The White Supremacy thread

[Satchmo Distel]

I'm guessing that Kirk said the same about Obama, who never sounds like he's read any critical race theory. But a typical MLK speech would sound like Stalinism to these arseholes (just like it did to their John Birch Society and KKK predecessors).

[ursus arctos]

Kirk would have said that about Ed Brooke

[diggedy derek]

Not to give too much credit to The Grauniad, but its podcast miniseries The Division is very good on racist and white supremacist legal structures in the Deep South. It feels like its picking up where the amazing in The Dark left off

[Balderdasha]

Some of the graphs in this article are pretty depressing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52992795

Despite more African-Americans attending college and being voted into Congress, the wage disparity between black and white Americans has not changed in the last 50 years and the household wealth gap between black and white families has grown substantially (with white families now having an average wealth 7 times higher than black families).

[Balderdasha]

We had our first whole school sports day for three years yesterday. I went to the section for the younger kids in the morning and for the older kids in the afternoon. Which means for the first time I got to see pretty much the whole school community, kids, parents, teachers. As I already knew, approximately a third of the kids are non-white and maybe about 20-25% of the parents (the difference being that there are many mixed-race children but fewer mixed-race parents). But, what I hadn't registered before is that 100% of the school staff, teachers, admin, cooks, etc is white. There is one Muslim mum I am friends with who wears a hijab and works as a lunchtime assistant (as an aside she spoke virtually zero English when I first met her five years ago and has worked incredibly hard to become almost completely fluent) and that appears to be it in terms of staff diversity.

I'm a bit disappointed, especially as I know quite a few non-white teaching staff at other schools in the town, so I don't think the school has had a lack of opportunities to diversify its teaching staff. I am going to raise it with the school governors. The school is very hot on providing reading material and teaching units about diverse people and has just revealed the new names of the classes next year. They're all named after inspiring people nominated by the children including Nelson Mandela, Alan Turing, Frida Kahlo, Ada Lovelace, Marcus Rashford, Floella Benjamin, Stephen Hawking and Kelly Holmes.

This is all well and good, but unless they're going to walk the talk and make active attempts to recruit diverse staff, it's just hot air.

[Balderdasha]

The governors board and the PTA is much more diverse. The PTA is co-chaired by my black midwife friend who volunteers for everything and doesn't appear to sleep. She keeps trying to lure me into joining the PTA committee with promises that it's fun and it just involves going to the pub for a laugh, but I am not falling for that.

[Satchmo Distel]

Sweet home Alabama:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...sages-revealed

[ursus arctos]

https://twitter.com/sifill_/status/1556662578159435777?s=21&t=xt3didawisnTmW9bq85GGA

[Satchmo Distel]

https://twitter.com/cliffordlevy/status/1560248817466974211

[Tactical Genius]

https://twitter.com/cliffordlevy/status/1560248817466974211

Yes, I have seen quite a few of these pop up in the black media in the last year in different parts of the country.
Seems as systemic as redlining.

[Tactical Genius]

https://twitter.com/sifill_/status/1556662578159435777?s=21&t=xt3didawisnTmW9bq85GGA

This hate crimes trial stank and good on the Arbery family for sticking to their guns and preventing DOJ for trying to give the McMichaels a sweet deal.

[Etienne]

What's going on in Jackson, and the fact no-one else seems to care is basically modern White Supremacy.

[Tactical Genius]

What's going on in Jackson, and the fact no-one else seems to care is basically modern White Supremacy.

There are a lot of towns and cities in the United States with issues of none or poisoned water. Flint is the most famous of them but is by no means alone, when you look at the demographics of such places, a suspicious large number are majority black.

[ursus arctos]

That suspiciously large number being virtually all

Some are majority Native American

[Balderdasha]

My black midwife friend lives on the same street as me in a virtually identical house. They bought their house two years ago for £90,000 less than we did (that's how much house prices went up round here over that time period). Yet somehow, my midwife friend and her husband are having to pay about £300 more per month on their mortgage than we are. That's only possible if they're being charged a much higher interest rate than we are. And there's absolutely no reason that they should be. They're both in secure, well-paid professional jobs. The only explanation can be that it's because they're black.

[Nocturnal Submission]

Well, one highly likely explanation is that they just didn't choose such a good deal as you did. Maybe the market was a lot tougher when they were looking for a deal. Maybe their credit rating is poorer than yours.

Assuming that it absolutely must be down to race seems a huge leap.

[Tactical Genius]

My black midwife friend lives on the same street as me in a virtually identical house. They bought their house two years ago for £90,000 less than we did (that's how much house prices went up round here over that time period). Yet somehow, my midwife friend and her husband are having to pay about £300 more per month on their mortgage than we are. That's only possible if they're being charged a much higher interest rate than we are. And there's absolutely no reason that they should be. They're both in secure, well-paid professional jobs. The only explanation can be that it's because they're black.

