Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 58

The Lost Battalion

Pour out a little liquor for our own Erik Vanderhoff's poor pooch. Otherwise, it's yours.

Against the 'Conversation on Race'

Robert Huber at Philadelphia Magazine is catching probably about the amount of hell he imagined when he penned his piece on "Being White in Philadelphia." Many of Huber's critics are attacking the piece for what it says about race and who he interviewed. That criticism may or may not be fair. Reading through the piece myself, I thought the article's problem was more technical than racial.
Writers who focus on race/gender/sexual orientation are often of the mind that the issues that they are tackling have, somehow, never been tackled before, or if so, have not been tackled "honestly" or "forthrightly" or "candidly." In the arena of race, the notion that Americans "don't talk about race" is a particularly pernicious rendition of this logic. I've never actually found this to be true. On the contrary, there's a lot of literature on the subject -- some of it enlightening, some of it clueless, and some of it racist. The sheer amount of material should, theoretically, raise the bar for "writing about race." 
But because Americans actually enjoy yelling about race a great deal, it does not. At this moment, Huber's piece is the most read story on his home site. I am certain his editors are unsurprised. I think I could drum up all sorts of traffic if only I mentioned reparations, Ron Paul and the Confederate flag every other post. I think this is why, with some regularity, we are bombarded with bad journalism premised on getting us to "talk about race."
Robert Huber writes:

I've shared my view of North Broad Street with people -- white friends and colleagues -- who see something else there: New buildings. Progress. Gentrification. They're sunny about the area around Temple. I think they're blind, that they've stopped looking. Indeed, I've begun to think that most white people stopped looking around at large segments of our city, at our poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods, a long time ago. One of the reasons, plainly put, is queasiness over race. Many of those neighborhoods are predominantly African-American. And if you're white, you don't merely avoid them -- you do your best to erase them from your thoughts. 

At the same time, white Philadelphians think a great deal about race. Begin to talk to people, and it's clear it's a dominant motif in and around our city. Everyone seems to have a story, often an uncomfortable story, about how white and black people relate.

Huber then fills in his piece with various white people (most of them anonymous) offering their  thoughts on "race in Philadelphia." As an after-school special on the minds of white Philadelphians, the piece is marginally successful. As an essay on "Being White In Philadelphia" it is a failure. And it must be a failure. Great writing moves from the particular, from the hard details, from specifics out to the universal. (Their Eyes Were Watching God will always trump a thousand alleged "conversations on race.") Like most pieces purporting to be about race, Huber's is lost in a sea of interesting anecdotes that never gel into anything.
This is surprising to me, because Huber is a very good writer. This piece on Bill Cosby is the best article written (among many) about Cosby during the era of the poundcake speech. Anchored to a particular thing, specific reporting, and actual people, Huber is able to tell us something about Bill Cosby, race, and the limits of moral castigation.
No one who wants to write beautifully should ever -- in their entire life -- write an essay about "the subject of race." You can write beautifully about the reaction to LeBron James and "The Decision." You can write beautifully about integrating your local high school. You can write gorgeously about the Underground Railroad. But you can never write beautifully about the fact race, anymore than you can write beautifully about the fact of hillsides. All you'll end up with is a lot of words, and a comment section filled with internet skinheads and people who have nothing better to do with their time then to argue internet skinheads.

