You keep saying this, but you never get around to identifying these “other records” and “government documents.”
I don’t think they exist. You apply for a loan, the bank declines the loan, the bank destroys the loan application. Finis. The bank never told the IRS, or the local human rights commission, or the Treasury, or any other governmental body that you applied. For that matter, the biggest problem was banks that refused to accept the loan application in redlined areas in the first place–no document was EVER generated by ANYBODY that you ever even thought about applying.
After 50 years, the notion that eyewitnesses are going to be available is likewise extremely unrealistic. Who are these people who had detailed knowledge of a black family’s intentions, finances, and so forth? The bank and the real estate company, assuming they even had somebody still around, are not going to be providing the statements.
What you are suggesting, in the real world, amounts to, “Tell me you were discriminated against and I’ll give you lots of money.”
Utility records and debt records basically don’t exist anymore for that time period, so forget those. Eyewitnesses who were adults in the 1960s are elderly now (assuming they are even still alive), and trying to get detailed recollections of events a half-century ago is extremely difficult. Have you ever seriously looked at school and tax records to see what kinds of information can be obtained therefrom? I don’t think it’s anywhere near as much as you seem to think.
You are not talking about a “difficult” undertaking. You are talking about a herculean undertaking that would in the end result in a haphazard, arbitrary, and incomplete listing, because most of the information you need was destroyed long ago.
The bulk of Japanese American internee reparations consisted of flat payments: if your name was on the lists kept during the war, you got $20,000.
For African-American victims of discrimination, we don’t have the list, and we don’t have any realistic way of preparing the list. That’s a pretty major distinction.
I don’t think you are talking about a process that would result in “some people missing out”–you are talking about a process in which the overwhelming majority of those affected would have no documentation whatsoever to prove any claim. How would a process like that hope to achieve any measure of fairness at all?
Yeah we do – black people who lived in those areas. That’s not hard to find. Considering the extent of housing discrimination, and considering how just living in the redlining areas contributed to higher risk of crime, lower access to services, on top of the reduced ability to compete fairly in the economy, that’s likely to be a mostly accurate list.
For other types of discrimination (Jim Crow, segregation, etc.) a reasonably complete list would be “black people born before year X”.
Far from perfect, but considering the extent and power that white supremacy had until quite recently, it would be a reasonable place to start.
It wouldn’t take too many people getting money erroneously based on not much more than personal testimony for that “slight negative” to turn into a very ugly scandal.
**Why have Democrats and Republicans refused to vote on H.R 40 for 25 years? **
I think the biggest reason it’s being held back is the fear that there will be no closure. I’d guess there’s a fear that once the can of worms is opened no report, no conclusion, and no reparation plan will ever be acceptable to anyone. That a lot of bad feelings will be aroused that will prevent even a prayer of concensus. That the best result will be a compromise, not a concensus, leaving nobody satisfied, but everybody craving satisfaction.
If you think that a study on such a hot-button topic will just be accepted and acted on, try looking up climate change. There will be denial and there will be ugliness.
Also, everyone associated with the study, including anyone voting for or against it and anyone making a public stance on the subject, will be dragged through fire. Practically speaking, it would be voting to pin a target to the back of every legislator, researcher, and committee member involved. Most legislators don’t want to do that. There’s a parallel to NIMBY (not in my back yard) called NIMTOO (not in my turn of office).
America may have a boil that needs to be lanced, and this study may be a tool that can help do it. But that’s not assured. The pain from starting to cut - that’s assured. So they’re ducking and hoping that the swelling will go down on its own.
Here’s an experiment: point us to a list of all the blacks who lived in redlined areas of Kansas City, Kansas, between 1960 and 1970.
The city doesn’t have it. The county doesn’t have it. The state of Kansas doesn’t have it. The federal government doesn’t have it. The school system doesn’t have it. The utility company doesn’t have it. The banks don’t have it. All of these institutions put together don’t have such a list or any means of compiling such a list.
So where is it? Have you ever looked for it?
A list or map of the redlined areas probably would not be that difficult to locate: the National Archives would be the first place to start.
The problem comes in figuring out who lived there and when. In the U.S. we don’t have residency permits or the like–people move in and out of cities all the time. Even the records that do exist won’t tell you as much as you apparently think: tax records, e.g., don’t list race.
It’s not a list that exists, but it’s a list that shouldn’t be too hard to put together. My father has found residency (including address) records for some ancestors back to the 18th century.
Even if there are no physical records in existence for these areas (and, of course, there are lots – including town hall records, old phone books, utility records, property records, church records, etc.), it still would be achievable. First step could be to just ask “who lived in this area?” For everyone who comes forward, we try to corroborate the info with each other… ask people who their neighbors are, what store was down the street, what church they went to, etc. This would be a big undertaking, but since we’re dealing with living people, this is very achievable.
Finding a residency record for somebody whose name you know is an entirely different task than determining everyone who lived in an area.
