Systemic Violence - Blog Posts
Housing Discrimination
NO. 1
Racial exclusion, or segregation had real damage to the black communities persistent in their fight for freedom to own and be included in everything whites were already allowed in; the fight for equality, economic security, for education, and for fair housing was just beginning. Racial exclusion was such a severe enough problem, since in every near northern city, black newcomers crammed into old and run-down housing, mainly in dense central neighborhoods left behind by upwardly mobile whites. White builders, in charge of housing and agencies related could dictate who could own, and William Levitt, of Leviittown where massive developments were made in the suburb, was no exception.
These types of houses were ‘affordable for the common man’, and remade America’s landscape after World War II. The iconic images of little ranches and Cape Cods, set in spacious yards on curvilinear streets, stood for everything that America celebrated in the Cold War era. These subdivisions attracted a heterogenous mix of surburnites, blue-collar workers employed by U.S Steel factories, teachers, clerks, and administrators. Levitt celebrated the ‘American-ness’ of these houses, saying ‘’No man who owns his house and lot can be a communist. He has much to do.’’ Don’t really know how owning a house can get in the way of your political ideologies, but alright. And when Levitt was questioned about the racial homogeneity of his planned community, he responded, ‘’We can solve a housing problem or we can try to solve a racial problem, but we cannot combine the two.’’ But the housing and racial problem was connected, as blacks could not get these houses because they were black. One instance of racial exclusion was in metropolitan Philadelphia, where between 1946, only 347 of 120,000 new homes built were open to blacks. Langston Hughes, popular poet described black neighborhoods as the ‘land of rats and roaches, where a nickel cost a dime.
NO. 2
Economist Robert Weaver spoke, ‘’among the basic consumer goods, only housing for Negroes are traditionally excluded freely competing in the market.’’ The struggle to open housing was not just a matter of free access to a market excluded to blacks. Racial segregation had high stakes. In post war America, where you lived shaped your educational options, your access to jobs, and your quality of life. The housing markets also provided most Americans with their only substantial financial asset. Real estate was the most important vehicle for the accumulation of wealth. Breaking open the housing market would provide blacks to access to better-funded, higher-quality schools. It would give them the opportunity to live in growing communities–near the shopping malls, office centers, and industrial parks where almost all new job growth happened. And more importantly, it would narrow the wealth-gap between blacks and whites. The battle against housing discrimination in Levingttown, or anywhere else would be the most important in the entire northern freedom struggle.
NO. 3
Housing segregation in the north was built on a sturdy foundation of racial restrictions encoded in private regulations and public policy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Midwest–and especially Indiana and Illinois, were dotted with ‘sundown towns’ places whose residents drove blacks off by force, enacted ordinances to prohibit black occupancy (although such ordinances were struck down by the Supreme Court in 1917), and sometimes posted signs, like that in Wendell Willkie’s Elwood, Indiana, warning blacks of the dire consequences of staying around after sunset. Such crude techniques succeeded in driving blacks out of small towns, but they were less effective in the major northern metropolitan areas that attracted the vast majority of African American migrants beginning in World War I.
Three devices were used to help housing discrimination: first, private but legally enforecable restrictive covenants—attached to nearly every housing development built between 1928 and 1948— forbade the use or sale of a property to anyone other than whites. Second, federal housing policies, enacted during the Depression, mandated racial homogeneity in new developments and created a separate, unequal housing market, underwritten with federal dollars, for blacks and whites. And third, real estate agents staunchly defended the ‘freedom of association and the right of home owners and developers to rent or sell to whom they pleased, steering blacks into racially mixed or all-black neighborhoods. Whites in the North had economic reasons to fear the ‘Negro invasion’ as they called it. Their ability to secure mortgages and loans were at risk. But their motivations were not solely economic. Intertwined concerns about property values were fears of black predation. North and South recoiled at the prospect of miscegenation. In the South, they feared the legal restrictions on intermarriage and racial mixing in public spaces; the North feared the regulation of housing markets.
Bail Reform
NO. 1
Back in late December, NYC’s Bail’s Reform has plenty of opportunities to free poor defendants, and be able to help wrongfully convicted people as was it’s intention--but as of right now, eliminating cash bail is sure to put too many violent criminals back on the streets, threatening public safety.
