites did not live there in abundance?
The answer is obvious—and offensive to Black people.
Advocates for gentrification have said it can work fairly with more housing construction in gentrifying areas to absorb newcomers, reducing displacement and curbing rents. At the same time, others have emphasized that adding apartments in high-income areas would allow others to enjoy their advantages and ease gentrification elsewhere.
But there are other social and cultural aspects of gentrification that cause resentment within Black communities. New white residents in the area of Howard University in Washington, D.C., have walked their dogs on the campus and allowed their pets to leave waste on the grounds. Instead of affording one of the most prestigious historically Black colleges—an institution that produced the first Black woman vice president in Kamala Harris and the first Black Supreme Court justice in Thurgood Marshall, among other notable alums—the respect and deference it deserved, one white man interviewed on local news said that if the students and administration had a problem with them walking their dogs on campus, “Then maybe they should move the campus.”
Filmmaker Spike Lee vehemently complained in 2014 about the attitude of the influx of wealthy white neighbors in his Brooklyn community who issued demands and disregarded the established culture. During a Black History Month appearance at the Pratt Institute, he laid out his concerns and ire in no uncertain terms, a controlled, profanity-laced tirade that summed up many people’s feelings.
“Why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better?” Lee said. “The garbage wasn’t picked up every motherfuckin’ day when I was living in 165 Washington Park. P.S. 20 was not good. P.S. 11. Rothschild 294. The police weren’t around. When you see white mothers pushing their babies in strollers, three o’clock in the morning on 125th Street, that must tell you something.”
The disdain or attempt to eliminate long-established cultural traditions also drew Lee’s indignation.
“Then comes the motherfuckin’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome,” the Oscar-winning writer and director said. “You can’t discover this! We been here. You just can’t come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherfuckin’ African drums in Mount Morris Park for forty years and now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherfuckin’-sixty-eight, and the motherfuckin’ people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic! We bought the motherfuckin’ house in nineteen-sixty-motherfuckin’-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the fuck outta here!
“Nah. You can’t do that. You can’t just come in the neighborhood and start bogarting and…like you’re motherfuckin’ Columbus and kill off the Native Americans. Or what they do in Brazil, what they did to the indigenous people. You have to come with respect. There’s a code. There’s people.”
Lee’s fury was in keeping with frustrations from countless Black people across the country. The issue, they and Lee contend, is not so much that white people move into historically Black neighborhoods, but that they seem hell bent on altering the landscape and without regard for those who had made those neighborhoods their home.
With gentrification, community names have been changed—like Stuyvesant Heights replacing Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn and SpaHa for Spanish Harlem in Harlem—an alarming trend that speaks to the issue of invisibility and communities effectively being erased, displaced, and separated from their culture, reminiscent of slavery.
“I’m for democracy and letting everybody live, but you gotta have some respect,” Lee said. “You can’t just come in when people have a culture that’s been laid down for generations and you come in and now shit gotta change because you’re here? Get the fuck outta here. Can’t do that!”
As profane, pointed, and on point as Lee’s seven-minute soliloquy may have been, the gentrification train plows on, with seemingly no way to slow it down. And, per usual in America, Black people will be impacted negatively the most.
Karen Garcia, a Bed-Stuy resident, was so disenchanted with the vast changes in her neighborhood that she founded makenewyorkgrimeyagain.com, an anti-gentrification organization that illuminates how this phenomenon impacts Black people and families.
“People were already facing homelessness due to the lack of resources,” she said, “but gentrification even heightens it because these landlords are tailoring their rents to people who are leaving the places they’re from and want to come to the hip and urban neighborhoods.”
The National Community Reinvestment Coalition reports that in the first thirteen years since the turn of the twenty-first century, more than 135,000 residents were displaced from their homes in 230 neighborhoods across the country. Blacks and Hispanics were the majority of these residents, NCRC said.
These concerns have resonated for some time with Thomas W. Mitchell, a Black property law scholar who in October 2020 received the prestigious MacArthur “Genius Grant”—one of the most celebrated honors in America. Mitchell, a law professor at Texas A&M University, has spent his career helping disadvantaged people maintain ownership of their real estate wealth.
The Howard Law School graduate was the principal author of the heralded model state statute designed to shift the paradigm of heirs’ property owners, especially Black land and homeowners. It is known as the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act and is in effect in eighteen states, eight of them in the South, where doubters insisted it would never fly. Mitchell’s work has fortified the ability of thousands of heirs and Black property owners to retain their land, which historically had not been the case.
Mitchell took an indirect path to his influential work. Born in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, he was inspired by family photos shared with him after the funeral of his grandfather in Newark, New Jersey, during his junior year of college. Many of the images were from southwest Georgia, sparking a thought: to link the displacement of Black people in major cities like San Francisco to the taking of Black-owned land in the South.
“I stumbled on some articles from the 1900s that talked about how African Americans lost a fair amount of land at the end of the Civil War,” Mitchell said. “I decided to study some of the laws that could explain that loss of property.
“I learned there were a variety of factors responsible for the involuntary loss of property. There’s a constellation of state laws that took advantage of African American property owners. And I learned there had been little effort to address these kinds of state and federal laws that were systemic discrimination.”
What Mitchell learned was startling, but not surprising, considering the history of backlash against Black people who built their wealth and communities. One hundred years ago in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a seventeen-year-old white girl accused a Black teenager of assaulting her in the city’s downtown area. As was the case repeatedly, white people went on a terrorist killing spree.
More than 300 Black people were slain and their thriving community that included Black-owned banks, grocery stores, and other businesses were burned to the ground in one of the worst and most infamous cases of destroying Black wealth.
Two years after Tulsa, a Black community was set ablaze after a white woman named Fannie Taylor claimed she was assaulted by a Black man on January 1, 1923, in Rosewood, Florida. Sam Carter, a local blacksmith, was tortured, and his mutilated body was hung from a tree.
By the time white people were done, as many as 150 Black people were killed, and their city was ashes. After Rosewood was destroyed, a grand jury and special prosecutor decided there was not enough evidence to prosecute the white men who had killed innocent Black people�
��mirroring much of what so often happens today and gives the Black Lives Matter movement fuel.
Twenty-three years before Tulsa’s destruction, jealous and angry white men similarly destroyed a successful Black community in Wilmington, North Carolina. Because the town’s political power structure was split between Black and white, white people feared the “threat of Negro rule.”
The local white-owned newspaper wrote with no evidence that white women were in danger because of Black men. It read, in part: “If it requires lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from ravening, drunken human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand negroes a week…if it is necessary.”
In the 1898 election, Black men were prevented from voting. But they had already accumulated wealth in their communities. Threatened still, whites announced the “white declaration of independence,” overthrew the Wilmington government, and a gang of white men attacked Black citizens who had done nothing wrong, except thrive. As many as 300 Black people were massacred. Wilmington officials spent the next one hundred years trying to eliminate the carnage from its history.
Among the most coldhearted tragedies was that of the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York in 1863. The orphanage was the first of its kind in America for Black children. Before the orphanage, Black youths were placed in jails or worked as chimney sweeps and beggars on the street.
White men grew angry that federal laws drafted them into the Union Army and went on a rampage. They stormed federal buildings. And for reasons no one could fathom, they ravaged Black neighborhoods and sought to kill Black children by burning down the four-story orphanage that housed 400 African American youths a year.
More than one hundred lives were lost, and the asylum, a beautiful Greek Revival building off Fifth Avenue between West 43rd and West 44th Streets, was destroyed by the mob.