opulentjoy asked:
slatestarscratchpad answered:
I’ve only read a little.
He’s obviously an excellent writer.
He has a rare gift for saying interesting things about race that I hadn’t heard before, which is of course rare in such a saturated subject. This includes giving good history lessons about the things other history lesson givers don’t talk about, which is a rare skill.
On the other hand, he’s not a social scientist, and it kind of shows. I argue against some of his case for reparations here: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/26/compound-interest-is-the-least-powerful-force-in-the-universe/
I think in that blog post you are actually arguing against Ezra Klein making a different point than Coates (sort of “riffing” off Coates by taking one paragraph from him).
Coates’s article, among other things, talks about people still alive today screwed over by housing red-lining, and brings up how this effects housing culture today (black families making 100k live in the same sorts of neighborhoods as white families making 30k,etc).
edit: One of the major themes is that banks were paying out huge settlements for “ethical lapses” after the crash, why haven’t there been any settlements from similar sucker mortgages pushed on to the black community during several decades of racially driven housing policy.
Edit edit: Like, block busting happened recently enough that I know people who actively profited from it (probably the 1980s?).
They’d front a single African American buyer for a house in a neighborhood, and then they’d convince the rest of the neighborhood to sell in a hurry for cheap (because “there goes the neighborhood” and the like). Buy 15% or so below market, then sell for 15% to a black family trying to leave the inner city.
I admit I forgot I was responding to Klein and not Coates in that post.
I don’t really understand the concept of banks paying reparations for “sucker mortgages”. I would expect banks, as corporations, to be constantly trying to get the best terms that they can, short of fraud or breaking the law. So the question I wonder about isn’t why they tried to ask for extremely favorable terms from blacks, but why they didn’t try to ask for those same extremely favorable terms from whites. Or, if they did, why the blacks took them and the whites didn’t. Until I understand this, the issue makes no sense to me.
I’ve read a few papers about blacks living in lower-income neighborhoods than whites. I’m not really sure where you get your “white $30000 = black $10000″ statistics - the sources I’ve read say that whites’ $43000 = blacks’ $53000 - a much smaller discrepancy. The two things that stand out as possible explanations are that blacks of a certain income have much lower net worth than whites of the same income; and that since neighborhoods are still mostly segregated, even rich blacks live in black neighborhoods, even poor whites live in white neighborhoods, and white neighborhoods are on average richer than black neighborhoods. Those two factors seem to explain the housing discrepancy pretty well; if Coates has explained why he thinks redlining explains it better, I haven’t seen it. Note that this pattern also holds in the expected direction for Asian and Hispanic families, who generally don’t have the same kind of history.
I’ve also never understood how block-busting proves a case for reparations. It seems like the main losers were the whites who were forced to sell their homes at way less than they bought them for, and the main winners were blacks who got an increase in the available housing supply.