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Justice / society - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Wealth is accumulated over generations. white peoples' centuries-long economic head start that most effectively maintains racial caste today
        
        Studies indicate the median white family in the United States holds more than ten times the wealth of the median African American family. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insights/the-economic-impact-of-closing-the-racial-wealth-gap
        
        Wealth, not income, is the means to security in America. Wealth — assets and investments minus debt — is what enables you to buy homes in safer neighborhoods with better amenities and better-funded schools. It is what enables you to send your children to college without saddling them with tens of thousands of dollars of debt and what provides you money to put a down payment on a house. It is what prevents family emergencies or unexpected job losses from turning into catastrophes that leave you homeless and destitute.
      - black Americans with a college education hold less wealth than white Americans who have not even completed high school. Further, because black families hold almost no wealth to begin with, black students are the most likely to borrow money to pay for college and then to borrow more. That debt, in turn, means that black students cannot start saving immediately upon graduation like their less-debt-burdened peers
    - - discrimination + opportunities
      - The magnitude of the wealth gap only widens as black people earn more income.
    - - Today black Americans remain the most segregated group of people in America and are five times as likely to live in high-poverty neighborhoods as white Americans
      - Not even high earnings inoculate black people against racialized disadvantage. Black families earning $75,000 or more a year live in poorer neighborhoods than white Americans earning less than $40,000 a year, research by John Logan, a Brown University sociologist, shows.
      - Nevertheless, more than six decades after the nation’s highest court proclaimed school segregation unconstitutional, black children remain as segregated from white kids as they were in the early 1970s
      - Lay those redlining maps over almost any city in America with a significant black population, and you will see that the government-sanctioned segregation patterns remain stubbornly intact and that those same communities bore the brunt of the predatory lending and foreclosure crisis of the late 2000s that stole years of black homeownership and wealth gains.
  - - - Automation (AI)
        
        likely to disproportionately affect Black americans (specifically men) bc a) overrepresented in the “support roles” that are most likely to be affected by automation, such as truck drivers, food service workers, and office clerks and b) underrepresented in resistant occupations such as education, health, business, legal (black women actually overrepresented)
        
        Solutions
        
        shifting education profiles to align with growing sectors
        
        engaging companies and public policy makers in developing reskilling programs
        
        redirecting resources to ease the transition as automation changes the landscape for African American workers
        
        strengthening local economies
      - covid 19
    - - Predatory lending & foreclosure crisis of late 2000s
      - Redlining
        
        http://www.designingthewe.com/undesign-the-redline/
        
        As part of the New Deal programs, the federal government created redlining maps, marking neighborhoods where black people lived in red ink to denote that they were uninsurable. As a result, 98 percent of the loans the Federal Housing Administration insured from 1934 to 1962 went to white Americans, locking nearly all black Americans out of the government program credited with building the modern (white) middle class.
        
        while black Americans were being systematically, generationally deprived of the ability to build wealth, while also being robbed of the little they had managed to gain, white Americans were not only free to earn money and accumulate wealth with exclusive access to the best jobs, best schools, best credit terms, but they were also getting substantial government help in doing so
      - Post slavery
        
        post slavery Millions of black people, liberated with not a cent to their name, desperately wanted property so they could work, support themselves and be left alone. [...] They were asking to, as the historian Robin D.G. Kelley puts it, “inherit the earth they had turned into wealth for idle white people.”
        
        We are not prodded to contemplate what it means to achieve freedom without a home to live in, without food to eat, a bed to sleep on, clothes for your children or money to buy any of it. Narratives collected of formerly enslaved people during the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s reveal the horrors of massive starvation, of “liberated” black people seeking shelter in burned-out buildings and scrounging for food in decaying fields before eventually succumbing to the heartbreak of returning to bend over in the fields of their former enslavers, as sharecroppers, just so they would not die.
        
        Then comes share cropping, convict leasing
      - Lynching, violence, retaliation
        
        despite the odds, some managed to acquire land, start businesses and build schools for their children. But it was the most prosperous black people and communities that elicited the most vicious response. Lynchings, massacres and generalized racial terrorism were regularly deployed against black people who had bought land, opened schools, built thriving communities, tried to organize sharecroppers’ unions or opened their own businesses, depriving white owners of economic monopolies and the opportunity to cheat black buyers
        
        scale of the destruction during the 1900s is incalculable. Black farms were stolen, shops burned to the ground. Entire prosperous black neighborhoods and communities were razed by white mobs from Florida to North Carolina to Atlanta to Arkansas. One of the most infamous of these, and yet still widely unknown among white Americans, occurred in Tulsa, Okla., when gangs of white men, armed with guns supplied by public officials, destroyed a black district so successful that it was known as Black Wall Street
      - Discrimination
        
        racist hiring laws and policies forced them into service jobs, even when they earned college degrees
        
        legally relegated into segregated, substandard neighborhoods and segregated, substandard schools
    - - the racial wealth gap is not about poverty. Poor white families earning less than $27,000 a year hold nearly the same amount of wealth as black families earning between $48,000 and $76,000 annually. It’s not because of black spending habits. Black Americans have lower incomes over all but save at a slightly higher rate than white Americans with similar incomes. It’s not that black people need to value education more. Black parents, when controlling for household type and socioeconomic status, actually offer more financial support for their children’s higher education than white parents do, according to the study. And some studies have shown that black youths, when compared with white youths whose parents have similar incomes and education levels, are actually more likely to go to college and earn additional credentials.
      - Also not about college, lack of homeownership, single motherhood,
  - - - Why
        
        none of the actions we are told black people must take if they want to “lift themselves” out of poverty and gain financial stability — not marrying, not getting educated, not saving more, not owning a home — can mitigate 400 years of racialized plundering. Wealth begets wealth, and white Americans have had centuries of government assistance to accumulate wealth, while the government has for the vast history of this country worked against black Americans doing the same.
        