Eat Oatmeal Or The Terrorists Win

Longtime readers of this blog will recall my patriotic affection for rolled oats, water and fruit and abiding intolerance of anyone who does not share in the love. People who microwave their oatmeal belong on the "Do Not Fly" list. People who do not eat oatmeal belong on the "You Are What's Wrong With Everything" list.  This is America. And these are the rules. Don't like them? Take your stuffed-brioche-french-toast ass back to Aix-en-Provençe (Proper pronunciation "Axe Un Province.")
For those who know this great country, like I know this is great country--which is to say those who have heard the gospel of awesome oatmeal and found themselves born anew--I have glorious news. I have discovered the greatest bowl of oatmeal ever made, in the most unlikeliest place in the world. The place is Flour Bakery in the town of Cambridge.
For the good of your country, you have got to get up on this--creamy perfectly cooked steel-cut oats. Fresh fruit sliced and diced right here in U.S. of A. Washed down with a hot cup of coffee. It's enough to make me ignore the hipsters at the counter with their smiles, good service and polite manner.
"But TNC," you say. "I thought you were real American? What are you doing hanging out in the communist commune of Cambridge?" 
Bite me Sharia-boy. I'll have you know that in the time you phrased that question, I punched five Muslim atheists and broke up a game of hacky sack. My star-spangled armor is supreme. And when it comes to awesome oatmeal, no power in the socialist-verse can stop me. 
Eat oatmeal. Your country is counting on you.

The Folly of Sober-Minded Cynicism

You should check out Fallows' feelings on the Iraq War here. Reading his own thoughts left me considering about my own circa early 2003. I wasn't a liberal hawk. I was actually a deliveryman for a deli in Park Slope, doing what writing I could (mostly at the Village Voice) in between. Back then I was seized with a deep feeling that I what I thought did not matter much. I was a writer in the sense that there were things that were published with my name on them. I didn't have a blog. I didn't have status. I didn't have a pager. 
But I did have a grinding cynicism. I was skeptical of war, but if the U.S. was going to take out a mad tyrant, who was I to object? And more, who were you to object? I remember being out during one of the big anti-war protests and watching the crowds stream down Broadway. I remember thinking, "You fools believe that you matter? You think what you're saying means anything?" 
In fact it meant a lot. It meant that you got to firmly and loudly say, "No. Not in my name." It meant being on the side of those who warned against the seductive properties of power, and opposing those who would bask in it. It also meant pragmatism. Fallows has it here:

[L]et's assume that many Iraqis may indeed be better off. For Americans that's not the relevant fact. After all, many people in Cuba, North Korea, etc might be better off if the U.S. invaded there too. The question I am asking is whether this was a sane investment of American lives, money, national focus and attention, and international reputation. I argued before the war and soon after that it wasn't, and I think time has strengthened rather than weakened that case.

And finally it meant the election of the country's first black president whose ascent began at an anti-war rally in Chicago. 
I say all this to say that if I regret anything it is my pose of powerlessness -- my lack of faith in American democracy, my belief that the war didn't deserve my hard thinking or hard acting, my cynicism. I am not a radical. But more than anything the Iraq War taught me the folly of mocking radicalism. It seemed, back then, that every "sensible" and "serious" person you knew -- left or right -- was for the war. And they were all wrong. Never forget that they were all wrong. And never forget that the radicals with their drum circles and their wild hair were right.
Watching reasonable people assemble sober arguments for a disaster was, to put it mildly, searing.

Iraq War Ten Years Later: The Folly Of Sober-Minded Cynicism

You should check out Fallows' feelings on the Iraq War here. Reading his own thoughts got my juices going and thinking about my own thoughts in early 2013. I wasn't a liberal hawk. I was actually a deliveryman for a deli in Park Slope and doing what writing I could (mostly at the Village Voice) in between. Back then I was seized with a deep sense that I what I thought did not matter much. I was a writer in the sense that there were things that were published with my name on them. I wasn't blogging. These were the days before I had status and before I had a pager. 
But what I did have was a grinding cynicism. I was skeptical of war, but if the U.S. was going to take out a mad tyrant who was I to object? And more, who were you to object? I remember being out during one of the big anti-war protests and watching the crowds stream down Broadway. I remember thinking, "You fools believe that you matter? You think what you're saying means anything?" 
In fact it meant a lot. It meant that you got to firmly and loudly say, "No. Not in my name." It meant being on the side of those who warned against the seductive properties of power, and opposing those who would bask in it. It also meant pragmatism. Fallows has it here:

[L]et's assume that many Iraqis may indeed be better off. For Americans that's not the relevant fact. After all, many people in Cuba, North Korea, etc might be better off if the U.S. invaded there too. The question I am asking is whether this was a sane investment of American lives, money, national focus and attention, and international reputation. I argued before the war and soon after that it wasn't, and I think time has strengthened rather than weakened that case.

