Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm

by Robin DiAngelo

The legal exclusion of Black people, in addition to illegal acts of terrorism against them such as lynching, continued all the way through to the 1960s. Black people were denied the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) housing loans in the 1950s that allowed a generation of white people to attain middle-class status through home ownership. Home ownership is critical in the US because it is how the average person builds and passes down wealth, providing the starting point for the next generation. In her acclaimed book Race for Profit, professor of African American studies Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues that the transition in the 1960s and ’70s from the exclusionary policies of the FHA to inclusionary policies, via the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Act of 1968, tied HUD and the FHA to real estate brokers, mortgage bankers, and home builders. Taylor explains how, even early in the program, unscrupulous mortgage banks dominated the market. With the federal government guaranteeing loans, these banks sold as many homes as possible to African Americans in poor communities—“the riskier the buyer, the better,” because the bank got paid even if borrowers defaulted.9 With mortgage banks largely unregulated and incentivized to sell, homes that should have been condemned were pushed on African American buyers. Where redlining and racial profiling had blocked Black Americans from the home ownership that created a booming middle class for white people after World War II, it now made Bla...