        From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century.
        
        a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it and our federal government initiated, condoned and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against black Americans until half a century ago. And so it is the federal government that pays.
        
        Race-neutral policies simply will not address the depth of disadvantage faced by people this country once believed were chattel.
        
        because reform and technically "non-discriminatory" laws do nothing to account for past injustices
      - What
        
        should include a commitment to vigorously enforcing existing civil rights prohibitions against housing, educational and employment discrimination, as well as targeted investments in government-constructed segregated black communities and the segregated schools that serve a disproportionate number of black children
        
        must include individual cash payments to descendants of the enslaved in order to close the wealth gap.
- - - - ARTICLES TO READ: https://truthout.org/articles/a-jailbreak-of-the-imagination-seeing-prisons-for-what-they-are-and-demanding-transformation/
        https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/06/19/the-case-for-abolition
        https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html
        https://www.8toabolition.com/
        https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/1Kwmf8subrhZUfqVb9mrxC9epEVHhrTl3DscEoDIwuFg/mobilebasic#ftnt1
        https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversation-mariame-kaba
        https://docs.google.com/document/d/182cay4IFu4S3wJuTChWA63NAKXqmJIDgkSxuNDZZTZo/edit
        https://wearyourvoicemag.com/surviving-rape-prison-abolitionist/
      - BOOKS TO READ:
        Are Prisons Obsolete
        Julia Sudbury, “Reform or Abolition? Using Popular Mobilizations to Dismantle the ‘Prison-Industrial Complex,’” 2016.
      - Transformative Justice
        
        READ:
        https://chodarr.org/sites/default/files/chodarr0435.pdf
  - - - Abolished?
        
        can't be reformed
        
        police unions
        
        Have tried reforms for decades and haven't worked
        
        Violence is their only tool. they can't be reimagined into social workers
        
        READ:
        https://www.redpepper.org.uk/the-police-are-not-here-to-protect-you/
        https://truthout.org/articles/police-reforms-you-should-always-oppose/
        https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59ead8f9692ebee25b72f17f/t/5b65cd58758d46d34254f22c/1533398363539/CR_NoCops_reform_vs_abolition_CRside.pdf
        https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ep4xy7/what-does-defund-and-abolish-the-police-mean
        https://www.themarshallproject.org/records/3382-police-abolition
        The End of Policing
        
        Racist and inequitable to it's core
        
        Originated as slave patrols
        
        Has worked before (e.g. Durham) - no cop, harm-free zones where communities self protect
        UNDERSTAND THIS MORE
      - Reformed?
        
        https://eji.org/issues/policing-in-america/
    - - Defund: first step towards abolition. Takes away power and money
        (and invest in community programs, social workers, medics)
      - Demilitarize
      - Decriminalize issues such as: drug use, sex work, minor traffic violations
- - - - Disproportionately affects people of color (black and latinx in SF)
      - Increases income gap
        
        San Francisco has the second highest inequality gap of any major city in the country
      - Strips cities of culture
      - PATTERN: economic growth, but for who? privileged few & at expense of non-elite (middle and working class people)
      - Homelessness
      - W/a predatory landlords?
      - Displacement of local communities when wealthier people move in and drive up rent prices (and prices of goods and services) (in manhattan w/ finance, brooklyn w/ hipsters, sf w/ tech)
    - - Cities / gov
        
        liberalize land-use restrictions to build more housing?
        
        Deal with collapse of middle class
        
        High-speed transit could do more to improve housing affordability than just about anything else, by allowing more workers to commute from outlying areas. New York’s extensive transit system is why it is becoming cheaper to live near Manhattan than it is to live near San Francisco.
        
        subsidized, Affordable housing for long term residents
        
        helping to increase supply and bring down steep housing costs
        
        Simply building more housing won’t prevent that racial banishment if local and federal government still perpetuate racist policies — and might end up exacerbating the problem. “You can’t just fix housing supply without fixing structural racism,” says Rysman. “You have to address structural racism, economic inequality, and housing supply together.”
        
        Taxing tech companies’ revenue
        
        W/a predatory landlords?
        
        Need to address structural racism, economic inequality
        
        Putting black Americans with lived experience of homelessness in leadership positions would help combat that mistrust and change the systems
      - tech companies
        
        put money back into the communities
        
        fund affordable housing
        
        how to get ahead of it in communities they're expanding to?
        
        Invest in public transportation > private busing
        
        Upgrade service jobs (in pay, benefits)
- - - - so much of advancements funded by public R&D, should partially be owned by public as well
      - In other words, the private sector, with its focus on fast profits and familiar patterns, now dominates America’s innovation spending. That, Dahl and others argue, means the biggest innovations cannot find their long paths to widespread adoption. We’ve “replaced breakthrough innovation with incremental innovation,” says Rob Atkinson, founder of the ITIF. And thanks to Silicon Valley’s excellent marketing, we mistake increments for breakthroughs.
    - - in a game run by venture capital, the people you end up helping are the ones who can pay, so investors can make their money
- - - - Manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back, and we can’t educate huge numbers of Americans for knowledge jobs
      - analogous to what we did during the New Deal, when we turned low-wage factory jobs into high-paid middle-class jobs. If we were willing to pay a little more for our cars and appliances to create a middle class in the last century, surely we can afford to pay more in this one to the people who serve us food and care for our kids and aging parents.