And finally it meant the election of the country's first black president whose ascent began at an anti-war rally in Chicago. 
I say all this to say that if I regret anything it is my pose of powerlessness--my lack of faith in American democracy, my belief that the War didn't deserve my hard thinking or hard acting, my cynicism. 
I am not a radical. But more than anything the Iraq War taught me the folly of mocking radicalism. It seemed, back then, that every "sensible" and "serious" person you knew--left or right--was for the War. And they were all wrong. Never forget that they were all wrong. And never forget that the radicals with their drum-circles and their wild hair were right.
The experience of having reasonable people pull together sober arguments by which a disaster might be brought about was, to put it mildly, searing.

Sequestering Science Research

My colleague Tom Levenson took a moment to speak with physicist, and current Dean of the School of Sciences at MIT, Marc Kastner about the effects of the sequester on research:

For MIT itself the effects, Kastner says, will hurt -- a lot. The hit to the annual research budget will be about $40 million -- falling most heavily on the School of Science, which gets 95% of its research budget from the federal government. The effects won't be felt equally across the board. If you run a big lab then you have some room to manouver, Kastner acknowledges. "Is ever Eric Lander going to slow down? He'll find a way." But, he says, "The rich survive and the poor get devastated. The real question is the next generation. " 
That is: the sequester wreaks its havoc by striking hardest at particular points in the life cycle of a university researcher. New tenure-line faculty are actually somewhat insulated from the very worst of the pressure. "Every agency has set aside money for young investigators," he says,"some from private foundations, and a lot from the feds." Cuts in budget strike those dependent on other people's grants -- graduate students, post docs and soft-money research scientists -- but a new faculty hire has somewhat better prospects than most for the first few years. The rubber hits the road, though, at tenure. MIT, like other leading research universities, generally tenures faculty at around the seven year mark. 
Researchers achieve tenure on the basis of strong performance in those first years and then after promotion are expected to advance their program through what should be the heart of their productive lives. The tricky part is that it is already enormously difficult to do so. Once tenured, the researcher competes for grants against the entire population, Nobel laureates, National Academicians and all. There's a reason that the average age for winning your first R0-1 grant is 42 -- that's up by more than five years since 1980. Add the sequester's cut on top of that existing semi (or more than)-crisis, and you have a circumstance where early-mid career scientists could become even more at risk to career-blasting loss of research funding.

Tom then zooms out to look at the whole motive for investing in science in the first place:

But to cut through to the hard cash at the core of this whole crisis, the simple truth is that paying for basic research is a bet a society makes on its future. And it turns out that it is one of the safest wagers around. In the 2007 report linked above, the CBO writes, in predictably dry language, "Federal spending in support of basic research over the years has, on average, had a significantly positive return, according to the best available research." (p. 15) Or, to put it a more gaudily, it's estimated that the Human Genome Project delivered a return on investment of 141:1 -- $141 in wealth created for every dollar spent on the job. 
No one claims that all basic research posts such glorious rewards, but as MIT president Rafael Reif and former Intel CEO Craig Barrett noted this week in the Financial Times, "A report by the non-partisan Information Technology & Innovation Foundation estimates that over those nine years, such cuts would reduce GDP by $200bn - and that estimate compares sequestration to a scenario where R&D merely remains at the 2011 rate. If in those nine years the US instead kept R&D spending constant as a proportion of output, the economy would be $565bn bigger. And if it invested in R&D at the same rate as China, that gap would grow to $860bn." 
Thus the risk posed by the sequester: it magnifies strains in an already constrained scientific enterprise. And from that, it's not hard to weigh the concept of decline, an actual, lasting erosion of essential national capacity. We can certainly avoid such an unforced error; we can decide to invest more, and more reliably in the future. But we may not...and that choice has consequences that aren't too difficult to perceive.

Read the whole thing. Then talk about it. Tom might just drop in and conversate a bit.

