Jackson, J., dissenting
“chartered, insured, and regulated savings and loan associations from the early years of the New Deal.”[1] But it did “not oppose the denial of mortgages to African Americans until 1961” (and even then opposed discrimination ineffectively).[2]
The upshot of all this is that, due to government policy choices, “[i]n the suburban-shaping years between 1930 and 1960, fewer than one percent of all mortgages in the nation were issued to African Americans.”[3] Thus, based on their race, Black people were “[l]ocked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history.”[4]
For present purposes, it is significant that, in so excluding Black people, government policies affirmatively operated—one could say, affirmatively acted—to dole out preferences to those who, if nothing else, were not Black. Those past preferences carried forward and are reinforced today by (among other things) the benefits that flow to homeowners and to the holders of other forms of capital that are hard to obtain unless one already has assets.[5]
This discussion of how the existing gaps were formed is merely illustrative, not exhaustive. I will pass over Congress’s repeated crafting of family-, worker-, and retiree-protective legislation to channel benefits to White people, thereby excluding Black Americans from what was otherwise “a revolution in the status of most working Americans.”[6] I will also skip how the G. I. Bill’s “creation of …
- ↑ Id., at 108.
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ R. Schragger, The Limits of Localism, 100 Mich. L. Rev. 371, 411, n. 144 (2001); see also Rothstein 182–183.
- ↑ Oliver & Shapiro 18.
- ↑ Id., at 43–44; Baradaran 109, 253–254; A. Dickerson, Shining a Bright Light on the Color of Wealth, 120 Mich. L. Rev. 1085, 1100 (2022) (Dickerson).
- ↑ Katznelson 53; see id., at 22, 29, 42–48, 53–61; Rothstein 31, 155–156.
