There are Plenty of Affordable Homes in America, But Little Financing, New America Blog Post by Elaine Tsui, May 19, 2021
NPR:Code Switch: Black Americans And The Racist Architecture Of Homeownership 5/8/2121
Youtube/ NPR: Code Switch - Housing Segregation and Redlining America: a Short History 4/2018
Human connections - 2 Queens, Real Talk Elliott with 2 T’s joined by President of the NAACP of Vegas
When the Dust Rises by Janice Blackmore
Stop sale of Seattle’s National Archives treasure trove, members of Congress tell feds
Dig: Revisiting Racecraft with Barbara and Karen Fields
March 05, 2021
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. By Seth M. Holmes (Available at SVC Library)
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson
The Straight State by Margot Canaday
The New Jim Crow by Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly, Slate, Chronicle of Higher Education, Literary Hub, Book Riot, and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller--"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education--with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." --Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.
Race for Profit by LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST, 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY By the late 1960s and early 1970s, reeling from a wave of urban uprisings, politicians finally worked to end the practice of redlining. Reasoning that the turbulence could be calmed by turning Black city-dwellers into homeowners, they passed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968, and set about establishing policies to induce mortgage lenders and the real estate industry to treat Black homebuyers equally. The disaster that ensued revealed that racist exclusion had not been eradicated, but rather transmuted into a new phenomenon of predatory inclusion. Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners. The federal government guaranteed urban mortgages in an attempt to overcome resistance to lending to Black buyers - as if unprofitability, rather than racism, was the cause of housing segregation. Bankers, investors, and real estate agents took advantage of the perverse incentives, targeting the Black women most likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure, multiplying their profits. As a result, by the end of the 1970s, the nation's first programs to encourage Black homeownership ended with tens of thousands of foreclosures in Black communities across the country. The push to uplift Black homeownership had descended into a goldmine for realtors and mortgage lenders, and a ready-made cudgel for the champions of deregulation to wield against government intervention of any kind. Narrating the story of a sea-change in housing policy and its dire impact on African Americans, Race for Profit reveals how the urban core was transformed into a new frontier of cynical extraction.In June 1863, at the height of the war, Harriet Tubman guided the Combahee River Raid, with 300 free black soldiers on three gun boats, liberating more than 700 slaves in South Carolina. She recalled that “coming on board the boat, I was carrying two pigs for a poor sick woman who had a child to carry and the order ‘double quick’ was given. I started to run, stepped on my dress, it being rather long, and fell and tore it almost off, so that when I got on board the boat, there was hardly anything left of it but shreds. I made up my mind then I would never wear a long dress on another expedition ... but would have a bloomer as soon as I could get it.”
Kate Clifford Larson’s fascinating biography, “Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero,” points out that the bloomer dress was a modified pantaloon that allowed more freedom of movement. It became a derisive term used by men who regarded suffragists “as literally wanting to ‘wear the pants.’” But for Tubman, “the Moses of her people,” the bloomer was highly appropriate.