Western Thought for Dun Linguists and Schoolmen Reformed

Leviathan (Chapter III: Of The Consequence Or Train Of Imagination)
There's a lot in this chapter that I didn't get, starting with the first paragraph:

BY CONSEQUENCE, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from discourse in words, mental discourse. 
When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently. But as we have no imagination, whereof we have not formerly had sense, in whole or in parts; so we have no transition from one imagination to another, whereof we never had the like before in our senses. The reason whereof is this. All fancies are motions within us, relics of those made in the sense; and those motions that immediately succeeded one another in the sense continue also together after sense: in so much as the former coming again to take place and be predominant, the latter followeth, by coherence of the matter moved, in such manner as water upon a plain table is drawn which way any one part of it is guided by the finger. But because in sense, to one and the same thing perceived, sometimes one thing, sometimes another, succeedeth, it comes to pass in time that in the imagining of anything, there is no certainty what we shall imagine next; only this is certain, it shall be something that succeeded the same before, at one time or another.

This totally lost me and its my hope that some of you will be able to help decipher. With that said, I think this section, very much, relates to the approach of this blog:

Sometimes a man desires to know the event of an action; and then he thinketh of some like action past, and the events thereof one after another, supposing like events will follow like actions. As he that foresees what will become of a criminal re-cons what he has seen follow on the like crime before, having this order of thoughts; the crime, the officer, the prison, the judge, and the gallows. Which kind of thoughts is called foresight, and prudence, or providence, and sometimes wisdom; though such conjecture, through the difficulty of observing all circumstances, be very fallacious. 
But this is certain: by how much one man has more experience of things past than another; by so much also he is more prudent, and his expectations the seldomer fail him. The present only has a being in nature; things past have a being in the memory only; but things to come have no being at all, the future being but a fiction of the mind, applying the sequels of actions past to the actions that are present; which with most certainty is done by him that has most experience, but not with certainty enough. And though it be called prudence when the event answereth our expectation; yet in its own nature it is but presumption. For the foresight of things to come, which is providence, belongs only to him by whose will they are to come. From him only, and supernaturally, proceeds prophecy. The best prophet naturally is the best guesser; and the best guesser, he that is most versed and studied in the matters he guesses at, for he hath most signs to guess by. 
A sign is the event antecedent of the consequent; and contrarily, the consequent of the antecedent, when the like consequences have been observed before: and the oftener they have been observed, the less uncertain is the sign. And therefore he that has most experience in any kind of business has most signs whereby to guess at the future time, and consequently is the most prudent: and so much more prudent than he that is new in that kind of business, as not to be equalled by any advantage of natural and extemporary wit, though perhaps many young men think the contrary. 
Nevertheless, it is not prudence that distinguisheth man from beast. There be beasts that at a year old observe more and pursue that which is for their good more prudently than a child can do at ten. 
As prudence is a presumption of the future, contracted from the experience of time past: so there is a presumption of things past taken from other things, not future, but past also. For he that hath seen by what courses and degrees a flourishing state hath first come into civil war, and then to ruin; upon the sight of the ruins of any other state will guess the like war and the like courses have been there also. But this conjecture has the same uncertainty almost with the conjecture of the future, both being grounded only upon experience. 

My sense of this is not that history is God, or that history necessarily reveals everything, or even that the past is likely to repeat. I think the claim is more humble--that history is better than nothing, that it allows for educated guessing. Hobbes says "The best prophet naturally is the best guesser." But I think this could also be read as "The best prophet is only the best guesser." We are all guessers, but our hope through the study of history is to be "better guessers," not to achieve an impossible ultimate prudence, but to be more prudent than we would be had we chosen to remain ignorant of past events.
I want to push this a little further: One thing that often comes up when I give talks concerning history (or even here in our recent talks around housing discrimination) is a desire to know, with certainty, precisely what this means for today. But for me, the more important thing is not the certainty but the prudence. And part of the prudence (at least as I am reading Hobbes) is understanding that there is no certainty in contracting from the "experience of time." There is only better guessing.
I'd here someone tackle that first paragraph. As well as the last one in which Hobbes continues his feud with the dastardly "Schoolmen."
Last week's entry here.

