EthnicMajority

(FoxNews) The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination is investigating a racially charged advertisement that was in a local newspaper.

The ad announcing land for sale appeared in the New Bedford Standard-Times recently and was placed by Harmon Law Office in Newton, MyFoxBoston reports.

The advertisement stated that the land “…shall not be sold, leased or rented to any person other than of the Caucasian race or to any entity of which any person other than of said race shall be a member, stockholder, officer or director.”

“Such restrictive covenants have long been deemed unlawful and unenforceable under Massachusetts statute, and conveyance of any such deed is expressly prohibited under Massachusetts anti-discrimination law,” said MCAD Chairman and Commissioner Malcolm Medley. “Advertising such a sale may also be unlawful under the statute. Our obligation is to investigate this matter to determine whether a violation of law has occurred.”

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(Wall Street Journal) Now that he’s the Kentucky Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul is facing increased scrutiny for statements he’s made regarding the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In a handful of media interviews, most recently on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” Wednesday evening, Paul would not commit to a firm yes-or-no answer when asked when he would have voted for the landmark legislation.

Paul has contended that while the legislation was correct in ending racial discrimination, he’s turned the question into a philosophical one over whether or not the federal government should be able to intrude on how a private business conducts itself. That may work well in the classroom, but it’s a tricky position to take as a political candidate on national television.

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(Yahoo News) A new Brandeis University study that followed 2,000 families has found that the pay gap between white and black American families quadrupled in only 23 years, from $20,000 to $95,000.

Even when black families earn a significantly higher income than whites, the study found, they accumulated much less wealth. That disparity can’t be attributed to personal saving habits either, since blacks and whites save at the same rate. White families earning more than $30,000 a year accumulated $74,000 in wealth between1984 and 2007, whereas black families earning more than $50,000 accumulated only $18,000 in wealth during that period.

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(Physorg) The wealth gap between white and African-American families increased more than four times between 1984-2007, and middle-income white households now own far more wealth than high-income African Americans, according to an analysis released on Monday by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy (IASP) at Brandeis University.

IASP, in a research brief, also reported that many African Americans hold more debt than assets and at least 25 percent of African-American families had no assets to turn to in times of economic hardship. The fourfold increase in the wealth gap, it said, reflects public policies, such as tax cuts on investment income and inheritances, which benefit the wealthiest and persistent discrimination in housing, credit and labor markets.

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In a recent New York Times article, the headline screams: “home ownership losses are greatest among minorities”. Given that African and Hispanic Americans were more likely to get subprime loans during the housing heyday up to 2006, you would think they would be the most negatively impacted by more recent foreclosures and more stringent mortgage approval standards.

In reviewing the research conducted by the Pew Research Center that the Times used to reach this conclusion, it does not appear that the news is as bad as the headline purports. Overall home ownership reached a peak of 69% in 2004 and declined to 67.8% in 2008. During the same time period, whites fell from 76.1% to 74.9%, Asians 60.8% to 59.1%, Blacks 49.4% to 47.5%, and Hispanics 49.8% to 48.9%. While home ownership rates declined more than the average for Asian and African Americans, the differences were marginal. And Hispanic declines were less than average, especially for more recent immigrants.

That said, the future does not look bright. African and Hispanic Americans are still two or three times more likely to get a subprime loan, pay 3 percentage points more for it, and borrow more for the same income levels when compared to whites.

This could lead to another foreclosure crisis, and we are still feeling the effects of the last one. But lets not jump the gun by making things sound worse than they really are today.

Ethnicmajority housing page.

I wanted to inform EthnicMajority readers of some new documentaries that have recently been released by California Newsreel. They look at contemporary civil rights issues such as housing descrimination, unfair incarceration and health inequities along racial lines.

