The Truth about Redlining’s History

Throughout my entire life as a black taxpayer I’ve heard about redlining — a practice generally, if colloquially, defined as making home loans harder to get for African Americans in black neighborhoods. Redlining is why my family didn’t have as much wealth as those of several Caucasian high-school buddies, a Reilly family friend and “calabash uncle” once told me. A two-minute search on Google (for “redlining stole black wealth”) turns up the same sort of opinions from far more reputable, or at least more mainstream, sources.

The lead result, from CBS News, is titled “What Is Redlining and Why Is It Still Happening (Across the U.S.)?” The Washington Post, in an article that prints out to several pages of single-spaced text, went with “Redlining Robs Black Families of Generational Wealth.” The New York Times brings the hammer down even more bluntly: “A vast wealth gap, driven by segregation, redlining, evictions and exclusion, separates black and white America.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the left-slanting website Inequality.org called the practice nothing less than “Black land theft,” almost entirely responsible for the “racial wealth divide” of today. And so forth: The story line is clear as glass.

Throughout my entire life as a black taxpayer I’ve heard about redlining — a practice generally, if colloquially, defined as making home loans harder to get for African Americans in black neighborhoods. Redlining is why my family didn’t have as much wealth as those of several Caucasian high-school buddies, a Reilly family friend and “calabash uncle” once told me. A two-minute search on Google (for “redlining stole black wealth”) turns up the same sort of opinions from far more reputable, or at least more mainstream, sources.

The lead result, from CBS News, is titled “What Is Redlining and Why Is It Still Happening (Across the U.S.)?” The Washington Post, in an article that prints out to several pages of single-spaced text, went with “Redlining Robs Black Families of Generational Wealth.” The New York Times brings the hammer down even more bluntly: “A vast wealth gap, driven by segregation, redlining, evictions and exclusion, separates black and white America.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the left-slanting website Inequality.org called the practice nothing less than “Black land theft,” almost entirely responsible for the “racial wealth divide” of today. And so forth: The story line is clear as glass.

About the Author

Wilfred Reilly

Wilfred Reilly is an associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University and the author, most recently, of Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me.