Western Thought For Dun Linguists And Schoolmen Reformed

Leviathan (Chapter III: Of The Consequence Or Train Of Imagination)
There's a lot in this chapter that I didn't get, starting with the first paragraph:

BY CONSEQUENCE, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from discourse in words, mental discourse. 
When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently. But as we have no imagination, whereof we have not formerly had sense, in whole or in parts; so we have no transition from one imagination to another, whereof we never had the like before in our senses. The reason whereof is this. All fancies are motions within us, relics of those made in the sense; and those motions that immediately succeeded one another in the sense continue also together after sense: in so much as the former coming again to take place and be predominant, the latter followeth, by coherence of the matter moved, in such manner as water upon a plain table is drawn which way any one part of it is guided by the finger. But because in sense, to one and the same thing perceived, sometimes one thing, sometimes another, succeedeth, it comes to pass in time that in the imagining of anything, there is no certainty what we shall imagine next; only this is certain, it shall be something that succeeded the same before, at one time or another.

This totally lost me and its my hope that some of you will be able to help decipher. With that said, I think this section, very much, relates to the approach of this blog:

Sometimes a man desires to know the event of an action; and then he thinketh of some like action past, and the events thereof one after another, supposing like events will follow like actions. As he that foresees what will become of a criminal re-cons what he has seen follow on the like crime before, having this order of thoughts; the crime, the officer, the prison, the judge, and the gallows. Which kind of thoughts is called foresight, and prudence, or providence, and sometimes wisdom; though such conjecture, through the difficulty of observing all circumstances, be very fallacious. 
But this is certain: by how much one man has more experience of things past than another; by so much also he is more prudent, and his expectations the seldomer fail him. The present only has a being in nature; things past have a being in the memory only; but things to come have no being at all, the future being but a fiction of the mind, applying the sequels of actions past to the actions that are present; which with most certainty is done by him that has most experience, but not with certainty enough. And though it be called prudence when the event answereth our expectation; yet in its own nature it is but presumption. For the foresight of things to come, which is providence, belongs only to him by whose will they are to come. From him only, and supernaturally, proceeds prophecy. The best prophet naturally is the best guesser; and the best guesser, he that is most versed and studied in the matters he guesses at, for he hath most signs to guess by. 
A sign is the event antecedent of the consequent; and contrarily, the consequent of the antecedent, when the like consequences have been observed before: and the oftener they have been observed, the less uncertain is the sign. And therefore he that has most experience in any kind of business has most signs whereby to guess at the future time, and consequently is the most prudent: and so much more prudent than he that is new in that kind of business, as not to be equalled by any advantage of natural and extemporary wit, though perhaps many young men think the contrary. 
Nevertheless, it is not prudence that distinguisheth man from beast. There be beasts that at a year old observe more and pursue that which is for their good more prudently than a child can do at ten. 
As prudence is a presumption of the future, contracted from the experience of time past: so there is a presumption of things past taken from other things, not future, but past also. For he that hath seen by what courses and degrees a flourishing state hath first come into civil war, and then to ruin; upon the sight of the ruins of any other state will guess the like war and the like courses have been there also. But this conjecture has the same uncertainty almost with the conjecture of the future, both being grounded only upon experience. 

My sense of this is not that history is God, or that history necessarily reveals everything, or even that the past is likely to repeat. I think the claim is more humble--that history is better than nothing, that it allows for educated guessing. Hobbes says "The best prophet naturally is the best guesser." But I think this could also be read as "The best prophet is only the best guesser." We are all guessers, but our hope through the study of history is to be "better guessers," not to achieve an impossible ultimate prudence, but to be more prudent than we would be had we chosen to remain ignorant of past events.
I want to push this a little further: One thing that often comes up when I give talks concerning history (or even here in our recent talks around housing discrimination) is a desire to know, with certainty, precisely what this means for today. But for me, the more important thing is not the certainty but the prudence. And part of the prudence (at least as I am reading Hobbes) is understanding that there is no certainty in contracting from the "experience of time." There is only better guessing.
I'd here someone tackle that first paragraph. As well as the last one in which Hobbes continues his feud with the dastardly "Schoolmen."
Last week's entry here.