It could also be that maybe they put down a smaller deposit than you or you have a much better credit rating than them?

I need to get myself checked out. My last two posts on this thread have been charitable

[Tactical Genius]

That suspiciously large number being virtually all

Some are majority Native American

I wonder how much this is linked to the relatively high Covid mortality cases seen in both communities.

[Fussbudget]

They bought their house two years ago for £90,000 less than we did (that's how much house prices went up round here over that time period).

Fucking hell, that's how much our 3-bed house is worth. The SE housing market is nuts

[ursus arctos]

I wonder how much this is linked to the relatively high Covid mortality cases seen in both communities.

The word that comes to mind is "closely".

Both communities suffer from massive disinvestment in public services of all kinds (health, education, transport, infrastructure, etc.) and are particularly harmed by the degree to which White populations can insulate themselves from that by forming new, massively white communities (or rapidly expanding existing ones), and/or through the creation of institutions like "academies" and "homeowner's associations".

[Balderdasha]

Well, one highly likely explanation is that they just didn't choose such a good deal as you did. Maybe the market was a lot tougher when they were looking for a deal. Maybe their credit rating is poorer than yours.

Assuming that it absolutely must be down to race seems a huge leap.

It's possible that there are alternatives reasons, but I have questions regarding:

Why would their credit rating be poorer than ours? They've both been in stable jobs for longer than we have. I ended up getting a mortgage solely in my name (couldn't get my husband's settled status in time and complications around the fact that he runs his own business) whereas there's is in both their names, which should make them an inherently less risky prospect.

I know that they were in a similar situation to us i.e. they'd been comfortably been paying a similar level of rent for donkey's years.

Two years ago, the market was generally less tough for finding a deal.

I had to get a mortgage deal that allowed me to borrow more than the average earnings to loan ratio; it was the only deal that let me borrow enough, only available to first-time buyers, had an accordingly higher interest rate than other deals on the market at the time. Why would their rate be higher than that?

While it's possible that we borrowed a lower proportion of the house's value than they did, there's no way that we borrowed less in total, because we borrowed more than the total amount that they bought their house for.

I can't prove that it's solely down to race, sure, but I have strong suspicions.

[Nocturnal Submission]

It's possible that there are alternatives reasons, but I have questions regarding:

Why would their credit rating be poorer than ours? They've both been in stable jobs for longer than we have. I ended up getting a mortgage solely in my name (couldn't get my husband's settled status in time and complications around the fact that he runs his own business) whereas there's is in both their names, which should make them an inherently less risky prospect.

I know that they were in a similar situation to us i.e. they'd been comfortably been paying a similar level of rent for donkey's years.

Two years ago, the market was generally less tough for finding a deal.

I had to get a mortgage deal that allowed me to borrow more than the average earnings to loan ratio; it was the only deal that let me borrow enough, only available to first-time buyers, had an accordingly higher interest rate than other deals on the market at the time. Why would their rate be higher than that?

While it's possible that we borrowed a lower proportion of the house's value than they did, there's no way that we borrowed less in total, because we borrowed more than the total amount that they bought their house for.

I can't prove that it's solely down to race, sure, but I have strong suspicions.

There are so many variables to consider that it's extremely hard to say if there was any bias involved. I presume that you wouldn't want to delve into their financial affairs but, without doing so, it's impossible to accurately assess the situation. But choice of the options available is a major component of the process.

My last mortgage deal was a very good one, partly because my mortgage broker managed to dig out a deal with a small regional building society, partly because of the size of my deposit and partly because of luck, (the interest on the product tracked the base rate which then fell to, and remained at, record lows).

The previous one was an endowment mortgage that was going to fall well short of paying off the loan before I terminated it.

Same surname.

[Balderdasha]

Fucking hell, that's how much our 3-bed house is worth. The SE housing market is nuts

It is completely ridiculous. We got into our place by me going into full-blown hypomania, going from thinking about buying a house to being in the house within five months, scraping together every penny we could (emptying the kids saving accounts (I've since replenished them to the previous amounts), begging money from family members), got the only mortgage on the market that allowed us to borrow enough (had to borrow six times my salary on a mortgage only available to first-time buyers), and had to bid more than £35,000 over asking price, using quite sneaky tactics, to secure the house we wanted.

In hindsight, it's not hugely surprising that this triggered a massive depressive crash the instant we moved in. If we'd left it three more months though, we couldn't have afforded it, and if we were still trying to buy now we'd likely never get on the property ladder.

[Balderdasha]

The cheapest three-bed end of terrace currently on the market in our town is being advertised at £350,000 and will likely go for much more than that. The cheapest three-bed semi-detached one is currently advertised at £400,000.

[Balderdasha]

There is one three-bed semi-detached house in the town being advertised at £700,000. Which somewhat boggles the mind. If you had access to £700,000, why would you be spending it on a three-bed semi?