By Paula A. Braveman, Elaine Arkin, Dwayne Proctor, Tina Kauh, and Nicole Holm

Systemic And Structural Racism:
Definitions, Examples, Health
Damages, And Approaches To
Dismantling

"Financial Practices: Widespread discriminatory public and private lending policies and practices are another salient instance of systemic racism and have created major obstacles to home ownership and wealth for people of color. Home ownership is the principal form of wealth for most Americans of modest means. Beginning in the 1930s bank lending guidelines from the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation were later adopted by private banks. The guidelines explicitly used neighborhood racial and ethnic
composition and income data in assessing mortgage lending risks.18 During decades when federal loan programs greatly expanded Whites’ homeownership (and thus, wealth), non-White and low-income areas were disproportionately “redlined”—a practice whose name refers to the red shading on Home Owners’ Loan Corporation maps of neighborhoods that were deemed hazardous for lending. Racial and ethnic differences in homeownership, home values, and credit scores in formerly redlined areas persist. 19 Predatory financial services disproportionately target communities of color, adding to the obstacles to their accumulating wealth.20 These include payday lenders and check cashing services, which typically charge excessive fees and usurious interest rates. 20 Even when mainstream banking services are available in a segregated community, people of color are often subjected to higher service costs. 20 Similar to redlining, these practices create obstacles to home ownership, starting or expanding businesses, accumulating wealth, financing college education, and generating property tax revenues to fund
schools. In addition, the dependence of public schools on local property taxes results in schools in seg-
regated areas often being poorly resourced, 21 making it difficult for children to escape from poverty and, as a consequence, ill health as adults. Property tax revenue is lower in segregated areas because of the obstacles to homeownership and wealth mentioned above. Although this example of systemic racism also affects poor White people, it disproportionately affects Black people because systemic racism has pro-
duced higher rates of household poverty, lack of wealth, and concentrated community poverty among them."

This is systemic racism and Prop 19 makes this system worse.  Prop 19 takes away home ownership from the housed who historically had a difficult time buidling generational wealth.

Errin