Denied fair mortgages, black inclusion came on predatory high-risk terms

Evidence

Our government’s history of denying FHA-insured mortgages to black homeowners has led banks to target prospective black homeowners with high-interest subprime mortgages today. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, the Leon Forrest Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University, calls this “predatory inclusion.” Because black Americans have been denied access to the housing market on the favorable terms that white Americans received, their inclusion has come at a cost. When they do get access, it is on unfavorable, high-risk terms that have the power to strip them of all the wealth they have built up. We have never seen a day when a majority of black Americans are homeowners, whereas a majority of white Americans have been homeowners since 1950, because of government subsidies. And homeownership remains out of reach for over a quarter of white Americans. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 441

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘predatory inclusion’ — a framing that inverts the usual narrative that inclusion itself is progress.
• ADDENDUM: Extends the causal architecture from the earlier chapter title locale into a contemporary mechanism, complementing the trees-as-infrastructure series’ interest in how past exclusion scaffolds present structure.
• XREF: connects to: Predatory sub-prime lending preyed on America’s poor and racialized communities — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 154