Season 4, Episode 5 – 07/25/2020

This is a big topic, and as such it makes for a longer episode. We apologize for the delay in getting it out to you and hope that you will find a lot of discussion worthy information.

On The Down Lola was so excited to welcome into the studio John Mcfly, Cornelius Hocker, and Joe Lewis to break down the Black Lives Matter movement and what exactly we are fighting for.

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Terms To Know

• Black Lives Matter – initially as a social media response to events such as George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.
  • Growth – Quickly left the internet and became a “real world” movement.
• Intersectionality – Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989
  • To describe that as humans, we are each more than one thing.
  • For example: a black man experiences oppression for being black, but a gay black trans woman experiences a multi-layered oppression stemming from her gayness, her blackness, and her femininity.
• Identity politics is a political process that brings people together based on a shared aspect of their identity.

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History of Black Oppression (Outside of Law Enforcement)

Center for American Progress

• Wealth Gap
  • In 2007, immediately before the Great Recession, wealth among people of color was 14% that of whites.
  • Currently African Americans on average own a disproportionate, ¹/₁₀ of the wealth of white Americans.
  • Poverty has many natural consequences (Other than being poor). People of color are more likely to experience negative income shocks but are less likely to have access to emergency savings. As a consequence, they are more likely to fall behind on their bills and go into debt during times of emergency
  • The wealth gap persists regardless of households’ education, marital status, age, or income. For instance, the median wealth for black households with a college degree equaled about 70 percent of the median wealth for white households without a college degree.
  • Black households have more costly debt. In 2016, blacks with debt typically owed $35,560—less than 40 percent of the $93,000 in debt owed by whites. However, because blacks owed larger amounts of high-interest debt—such as installment credit and student and car loans—the debt they typically owed was more expensive.
• Education (Brookings Institute)
  • Americans often forget that as late as the 1960s most African-American, Latino, and Native American students were educated in wholly segregated schools funded at rates many times lower than those serving whites and were excluded from many higher education institutions entirely.
  • The end of legal segregation followed by efforts to equalize spending since 1970 has made a substantial difference for student achievement.
    • On every major national test, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gap in minority and white students’ test scores narrowed substantially between 1970 and 1990, especially for elementary school students.
  • Jonathan Kozol s 1991 Savage Inequalities described the striking differences between public schools serving students of color in urban settings and their suburban counterparts, which typically spend twice as much per student for populations with many fewer special needs.
  • Contrast MacKenzie High School in Detroit, where word processing courses are taught without word processors because the school cannot afford them, or East St. Louis Senior High School, whose biology lab has no laboratory tables or usable dissecting kits, with nearby suburban schools where children enjoy a computer hookup to Dow Jones to study stock transactions and science laboratories that rival those in some industries.
  • Or contrast Paterson, New Jersey, which could not afford the qualified teachers needed to offer foreign language courses to most high school students, with Princeton, where foreign languages begin in elementary school.
  • Even within urban school districts, schools with high concentrations of low-income and minority students receive fewer instructional resources than others.
• Housing
  • the federal government established several programs in the 20th century that were designed to promote homeownership and provide a pathway to the middle class.37 However, these programs largely benefited white households while excluding Black families.
  • In 1933 and 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Homeowners’ Loan Act and the National Housing Act into law to prevent foreclosures and make rental housing and homeownership more affordable.
  • To carry out these missions, the newly minted Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC) created maps to assess the risk of mortgage refinancing and set new standards for federal underwriting.
  • The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) used these maps to determine the areas in which it would guarantee mortgages.
  • But HOLC maps assessed risk in part based on a neighborhood’s racial composition, designating predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods as hazardous, and coloring these areas red.
  • This process, known as redlining, denied people of color—especially Black people—access to mortgage refinancing and federal underwriting opportunities while perpetuating the notion that residents of color were financially risky and a threat to local property values.
  • As a result, just 2 percent of the $120 billion in FHA loans distributed between 1934 and 1962 were given to nonwhite families
  • Today, approximately 3 in 4 neighborhoods—74 percent—that the HOLC deemed “hazardous” in the 1930s remain low to moderate income, and more than 60 percent are predominantly nonwhite
  • In 1944, President Roosevelt signed into law the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act—commonly referred to as the GI Bill—which provided a range of benefits, such as guaranteed mortgages, to veterans of World War II.
  • However, according to historian Ira Katznelson, “the law was deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow.”
  • For instance, the GI Bill allowed local banks to discriminate against Black veterans and deny them home loans even though the federal government would guarantee their mortgages.
• Employment
  • Both the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco reports suggest that the unobserved or unexplained factors that play a role in the black-white income and employment gap include:
    • employment discrimination,
    • weak enforcement of anti-discrimination laws,
    • or racial differences in unobserved skill levels
    • as opposed to measurable factors such as educational attainment or work experience.
  • It is likely that disparities in employment may actually be underestimated because they do not account for the large number of blacks who have been negatively impacted by a criminal justice system that has aggressively and persistently targeted communities of color

Police Brutality of People of Color

US National Library of Medicine/National Institute of Health

• US White (non-Hispanic) Population (60.4%) Fatal interaction with LE (52%)
• US Black Population (13.4%) Fatal interaction with LE (32%)
• with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher among blacks than whites.
• Most victims were reported to be armed (83%)
  • black victims were more likely to be unarmed (14.8%)
  • than white (9.4%)
  • Hispanic (5.8%)
• Four case subtypes were examined based on themes that emerged in incident narratives:
  • 22% of cases were mental health related
  • 18% were suspected “suicide by cop” incidents, with white victims more likely than black or Hispanic victims to die in these circumstances
  • 14% involved intimate partner violence
  • 6% were unintentional deaths due to LE action.
  • Another 53% of cases were unclassified and did not fall into a coded subtype.

	White (Non-Hispanic)	Black	Hispanic/Latinx	Native American	Asian
Population 328.2 million (2019)	186,482,305	41,371,902	56,500,433	4,013,692	18,215,987
LE Death (etimated 7,663 total: 2013-2019	3,378	1,944	1335	112	118

• Population information estimates from US Census Bureau
  • LE related fatalities info from https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

 Resources

• FBI: Use of force database – https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/use-of-force
• Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA – https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793
• US National Library of Medicine National Institute of Health – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/
• United States Census Bureau – https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219
• https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/
• Center for American Progress – https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2018/02/21/447051/systematic-inequality/
  https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2019/08/07/472617/systemic-inequality-displacement-exclusion-segregation/
• Brookings Institute – https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/