Anne Hathaway Is Not Your Friend

I've been running around a bit giving talks (no idea what anyone want me to talk in February) so I'm late respond on the "Why we don't like Anne Hathaway" story. I use "story" very loosely. You can see samples here, here, here and here. 
Ann Friedman sums up the state of affairs:

Does EVERY WOMAN ON THE INTERNET baselessly hate Anne Hathaway? I took a quick straw poll. "She is that theater kid with good intentions but secretly annoys the shit out of you," said one friend, adding, "You want to be excited for her and you are but deep down you are kind of rolling your eyes." Another replied, "I think someone told her she was America's sweetheart and she believed it." One friend placed her in the category of "really affected drama queens," saying, "I can imagine her non-ironically yelling 'Acting!'" In other words, she's always onstage, always calculated -- not someone with whom you'd want to party or share your deepest secrets. "I am an Anne Hathaway supporter," said a friend who sidestepped the question of whether or not she finds the actress likable. "Sure, she's kind of needy, but so are all actors."
What does it really mean when we say an actress "annoys the shit" out of us, anyway? That we hate the roles she chooses? The paparazzi'd version of her life we see in US Weekly? Her insufficiently funny quips on the red carpet? Or, as Salon asked today, is it her face? In some ways, the point of sitting on the bleachers of celebrity culture is the thrill of judging with impunity. Unlike our neighbors or co-workers, we convince ourselves that famous actors, by dint of making their living entertaining us, have chosen to be judged. And judge we do. (This isn't just a byproduct of our Twitter-enforced instapundit culture, either: "Let's get Entertainment Weekly and play my favorite new game: Love Her/Hate Him," exclaims Will in a 1999 episode of Will & Grace.)

This makes me feel very very old. I'm reading this but the gears of my 37-year old are...not so good.
Nevertheless, I would like to propose that Hathaway is laboring under forces that, say, Mark Wahlberg is not. I don't really know if Gary Oldman is a "good guy" or not. I'm not really clear that I'd actually like to have a beer with Denzel Washington or Chiwetel Ejiofor. I pay to watch them  them work and feel no need to expand the relationship beyond those bounds. 
I recognize that there is an entire publicity industry designed to get us to "like" people whom we essentially pay to see work. And perhaps it's fair to judge whether or not that industry has been effective in making you think you know Hathaway in a way that you probably do not. But the fact remains that you don't really know any of these people.
Anne Hathaway is an actor. This is not a synonym for "Homecoming Queen" nor "special friend." She does her job better than most. That should be enough.

The Ghetto, Public Policy, and the Jewish Exception

The other day I wrote about differences in how two sectors of Chicago's white community responded to the prospect of integration. I contrasted the response of Chicago's upper-class whites with its working class white ethnics. I am coming to hate all of these terms for their lack of precision. Chicago's white Jewish community demonstrates the problem. When I was researching More, I don't know how much should be made about the fact that Jews, like other whites, ultimately left after large number of blacks moved in. It is increasingly clear to me that white flight was not a mystical process for which we have no real explanation or understanding. White flight was the policy of our federal, state and local government. That policy held that Americans should enjoy easy access to the cities via the automobile live in suburbs without black people, who by their very nature degraded property and humanity.
I wish I were exaggerating. From Beryl Satter's Family Properties :

