News — White supremacy

Yvan Sagnet from Cameroon is battling modern slavery in Italy's agricultural sector. Yvan once worked as a low-wage farmhand. He represents the hundreds of thousands of seasonal farm workers from Africa and eastern Europe on Italy's fields. Without their labor, the country would have no tomato, orange or olive harvest. But the workers are exploited and often forced to live under inhumane conditions in ruins or shantytowns called ghettos and treated like animals. Now Yvan is fighting for the rights of seasonal farmworkers, taking criminal recruiters, or gangmasters, to court. This is an example of modern forms of slavery that black people still experience worldwide. In Yvan's words, "slavery does not require chains." What do you think?

Sundown Towns are all-white communities, neighborhoods, or counties that exclude Blacks and other minorities through the use of discriminatory laws, harassment, and threats or use of violence. The name derives from the posted and verbal warnings issued to Blacks that although they might be allowed to work or travel in a community during the daytime, they must leave by sundown. Although the term most often refers to the forced exclusion of Blacks, the history of sundown towns also includes prohibitions against Jews, Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and other minority groups.

Although it is difficult to make an accurate count, historians estimate there were up to 10,000 sundown towns in the United States between 1890 and 1960, mostly in the Mid-West and West. They began to proliferate during the Great Migration, starting in about 1910, when large numbers of African Americans left the South to escape racism and poverty. As Blacks began to migrate to other regions of the country, many predominantly white communities actively discouraged them from settling there.

The means to announce and enforce racial restrictions varied across the country. In its most blatant form, signs were posted at the city limits. One in Alix, Arkansas, in the 1930s, for instance, read, “N—-r, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On You In Alix.” Others stated, “Whites Only After Dark.” Many sundown towns used discriminatory housing covenants to ensure no non-white person would be allowed to purchase or rent a home. In the 1940s, Edmond, Oklahoma promoted itself on postcards with the slogan, “A Good Place to Live…No Negroes.” The town of Mena, Arkansas advertised its many charms: “Cool Summers, Mild Winters, No Blizzards, No Negroes.” In other cases, the policy was enforced through less formal norms and sanctions. Businesses that served Black customers or hired Black employees would be boycotted by the white townspeople, ensuring that Blacks had few, if any, job opportunities in those communities.

Racial exclusion in sundown towns was also achieved with violence. African Americans who lingered in sundown towns even during the daytime experienced harassment, threats, arrest, and beatings. It was not uncommon for Black motorists passing through these communities to be followed by police or local residents to the city limits. In extreme cases, hostility toward African Americans resulted in extrajudicial killing. The lynching of two Black teenagers in Marion, Indiana, in 1930, for instance, resulted in the town’s 200 Black residents moving away never to return.

The rise of sundown towns made it difficult and dangerous for Blacks to travel long distances by car. In 1930, for instance, 44 of the 89 counties along the famed Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles featured no motels or restaurants and prohibited Blacks from entering after dark. In response, Victor H. Green, a postal worker from Harlem, compiled the Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide to accommodations that served Black travelers. The guide was published from 1936 to 1966, and at its height of popularity was used by two million people.

Historians have found that most sundown towns deliberately hid the means by which they became and remained all-white. Apart from oral histories, there are often few archival records that describe precisely how sundown towns excluded Blacks. Laws and policies that enforced racial exclusion have largely disappeared, but de facto sundown towns existed into the 1980s, and some may still be in evidence today.

Thirty-four victims of racial lynching in Maryland dating between 1854 and 1933 were granted posthumous pardons by Gov. Larry Hogan on Saturday. Hogan signed the order during an event to memorialize Howard Cooper, a 15-year-old boy who was hanged outside the Towson jailhouse by a White mob in 1885.

“In the interest of equal justice under law, I have made the decision to grant a posthumous pardon today for Howard Cooper,” Hogan said during the outdoor ceremony in Towson. “And studying this case led me to dig deeper,” Hogan continued. “Today I am also granting pardons to all the 34 victims of racial lynchings in the state of Maryland which occurred between 1854 and 1933.”