“town hall records”–what are those? Cities keep distinct record series–taxes, permits, complaints, etc., not some generic ‘town hall records.’ What record series do you think they will have that would be relevant or helpful?
old phone books–won’t tell you race, won’t tell you about anyone other than the head of household, and won’t tell you about anybody who didn’t have a phone at all (still a significant problem in the 1960s–in some states, half of households did not have a telephone available).
utility records–are not going to exist for the time period
property records–will give you the name (but not the race) of the property owner, but will tell you nothing at all about who actually lived there
church records–possible but unlikely, because many denominations don’t keep detailed records in the first place, and the preservation and accessibility of the extant records varies remarkably.
“First step could be to just ask “who lived in this area?”” Who are you going to ask? Nearly half of the Americans alive in the early 1960s are dead now; many of the remainder either were too young then or are too memory-challenged now to be able to answer your questions. “Very achievable” is not a description I would apply to your project. “Massively complex,” “incredibly laborious,” and “error-riddled” I’ll give you, but not “very achievable.”
It’d be tough. You seem to think it would be harder than I do. My experiencing with genealogical research tells me that it would be possible to find most of this stuff for most people, given time and effort.
My experience dealing specifically with inner-city research (including genealogical) tells me it would not.
The processes of genealogical research are very different from what you are proposing, and I don’t think you grasp the differences. As a genealogist, you start with a name and a location and work backwards; here, you’d be starting with merely a location and trying to work forwards.
Just take a single address: who lived there in 1965? If the property was a rental (low home ownership rates, remember?), then tax and property records will tell you nothing about the resident. Most other forms of records are going to be arranged by name, but you don’t have the name. You could get somebody to input the entire phone directory into a searchable database, so if the resident had a phone, you might find him or her, but they might not have had a phone. (Nationwide, 20% of households lacked access to a phone in 1960. That’s not “lacked one in their own dwelling and name”; that is “lacked one on which people who live in the household can be called.” In minority neighborhoods, the percentage went up.) City directories, particularly for minority neighborhoods in big cities, tend to be quite incomplete; multi-family units such as apartments are often a total washout. School records are organized by name; the abstracted records, which are likely all that is left after this many years, may or may not have a single address attached, but they probably don’t have an address history (“Susie lived here in 1st and 2nd grades, but then moved there for 3rd and half of 4th…”) Utility records are not available. Church records are not arranged by and may not include an address.
Where would YOU start with a question like “who lived at 123 Fourth St in 196x?” or even “who lived on Fourth St in the 1960s”? In which set of records or documents would you begin?
I swear to God there must be must be some mandatory clause you (and others) have with your ISP to make a crack about my screenname every month. I am curious: what is the deal ya’ll get from your ISP? $10 off your cable bill? A free month of Xfinity on-demand? 3-months free of HBO and Showtime? I replied to your post in #26 and #28 and you stepped right over that and decided to post this. Then, on top of that, you excised a portion of my post without the use of ellipses. So here’s what I am going to do: I’ve put you on ignore. If my honesty is questioned in this regard, the administrators and moderators have my full permission to confirm this action to you. You (or anyone else) won’t Arafat me in this thread. Sorry. If you (or anyone else) has an issue with my screen name then I encourage you to send me a PM so I can put you on ignore, too. It’s no problem.
This is an interesting map and should be placed in every high school textbook in the U.S. It’s a shame that the same States that advocated slavery and Jim Crow don’t have the confidence and honesty within themselves to apologize.
Money is not central to the reparation solution.
Yes. See final paragraph.
You know what, magellan01. If you think this thread is about getting money from the U.S government. Well, you keep on thinking that.
I love when white people come and try to tell black people what’s wrong with them. Good grief. What about your lack of self-acceptance, self-love, and contrived moral system? Your children run around shooting up each other Columbine-style, get together to consume semen-covered oreos, and have a propensity to act the fool in public. We know damn well when that half-Asian dude shot up those sorority girls there was no discussion of the failings of the “White Family” or the influence of white male privilege on sexism. I am sure, for you all, it boiled down to some inane talking point like “mental illness” or “lone wolf” that allows your conscience to remain oblivious to your own cultural problems. So, please.
Black people can succeed just fine as long as white people aren’t obstructing them at every roadbend. We don’t need you, in fact, my friend, you need us more than we need you. As for welfare, that lunch ended in 1996. I don’t know what you’re talking about because eligibility requirements have been tightened to >100% of the poverty line. Welfare as we know it, is dead. There’s no more government cheese, no more free butter, no more cash payments, and definitely no more rainbow-colored food stamps. Whenever you’re ready, feel free to jump in that time machine, turn the ignition key, and come back to 2014. It’s shinier here.
.........
Oh, but it is. Indexed to inflation, you’ve strangled your education system to the point it has to be privatized. Would you like me to provide the cites? Just say the word, magellan01. It’s not a problem.
