Laws and Policies Are Oppressing

When the laws and regulations were being put into place they were only meant for the race of people who were making them. The New Deal’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) started redlining by applying borders to the maps of major minority cities and used discriminative criteria to racially profile people’s risks making their color and lifestyle unacceptable and unqualified.

The laws were not made to benefit anyone other than the class of people who lived and are still living by them. As other races of people were being forced to come around, the lawmakers shifted their ideals to segregate, oppress, and purposely keep anyone of color in a caged border. The borders are now set up like invisible fences and the shock hits pockets as taxes and other forms of fixed policies.

With policies denying financial loans and insurance minority communities do not have the resources available for reinvestment and reconstruction. Laws and policies are put into place to keep certain people from getting things, such as access to financial assistance to reconstruct buildings and streets for the neighborhood.

Suburban neighborhoods and communities have an obvious advantage and have greater access and resources at the expense of the lesser fortunate, colored communities — like the ones in Chicago. Because of the obvious neglect and mismanagement, the inability to invest in the rehabilitation of housing and businesses took a significant toll and added to the decline of neighborhoods especially when compared to the Suburbs.

Laws and policies have been put into place before the slaves got to America and have been tweaked and tampered with statutes and negatively applied to people of color. For example, Jim Crowe laws and policies were practiced during slavery to herd the crowd, then the great migration to the north to escape slavery laws and policies were played with to make room for the “hoods” and “ghettos” to occupy the people of color and the “non-Caucasians”.

Most of those practices are still being passed down through training, more recently the War on drugs is another major way the minority community is being targeted. These laws and rules are not keeping bad people from doing bad things; they are solely put in place to keep a race from doing and accomplishing great things. They are oppressing the idea of an entire race having a promising, prosperous, self-sustained, and independent future.

Opinion News by Darryl Robinson
Edited by Sheena Robertson

Sources:

Encyclopedia of Chicago: Redlining; By D. Bradford Hunt
ChicagoMag: How Redlining Segregated Chicago, and America; By Whet Moser

Featured and Top Image Courtesy of afri.’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
Inset Image Courtesy of Waikay Lau’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License