This is a first-of-its-kind pardon by a governor of a U.S. state, the Associated Press reported. Hogan said the victims were denied legal due process.

Cooper was dragged from the Baltimore County Jail and hanged from a tree by a mob of White men in 1885. This was after an all-White jury had concluded within minutes that he was guilty of raping Katie Gray, a white teenager in Baltimore County. According to The Baltimore Sun, neither Gray nor Cooper testified that Gray was raped. Cooper was sentenced to death by hanging. And even before his attorneys could appeal his conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court, he was lynched in the early hours of July 13, 1885.

Students at the state’s Loch Raven Technical Academy and the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project had earlier this year petitioned the governor to pardon Cooper. Hogan, a Republican, then asked his staff to search for all of the available accounts of racial lynching in Maryland.

“My hope is that this action will at least in some way help to right these horrific wrongs and perhaps bring a measure of peace to the memories of these individuals and to their descendants and their loved ones,” Hogan said.

The governor on Saturday read the names of Cooper and the 33 others pardoned: David Thomas, Jim Wilson, Isaac Moore, Jim Quinn, Thomas Jurick, John Jones, John Henry Scott, John Simms, Michael Green, James Carroll, George Peck, John Diggs, George Briscoe, Townsend Cook, Charles Whitley, Benjamin Hance, John Biggus, Asbury Green, James Taylor, Isaac Kemp, Stephen Williams, Jacob Henson, James Bowens, Sidney Randolph, William Andrews, Garfield King, Wright Smith, Lewis Harris, Henry Davis, William Burns, King Johnson and George Armwood.

Frederick, a 13-year-old boy, is the final victim. His full name “was lost to history,” the governor said.

Hogan announced the pardons while at the location near where Cooper was lynched. He unveiled a new historical plaque at the event that says that Cooper’s body was left hanging from a sycamore tree “so angry white residents and local train passengers could see his corpse.”

“Howard’s mother, Henrietta, collected her child’s remains and buried him in an unmarked grave in Ruxton,” the plaque reads. “No one was ever held accountable for her son’s lynching.”

In the late 19th century, lynchings were the only latest form of racial terrorism against Black Americans after White plantation owners had used various forms of violence against the enslaved.

According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), tension had begun brewing throughout the late 19th century in the U.S., and this was mostly felt in the south, where people blamed their financial woes on the newly freed slaves that lived among them.

Whites resorted to lynching as a form of retaliation towards the freed Blacks. What mostly triggered these lynchings were claims of petty crime, rape, or any alleged sexual contact between black men and white women. Whites started lynching because they felt it was crucial to protect White women.

From 1882-1968, 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States. Of these people that were lynched, 3,446 were black. The blacks lynched accounted for 72.7% of the people lynched, according to the NAACP, which was quick to add that not all of the lynchings were ever recorded.

Out of the 4,743 people lynched only 1,297 white people were lynched, that is, 27.3%. These whites were lynched for domestic crimes, helping the black or being against lynching.

“A typical lynching would involve criminal accusations, often dubious, against a black American, an arrest, and the assembly of a “lynch mob” intent on subverting the normal constitutional judicial process,” a report by The Guardian said.

It added that victims were seized and tortured, with many being hung from a tree and set on fire. Some were dismembered and their pieces of flesh and bone were taken by mob members as souvenirs.

June 18th, 1964, was a powerful yet little talked about moment in the history of the United States, and an especially important one in civil rights movement. 

On this day, a white hotel manager was photographed as he poured acid into a pool where white and black activists had integrated to protest segregation.

Together with the other protests and demonstrations in the summer of 1964  known as the St. Augustine Movement, this event at the pool in St. Augustine, Florida was so powerful that it changed the course of history, bringing more resolute action towards the plight of black people.