TULIA TEXAS

Though its scrupulous investigation of a landmark case, this documentary uncovers the deep-rooted assumptions about race and crime that still permeate our society and undermines our justice system. The film convincingly shows how the ‘war on drugs’ has become a war on due process, waged against African Americans.

http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0218

SCARRED JUSTICE: THE ORANGEBURG MASSACRE

This documentary brings to light one of the bloodiest tragedies of the Civil Rights era after four decades of deliberate denial. The killing of four white students at Kent State University in 1970 left an indelible stain on our national consciousness. But most Americans know nothing of the three black students killed at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg two years earlier.

http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0223

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The blame game for the $700 billion mortgage bailout is shifting into high gear, with Congressional hearings conducting a show trial with the CEO’s of Lehman and AIG. All of these folks have high-priced attorneys and lobbyists protecting their interests, and in many instances the golden parachutes they took with them. Who will represent the homeowners?
As the story goes, the government began pressuring Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and banks to increase loans to low-income borrowers, including minorities. These entities acted as a conduit by packaging pools of these loans to large institutional investors, underwritten by large Wall Street investment banks like Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Lehman. Since many low-income borrowers didn’t have the cash to make a deposit or the income to make the mortgage payments, these loans were obviously riskier. To underwrite the increased risk, insurance giant AIG jumped in by protecting the investors against defaults.

Everybody made huge profits because of one factor – leverage. They were able to package, sell, and insure billions of dollars of these loans with minimal amounts of collateral, which translated into enormous returns on investment. But leverage is a two-way street. If real estate values increase, profits will be large. If they don’t rise, and defaults increase, the losses would be substantial. Because the real estate market was strong, competition to invest in subprime loans became over-heated, and lenders did not increase pricing or tighten underwriting standards to compensate for the increased risk.
It is clear that many loans were made to people who couldn’t afford them. But who is to blame for that? Lenders, investors, investment banks, or insurance companies who were making obscene profits and taking huge risks, or honest Americans, many of whom are people of color, trying to live the American dream. I fear Wall Street will turn the homeowners into scapegoats, and claim more than their fair share of the bailout funds.

Ethnicmajority Housing page.

Aging Americans, like other age groups, are feeling the effects of the declining real estate and stock markets, as well as soaring fuel and food prices. Seniors� economic security will only increase in importance as the U.S. population ages. The nation�s health and social services resources will face unprecedented demand as 75 million people in the baby boomer generation reach retirement age�some with eroded savings and retirement accounts.

Fighting elderly poverty

Between 1959 and 1974, the elderly poverty rate fell from 35 percent to 15 percent. This was largely attributable to a set of increases in Social Security benefits. The elderly poverty rate has continued to decline in subsequent decades, reaching 9.4 percent in 2006. Social Security and Supplemental Security Income benefits continue to play a key role in reducing elderly poverty, especially among women and people of color. If Social Security benefits did not exist, an estimated 44 percent of the elderly would be poor today, assuming no changes in behavior.

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BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – A black professor at Columbia University tells Soledad O’Brien that he instructs his 11-year-old son to fear the police.

“When you are stopped, whether you have done something or not, you cower. I want you to cower because I want you to live,” he says.

The CNN special-projects anchor says black parents from all social and economic classes told her the same thing.

“It was stunning and disturbing,” she said in an interview last week. “What is the impact of that on the psyche of these young children? What does it say about our society?

“And what’s interesting to me about that is white people do not have those conversations with their children, but every black person does,” she adds. “And the gap between those two things is where our story lies. What is happening in America? Why is that difference there?”

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The subprime mortgage fiasco is sending tremors through Wall Street and has brought the U.S. economy near (if not into) recession. For African Americans and Latinos — the primary victims of the debacle — the mortgage meltdown may widen the considerable gap in wealth that already exists between whites and people of color. Even worse, some proposals to fix the problem of limited access to credit may end up doing more harm than good.

“We estimate the total loss of wealth for people of color to be between $164 billion and $213 billion for subprime loans taken during the past eight years. We believe this represents the greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern U.S. history,” the Boston-based organization United for a Fair Economy noted in its report “Foreclosed: State of the Dream 2008.”

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