In the 1930s, the U.S. appraisal industry opposed the "mixing" of the races, which it believed would cause "the decline of both the human race and of property values." Appraisers ensured segregation through their property rating system. They ranked properties, blocks, and even whole neighborhoods according to a descending scheme of A (green), B (blue), C (yellow), and D (red). A ratings went to properties located in "homogenous" areas--ones that (in one appraiser's words) lacked even "a single foreigner or Negro." Properties located in neighborhoods containing Jewish residents were riskier; they were marked down to a B or C. If a neighborhood had black residents it was marked as D, or red, no matter what their social class or how small a percentage of the population they made up. These neighborhoods' properties were appraised as worthless or likely to decline in value. In short, D areas were "redlined," or marked as locations in which no loans should be made for either purchasing or upgrading properties.
The FHA embraced these biases. It collected detailed maps of the present and likely future location of African Americans, and used them to determine which neighborhoods would be denied mortgage insurance. Since banks and savings and loan institutions often relied upon FHA rating maps when deciding where to grant their mortgages, the FHA's appraisal policies meant that blacks were excluded by definition from most mortgage loans. 
The FHA's Underwriting Manual also praised restrictive covenants as "the surest protection against undesirable encroachment" of "inharmonious racial groups." The FHA did not simply recommend the use of restrictive covenants but often insisted upon them as a condition for granting mortgage insurance....the FHA effectively standardized and nationalized the hostile but locally variable racial biases of the private housing industry.

In 1954, FHA official George W. Snowden told the Mortgage Bankers Association that since black home purchasers had an excellent credit record, it would be logical for mortgage bankers to use a "uniform, single-standard lending policy" for blacks and whites. The association's trade journal, Mortgage Banker, derided Snowden's comments as "one of the most remarkable statements ever heard from an MBA rostrum." In short, on the rare occasions that private bankers and savings and loan officials were presented with evidence of black creditworthiness, they rejected the information.

In Chicago, by the 1940s restrictive covenants covered "approximately half of the city's residential properties." There's nothing shadowy or overly complicated here. We do not need telepathy, nor do we need to look into the hearts of our government's officer to discern whether they were good people or not. It matters not whether the executors of these polices refrained from kicking the dog on the way out the door. The policies they proffered were patently racist. Their effects are unsurprising.
Satter's book is a mix of memoir and history chronicling the fleecing of Chicago's black community by the city's mortgage industry and her father's complicated efforts to fight that fleecing. Beryl Satter's father, Mark Satter, was Jewish. In his story and the stories of his neighbors in the Jewish enclave of Lawndale, we see two impulses born of oppression. 
The first is genuinely sympathetic. Many of the Jews in Lawndale held fresh memories of their own discrimination, and could not fathom doing to blacks precisely what had been (and to some extent still was being) done to them:

Several of Lawndale's first black families were encouraged to seek housing there by Jewish friends. If viewed without prejudice, they had the makings of ideal neighbors. Most were Chicago-born middle-class men and women who purchased their buildings with substantial down payments. They managed to get modest mortgages to finance their purchases, and several paid off their mortgages early. The new black residents of Lawndale not only maintained their buildings but upgraded them.

The second impulse was darker:

...If many of Lawndale's residents were unsettled by the new arrivals from Mississippi, a small group of men saw something else in the faces of the hardworking new people now streaming into the area. They saw an opportunity.
Lawndale's operators, its schemers and hustlers, had much in common with the area's idealists. Like my father, several of them were first-or second-generation immigrant Jews. Their early years, like those of my father, were marked by anti-Semitism and poverty. But while my father's childhood disability and exposure to his father Isaac's social idealism inspired in him a profound empathy for the oppressed, these men drew very different conclusions from the harsh realities they had witnessed during the Depression. They had observed a world of victims and of victimizers, of those who "worked the system" and those who were destroyed by it. And they knew which side of that divide they wanted to be on.

In finding their way onto the proper side of the divide, Satter's operators hit upon the contract scheme: A speculator would purchase a home at a low price, and then offer it to a black family at a much steeper price. Except no deed would be transferred. The new black "buyer" would be responsible for monthly payments with high interest attached. Moreover, they would be responsible for any repairs and for all code violations. If one payment was missed the contractor would immediately move to evict, and the black "buyer" would forfeit not just their down-payment, but every payment they'd made since, and any money they'd put into upkeep. The speculator would then wash and repeat.
The scheme was dirty all the way through. Often the speculator would present himself to the family as a "broker" seeking the best deal on their behalf, concealing the fact that he was also the owner. He might steer the family to a lawyer who was in on the scheme, or a construction crew also in on the take. 
An illustrative example:

