92% of redlined homeowners were white

Update: I thought I was writing this post for people who were familiar with the subject, but in the comments, I learned that wasn’t always true, so here’s a quick introduction to redlining:

Redlining is the act of drawing lines on a map and deciding everyone who lives inside the red lines is a greater financial risk than the people who live outside of them. The unintentional effect is to make it harder to improve poor neighborhoods because redlining makes it much harder for poor people to get loans and mortgages. Anti-racists insist redlining was racist because it affected a disproportionate number of black people because black people are disproportionately poor. While it is very true that this country is still living with the legacy of slavery and redlining began during Jim Crow, redlining does not appear to have been motivated by racism. If racism was a factor, the people drawing the red lines were willing to punish nine white homeowners for every black homeowner.

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Race reductionists insist redlining was racist, perhaps because they think banks are in the business of producing racism instead of profit. RACE, RISK, AND THE EMERGENCE OF FEDERAL REDLINING reveals a more complex story. Though poverty in the US has always been racially disproportionate, “the vast majority (92 percent) of the total redlined home-owning…