On June 11, 1964, a week before the event, civil rights icon, Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested for trespassing at the Monson Motor Lodge after being asked to leave its segregated restaurant. According to historians, King used the “confrontation as an opportunity to publicize both the non-violent approach used by civil rights activists and the desperate discrimination against black people that persisted across the city”.

King’s arrest, his only time in the state of Florida, spurred a series of protests and confrontations between activists, police, and segregationists, one of which was a ‘swim-in’ demonstration. King and his two associated planned the ‘swim-in’ at the same lodge that refused to admit him at its restaurant. 

White activists paid for motel rooms and invited black people to join them as their guests in the “whites only” pool. The motel manager, Jimmy Brock, allegedly furious with King’s earlier protest and now the ‘swim-in’, poured a bottle of muriatic acid, an undiluted hydrochloric acid used to clean pools, into the pool, hoping the swimmers would become scared and leave.

Brock apparently exclaimed, “I’m cleaning [the] pool!” as he poured the acid, a move captured by journalists and photographers who had gotten word of the demonstration and were onsite.

NPR interviewed two of the “swim-in” protesters, J.T. Johnson and Al Lingo, when they were 76 and 78, respectively. The two recalled that the hotel manager, Brock had ‘lost it”.

“Everybody was kind of caught off guard,” J.T. said.

“The girls, they were most frightened, and we moved to the center of the pool,” Al added.

“I tried to calm the gang down. I knew that there was too much water for that acid to do anything,” J.T. said.

Historians say that one swimmer, who knew that the ratio of acid to pool water was too little to be a threat drank some of the pool water to calm the other swimmers’ fears. Though some of them were scared, they did not back out of their demonstration. In fact, a cop had to jump in to arrest the protesters.

“When they [dragged] us out in bathing suits and carried us out to the jail, they wouldn’t feed me because they said I didn’t have on any clothes. I said, ‘Well, that’s the way you locked me up!’,” J.T. explained.

The Aftermath Of The Swim-In

Historians say, “the aftermath of Dr. King’s arrest and the swim-in demonstration was both swift and powerful”. Once lawmakers and public officials saw images from the “swim-in” among other protest activities in the St. Augustine Movement, public outcry for action intensified and officials could no longer feign ignorance.

In fact, on the following day, the Civil Rights Act was approved, after an 83-day filibuster in the U.S. Senate.

“That had not happened before in this country, that some man is pouring acid on people in the swimming pool,” J.T. said. “I’m not so sure the Civil Rights Act would have been passed had [there] not been a St. Augustine. It was a milestone. We was young, and we thought we’d done something — and we had.”

On July 1, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, effectively making “discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin” unlawful.

Racial discrimination in the housing system in the United States is a systemic problem with several reports over the years exposing the significantly huge gap between Black and White homeowners.

Though the reasons for that, including redlining, challenges with securing home loans and undervaluing Black-owned homes aren’t hidden secrets, efforts to mitigate these setbacks have moved at a snail’s pace.

In California, a Black Bay Area couple shared their story on how their home was undervalued by a White appraiser despite making significant renovations amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. They believe race played a part.

Speaking to ABC7, Paul and Tenisha Tate Austin said they purchased their Bay Area home in 2016 after initially struggling to close deals on properties they were interested in due to challenges including being outbid. They said they eventually became homeowners thanks to another Black family that wanted to sell their property off to a Black couple.

The couple said when they moved into the 1960s-built home, they invested heavily in renovations, spending $400,000 in constructing new floors, a deck and a fireplace. They said they also installed new appliances and added 1,000 square feet of space as well as a whole new floor.

When their massively-renovated home was subsequently appraised, however, it was far below their expected valuation. “I read the appraisal, I looked at the number I was like, ‘This is unbelievable’,” Tenisha Austin told the news outlet.

