cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3482200
USA apartheid
In 1954, you had a White water fountain and a Colored water fountain.
In 2024, we have abolished water fountains and try to sell you the same water in a plastic bottle that costs $5. Also, whites live in these enormous suburban enclaves where you’ll never seen a person of color because real estate agents simply won’t sell to them.
because real estate agents simply won’t sell to them.
It’s also because our state and local officials either A) completely misunderstand how to distribute Low-Income Housing Credits or B) Have a full understanding of the consequences of concentrating poverty within a central location via Low-Income Housing Credits, and do it anyway.
If you do not spread the LIHCs around your state / city within “High Opportunity” areas, you just compound the poverty. When you stack poor people on top of poor people under the guise of “Well this area is full of poor people so let’s designate more LIHC there because they need them.” you just create a multiplicative effect on the areas’ poverty. No one can afford to patronize the businesses in the area, and no one living in the area can afford to open a business. Which means no local employment for the poor, and no local commerce for the poor. They have to travel for work, travel for groceries, travel for everything. This means they’re either buying a car and maintaining it, or attempting to rely on dilapidated public transportation.
What you get are dens of poverty that actually make it even harder to rise out of poverty, and total segregation of a population that ultimately skews black and brown. The real estate agents hardly need to expend any energy to be racist when the structures they work inside of area doing most of the heavy lifting for them.
All that is true. But there’s also the issue of Red Lining and race-based lending practices and real estate shitfuckery that make certain neighborhoods - which would otherwise be affordable to everyone in the given income bracket - inaccessible to PoCs. This, combined with staunch refusal to adopt multi-lingual education (particularly the dreaded Spanish), and segregation of education (whites-only Universities), and segregation of career paths (engineering firms and legal firms and hospitals/clinics that won’t take on junior hires outside their ethnic group), force people to cluster together by circumstance.
This doesn’t even need to be segregation by income, either. Houston’s Bellaire district is overwhelmingly Vietnamese (and South East Asian generally speaking) in large part because its the only part of town that caters to Vietnamese non-Native speakers. There’s no shortage of wealth and even some amount of political power consolidated in Bellaire, but its still functionally a ghetto.
We live in a much more civilized time. Nowadays we poison the water of minority communities with lead and then drag our heels to fix it even after it becomes national news. And of course no one responsible for it will ever be held accountable for their actions. Hooray for progress!
Nowadays we poison the water of minority communities with lead and then drag our heels to fix it even after it becomes national news
We poison the water with lead and ten years later we send in the police to deal with all the crime. The machine of politics uses it all to justify amplifying the policies we always wanted to embrace.
And where does the money for the next round of policing come from? Well… that next district over just can’t afford clean water anymore.
The person that says this and the person that says they wish it was the 50s again
i think it would strike a stronger chord to mention that the people who lived through it are still alive and some of them are running for president.
that’s right Jack. I got into politics because of the Civil Rights movement. I wanted to push it backward
Reminder that:
-Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer first aired on 12/6/1964, before integration was made fully federally enforceable by Heart Of Atlanta Motel v. U.S. on 12/14.
-Schools in districts such as Greenville in South Carolina took until 1970 to be de jure desegregated.
-Mississippi senator James Eastland, an open and vocal white supremacist and anti-semite, was in office until 1978.
Former Louisiana KKK leader David Duke won 43.5 percent of the vote in the 1990 Louisiana Senate election.
-A majority of the US population disapproved of interracial marriage until the mid 1990s.
-South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, who once spent 24 hours straight defending segregation, remained in office until shortly before his death at 100 in 2003.
-In 2004 Alabama, a majority of voters opposed a ballot measure to officially remove unenforceable Jim Crow clauses in the state constitution.
-Segregated proms were still held in rural Georgia up through 2013.
What happened in the mid 80’s to get Americans on board with interracial marriage? Was it somehow the show Cheers?
Grades of US tap water
Restaurant, Bar, Stadium, Filtered soda gun tap.
New luxury condo/apartment tap–fancy hotel tap
Museum, Private School, and University water fountain tap, bottle filler option grade water fountain.
Old residential construction moderate income tap
Chain Hotel/Motel tap
Community College and Public School circular water fountain tap (occasionally dented gummed and disabled)
Gentrifying pioneer rehabbed old construction yellowlined low rent yet centrally located tap
Commercial Restroom Tap
Nestlé Poland Spring filtered contaminated ground water
Redlined old residential lead tap
Prison Tap