According to the NY Times, CNBC, and the New York Post, the new laws seem to be doing the opposite effects of helping people, whereas instead is hurting the communities where these crimes are happening. From the NY Times, it goes into defining what the bail reform actually is: ‘’New York is now the only state in the nation that requires judges to entirely disregard the threat to public safety posed by accused persons in determining whether to hold them pending trial or to impose conditions for their release. In addition, the new law constrains judges from holding repeat offenders with long records of both crime and absconding trial. It eliminates cash bail and the possibility of detention for a wide array of offenses, including weapons possession, trafficking of fentanyl and other drugs, many hate-crime assaults, the promotion of child prostitution, serial arson, and certain burglaries and robberies.’’
NO. 2
It also floods police departments and attorney’s with intensive forms of paperwork, leading to important evidence being suppressed and ‘solid cases can be dismissed on the grounds of incomplete discovery’; So it seems that the bail reform is leading to all kinds of damages. CNBC is saying that critics of the bail reform were absolutely wrong after three weeks after the law went into effect, as some of the repeat offenders have been arrested for anti-Semetic assault and harassment, just as New York is seeing a disturbing spike in these hate crimes. ‘’In case you need to be convinced how big a political issue this could become, remember that violent crime stories are visceral in many ways. They often involve life and death, and can be easily painted in terms of “good guys” and “bad guys” with very little gray areas in between. Crime stories also have a rare ability to energize otherwise non-politically active Americans. Ask anyone who lived through the urban crime waves of the late 1960s through the 1980s to confirm that.’’
NO. 3
The New York Post has a similar agreement, explaining the increase of anti-Semetic attacks happening and the suspects quickly being released, like the case of Tiffany Harris, which was reported on December 28, 2019, attacked three Orthodox women in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She was hauled in handcuffs before a Brooklyn judge on menacing, harassment, and attempted assault charges; but this wasn’t the first time, as she had an open harassment and assault case back in November 2018.
So, I agree that this new law is just going to take us into a new era of ‘fear mongering’ that poses against public safety, and that’s a major problem. I live in New York, and I want the laws to be immediately changed on proof that there is a better way of fixing the criminal justice system. I understand Governor Cuomo’s reasoning, as he doesn’t want those who are innocent to be unlawfully held in prison, but the consequences of releasing those who are a danger to the community, are to grave and too high to mistake.
Being poor is dangerous. Being POC while poor? Even more dangerous.
NO.1
The question, ‘‘Is being poor dangerous’, an easy question to answer for those who suffer from being poor. Yes, it is highly dangerous, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. People usually move to cities in the U.S, and cities are segregated. Each person, family, etc. has a different background, therefore they have a different connection with others unlike themselves. That means different habitus’ and different inequalities, for those who are not rich.
NO.2
This all has to do with the economic structure, between poor, middle class and rich. Segregation is everywhere, and in cities, it is an intermix of ethnicity, citizenship, indigeneity, and class, and when they are intertwined, they create systems of labor, respect and suffering. The physical differences in the conditions of life, especially barbaric. Throughout the hierarchy of suffering, the opportunities decrease and the social hardships increase as you go down the ladder, and depending on what race you are, the more dangerous, psychologically strenuous and physically stressful it can be. Everyone is structurally vulnerable, and each person can participate in what is called the Gray Zone.
NO.3
Primo Levi defines it as the knowledge of the corrupt system but trying to survive within it, whether you’re at the top or at the bottom, and when you are at the bottom, the system is designed to make people remain there. For Mexican workers who choose to make the difficult journey to work in the strawberry fields in Southern California, they are kept segregated by race, class, and citizenship, they have limited opportunities to afford the basic needs we use every single day, either access to affordable healthcare or able to get a decent paying job. Collective bad faith, or as Nancy Scheper-Hughes calls it, is the self deception to help you feel okay about the work you do in the moral gray zone. One example would be the strange concept of naturalization, like black deaths at the hands of police officers. A more basic definition would be seeing an oppressed people and saying that they like being oppressed, making you feel better about the injustice. Since we see it go on for so long, the moral injustice, we normalize it, or that it just part of ‘the game’. The game is to thrive, survive, and suffer in the social world, where you are both dominated and dominant. We justify it because they are different, and say it is normal.
NO.4
‘‘For decades, experts have agreed that racial disparities in health spring from pervasive social and institutional forces. The scientific literature has linked higher rates of death and disease in African Americans to such ‘social determinants’ as residential segregation, environmental waste, joblessness, unsafe housing, targeted marketing of alcohol and cigarettes, and other inequalities; Racism, other researchers suggests, acts as a classic chronic stressor, setting off the same physiological train wreck as job strain or martial conflict: higher blood pressure, elevated heart rate, increases in the stress hormone cortisol, suppressed immunity. Chronic stress is also known to encourage unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking and eating too much, that themselves raise the risk of disease.’’ From How Racism Hurts—Literally.
