Gaslighting

Crime is racially and economically segregated. From indigenous reservations throughout the American and African continents, Jewish ghettos of Europe, to today’s urban ghettos filled with forcefully concentrated Black residents into often dilapidated and food scarce areas, de jure segregation by intentional government action through public policy and law breed the crime we habitually see oversimplified in media. This level of ethnic concentration is what the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation imposed with color coded maps of every city: Green defining neighborhoods deemed as safest, Yellow as mid, while Red was established for those neighborhoods filled with Black residents and therefore with high risk of crime and poverty even if those Black residents were of middle-class income. This red-lining continues to target poor and largely Black neighborhoods with separate but not equal segregation, discriminatory housing practices, and over-policing. In fact, these housing practices through inflated monthly home payments regularly force Black contract buyers to subdivide their apartments and cram in extra residents to already resource-deficient environments. Black people are expected to fix deeply structural disparities placed upon their communities that lead to violent crime. However, in severely segregated cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago, it is red-lining that created the conditions that deteriorate the ghetto, not its captive residents.