racist ideas in black and white

 In the 1930s, the Home Ownership Loan Corporation (HOLC), a New Deal agency created to address the urban foreclosure crisis, tapped real estate professionals in hundreds of American cities as part of a federal effort to map housing trends.  Graded  A, B, C, and D, color-coded green, blue, yellow, or red — communities were marked for their “worthiness” of a stimulus program designed to subsidize home owners who got behind on mortgages during the Great Depression.   

When viewing the HOLC field reports, it is clear that race was a primary determinant for an area’s grade.  This is made plain in the notes of the Charlotte Field Representative collected for this project.  The typewritten words of Mr. C.W. Nixon, along with those of his counterparts nationwide, served as the foundational data for redlining, a shameful practice of denying Black Americans equal access to the credit and lending opportunities offered to white Americans. 

I am a beneficiary of these racist housing policies that robbed Black Americans of intergenerational wealth through home ownership along with many other unearned privileges of whiteness.  This truth could be no more apparent to me than when documenting Charlotte's Black Lives Matter in the summer of 2020.

The pain expressed in those same streets  targeted for redlining more than 80 years ago, tell us without any doubt that justice will not be delivered through systems built on racist ideas.  Any system built to preserve and protect a racial hierarchy  must be entirely reimagined #queerthesystems