In 1953, for example, Sallie Bottom and her daughter, Jessie Jackson, bought a two-flat apartment on contract for $28,000, with a hefty down payment of $6,000. Their broker, Frank Bishofberger, concealed the fact that he was the building's owner and that he had purchased it only a few weeks before, for $17,000. By 1959, Bottom and Jackson had paid Bishofberger an additional $16,800. At that point, despite having made a down payment of over one-third of the building's true value--plus additional monthly installments that more than covered what Bishofberger had paid for the building--the two women fell behind, and Bishofberger moved to evict them.

And subsequently "sell" the building again to another black family. Satter estimates that some 85 percent of all properties sold to blacks in Chicago was done on contract. And there was no shortage of black buyers.  From Hirsch:

There is no doubt that many blacks were ready to take advantage of the new housing opportunities as they appeared. Both during and after the war, sustained economic gains permitted an increasing number of blacks to better their situation. Adjusting for inflation, an income of $5,000 in 1950 was roughly equivalent to earning $6,000 in 1960. In 1950, 10,200 (8.9%) of Chicago's nonwhite families earned $5,000 per year. Ten years later, 63,100 (34.1%) of the city's nonwhite families earned $6,000 or more. 
By the mid-1950s, the National Housing Inventory found 45,000 black families in Chicago in the market for middle- or upper-income housing. The augmented financial resources of at least some blacks were crucial to the destabilization of old racial borders. The high degree of residential segregation in Chicago produced a dual housing market: one for  whites, another for blacks. 
The restricted black housing supply and the overwhelming demand for new homes combined to inflate the cost of black housing. Rents in black areas ranged from 15% to 50% higher than that paid by whites for similar accommodations, the Illinois Inter-Racial Commission wrote in 1944. The difference was especially great, they added, in areas just beginning the process of racial succession. By 1960, even after a decade of new construction, the rents paid by blacks were still 10% to 25% higher than those paid by whites for equivalent shelter. Not only were rents higher, but the cost of purchasing housing was greater for blacks.

In mid-20th century Chicago, black people were, like most Americans, enthralled with homeownership. But the federal government which helped whites achieve the dream, worked to hinder black achievement. In the private sector, slum clearance schemes were hatched to destroy entire neighborhoods with minimal attendance to new housing. The city's aldermen worked overtime to guarantee that this new housing be erected only in the already overcrowded ghettoes. Out in the streets mobs of whites, thousands deep, rioted at the mere hint of integration. The unlucky black family caught in the sights of such a mob enjoyed only whimsy police protection. 
Taking all this in, it is hard to not conclude that in mid-20th century Chicago, black existed beyond the usual protections of the state. And so it was hunting season:

According to Favil Berns, the speculators saw their customers as "on their own. If you can survive in the wilderness, survive. If you can't, you go by the wayside, that's all. It is survival of the fittest." Selling on contract was closer toa blood sport than a livelihood. As Berns said, explaining why speculative contract sellers kept at the business despite having already made huge amounts of money, "It was like people who like to go out and shoot lions in Africa. It was the same the thrill...the thrill of the chase and the kill."

I am tempted to read something into this regarding the results of oppression, given that the speculators Satter is discussing are almost all Jewish, but I think that might be too far afield for me. And yet I think there is something instructive here, given that the Jewish reaction to integration is different. The race riots were not the result of few bad apples, but whole communities engaging in terrorism. Speculation and selling on contract is not a communal act, but the act of individuals. It's fair to say that the terrorists of Cicero--at times numbering some 4,000--represented a communal will. You can't really draw the same conclusion from the Jewish speculators. It's much easier to argue for "bad apples" in those cases. 
And to argue for the great harm that the concept of whiteness has done to this country, because what you do find among the Jewish contractors is the same racism that you would see in Cicero. Satter reports one contractor asking a question of black people, that any bigot of Mississippi would have posed at the time, "How are young going to educate dumb animals?"