The Inequalities Of Race In Housing And Education

Stereotypes are like scalp dandruff, unnecessary, ugly, and hard to get rid of, unless you have the right shampoo. That shampoo could symbolize proper education or enlightenment for getting rid of that particular stereotype. Some stereotypes are so absurd we sometimes wonder where the heck did they even originate from. For example, Asians are bad drivers, or white people cannot dance. However there is a type of stereotype that has some little truth to it, but you find it is not the people who we are stereotyping’s fault. To be more specific, there is a stereotypical view that poor minorities are sometimes considered uneducated. This lack of minorities’ education is not their fault, but the fault of unlikely outside forces. Therefore there is some truth to this particular stereotype, but the minorities are not to blame for their lack of education. Few opportunities are given to them, starting with housing then leading to schools which would then affect their individual education.

So why would one have the connection with minorities and poverty? Could there possibly be some sort of relation between race and class? This all started with our Federal Housing Agency or the FHA. In the book The Possessive Investment in Whiteness the author George Lipsitz put extensive research into how the FHA started and how its agency ties into minorities receiving loans or the lack of. In 1934 the FHA was provided from the government who then gave the agency’s power to private home lenders, and this is when racial biasness came into place through selective home loans. Lipsitz says “[the] Federal Housing Agency’s confidential surveys and appraiser’s manuals channeled almost all of the loan money toward whites and away from communities of color”(5). These surveys were conducted by the private lenders who had free reign to prove the loans to whomever they want. Because the minorities did not get a chance to receive the FHA loans that they needed, they are then forced to live in urban areas instead of suburban neighborhoods. There was this underground suburban segregation going on with these private lenders, which would then greatly diminish better opportunities for minorities to live in better neighborhoods.

Then comes the education part, where according to the author Jonathan Kozol in his book Savage Inequalities Children in America’s schools, property tax is one of the main financial distributions that goes towards local schools. In Kozol’s book he quotes that, “typically in the United States, very poor communities place high priority on education, and they often tax themselves at higher rates than do the very affluent communities.