I was just thinking: this paragraph could be said by Donald Sterling, easy. I find it funny that in one hand you claim blacks don’t have “respect for learning” but on the other you claim that blacks advocate sending their children to charter schools. So which is it, Donald? Do blacks have respect for learning or do they prefer to send their children to charter schools for shits and giggles? I hope you realize that both cannot be true though feel free to contort the logic to fit your jigsaw narrative.
There would be closure.
Surprisingly, white people had the right reparation formula in 1960’s - Affirmative Action, the Voting Rights Act, Equal Pay Act. These were imperfect but suitable reparations for 400 years of mistreatment. Unfortunately, white people decided to renege on these “reparations” immediately after MLK died. He wasn’t in the ground for more than a decade before the Courts start striking them down one-by-one (See Bakke). Indeed, the Michigan case that was decided by the Supreme Court was brought on the ballot through voter fraud and the U.S government did nothing. Moreover, the striking down Section IV of the Voting Rights Act shows that white people are not serious at all in combating and even recognizing there is still systemic racism in this country which was ostensibly borne from the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
False. Coates gave Germany as an example. In the face of popular opposition in both Germany and Israel (for different reasons) the Germans paid substantial reparations for the Holocaust. Today Germany and Israel have pretty solid diplomatic relations. More to the point, the rest of Europe has decent relations with Germany as well.
So again: wrong. Coates provided a specific model for what he was trying to do.
Really? You sure? Because I can vouch with Yglassias’ grasp of economics. The Federal Reserve could run monetary policy by purchasing (used) bonds or by purchasing used cars. They could also do it by cutting checks, if it were permitted. It’s what Bernanke referred to as a helicopter drop.
Last year, the Fed purchased $85 billion per month of securities as part of QE-III; they started tapering that off in September 2013. The idea of spreading out the checks over a 24 month period was to permit some flexibility in the execution of the plan, to address possible overheating. At the moment, conventional monetary policy is maxed out. So there’s a lot of economic scope for this sort of plan, though of course the politics are another matter.
Not when the economy is in a liquidity trap, as it is today. After that, there would be scope for substituting in some combination of higher inflation, higher interest rates or lower payouts. All 3 variables are basically at rock bottom at the moment. It’s an economically workable plan. I can think of others.
Now obviously the concept is a political non-starter. But Coates’ point is that reparations isn’t as nutty as it sounds. Again: it’s been done before. The way I see it, Germans committed a terrible horror during the 1930s and 1940s but have credibly moved beyond that. At the other side of the spectrum, the Turks claim that they never visited genocide on the Armenians and that there are no dark chapters in Turkish history - not even a page!
So what’s it gonna be dopers? All those slaving, rapes, lynchings, terrorism and asshole empowering laws are in the past. Is the country going to acknowledge the past with a fair reckoning? Or are we just going to blather about the founding fathers? Do we want to emulate the post-war Germans or the post-war Turks?
My experience is different then yours, but it still tells me it would be difficult. Difficult is far from impossible.
We don’t need to continue this “how difficult would it be” – we both think it would be… and obviously I think it would be worth it, and you don’t seem to.
I wouldn’t do it that way – I’d go the other way. I would put out the maps and say “who lived in this area”? People would come forward. Then I’d say “where exactly did you live”? People would give me addresses. Then I’d say “do you have any paperwork or other witness testimony that supports this claim that you lived there?”. Then I’d check this paperwork and witness testimony. And I’d check people’s claims against other people’s claims. For cases with little or no evidence, I’d go into city records, old phone books, church records, etc., as well as asking their confirmed neighbors “who lived here” to corroborate. Many of these folks would have records and witnesses and would be easy to corroborate. Once we have neighborhoods starting to fill out a bit, the information will build on itself – we might know for sure who lived in house 3, 4, and 6, but not house 5, so we ask the folks in 3, 4, and 6 “who lived in house 5?” and compare their answer to the person who said they lived in house 5 but didn’t have solid evidence.
Sure, lots of work, and it wouldn’t be perfect. But that’s okay.
What people? The ones that moved away? The ones that are dead? The people that moved into the neighborhood within the last five years? The ones that don’t get involved with their neighborhood at all?
Unless you’re hopping into your time machine and interviewing them when it happened, then what you are talking about is interviewing people that aren’t there any more.
Right, which is why I’d ask them to come to me (if I were administering this fictional program in which we’ve put approxmately 20 minutes of preliminary thought into). So some ads, some news stories, etc., asking those who lived under redlining to contact the program’s staff.
[QUOTE=Elendil’s Heir]
Any discussion of reparations now will, I’m afraid, only reinforce the views of contemporary racists that blacks are just looking for a government handout.
[/QUOTE]
Apart from the word “just”, in what way is this inaccurate?
The percentage of American that know what “redlining” even means is probably very small, and the percentage of those that know they were victims of it…? I swear, if I were looking for a way to pay out to as few a number of African Americans as possible, I would hire you in a heartbeat.