The couple said the appraiser – an older White woman – used coded language including “Marin City is a distinct area” in her appraisal. She valued the couple’s home at $989,000 – $100,000 more than its previous estimate before their $400,000 renovation, ABC7 reported. The Austins said they believe race played a part in the White appraiser’s estimation of their home.

“It was a slap in the face,” Austin said.

Dissatisfied with the estimate, the couple said they complained to their lender and requested a second appraisal. They were granted that after a month of following up. Before the second appraiser came in, however, the couple said they had a White friend pretend to be the owner of their home.

“We had a conversation with one of our white friends, and she said ‘No problem. I’ll be Tenisha. I’ll bring over some pictures of my family,’” Austin said. “She made our home look like it belonged to her.”

That plan worked as the second appraiser valued their home at $1,482,000 – almost $500,000 more than the first appraisal. The couple said their home being initially undervalued is a stark manifestation of the much broader issues pertaining to systemic racism in the United States.

“There are implications to our ability to create generational wealth or passing things on if our houses appraise for 50% less than its value,” Tate Austin told ABC7.

Glaring reality

Racial discrimination in the housing system in the United States continues to persist, with Black Americans usually struggling to secure home loans compared to their fellow Whites, The New York Times reported in 2020. The former are also subjected to redlining, where they are denied mortgages in some neighborhoods. This practice further devalues homes in Black neighborhoods. Black homeowners also reportedly claim their properties are usually appraised far less than that of their neighbors in mixed-race and predominantly White neighborhoods.

A 2018 report by researchers at Gallup and the Brookings Institution also shed some light on the devaluation of properties in Black neighborhoods compared to similar homes in White neighborhoods. According to the report: “Owner-occupied homes in black neighborhoods are undervalued by $48,000 per home on average, amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses.”

Speaking to The New York Times, Andre Perry, one of the writers of the Brookings Institution report, said Black homeowners still continue to bear the brunt of their homes being devalued – irrespective of the neighborhood they find themselves in.

“We still see Black people as risky,” Perry said. “White appraisers carry the same attitudes and beliefs of white America — the same attitudes that compelled Derek Chauvin to kneel casually on the neck of George Floyd are shared by other professionals in other fields. How does that choking out of America look in the appraisal industry? Through very low appraisals.”

A report by Redfin also revealed only 44% of Black Americans managed to own homes in 2020 as compared to 74% of White Americans. President Joe Biden has proposed financial reforms to make it less cumbersome for Black Americans to purchase homes.

Rapper and actor Romeo Miller recently opened up about a tense encounter with a Black police officer after he allegedly pulled him over at gunpoint while he was driving around the University of California, Los Angeles campus.

Speaking on FOX Soul’s The Mix, the 31-year-old said the officer moved to him with his gun drawn and went ahead to ask if the car he was driving was stolen. “UCLA, you better have that camera recording, because they don’t play no games. But the guy pulled me over at gunpoint, a Black cop, and was like, ‘Is this a stolen vehicle?’” he recollected. “I’m like, bro, relax. Just come check my registration and get my driving license.”

“Is this a stolen vehicle?” Miller repeated, playing the role of the officer. The Jumping the Broom actor, however, said the hostility ceased once the officer recognized him. “And then he saw it was me and was like, ‘Oh, Romeo Miller? Oh, you’re good. I thought you were just some random Black dude,’” he recalled.

Though Miller, who is the son of veteran rapper and business mogul Master P, fortunately walked away unharmed, he lamented on how things could have gone south had it been just another regular Black person. Miller used his younger brothers as an example, saying the police could be hostile to them because they’re less famous and their towering physiques could pass them off as intimidating and mature – though they aren’t.

“I don’t care, you don’t have to be ‘some random Black dude.’ My brothers ain’t famous. They’re bigger than me –– these guys are 6’4, 6’5. These guys are ‘intimidating Black men.’ I have little brothers that literally look like grown men,” he said. “What are they going to go through when they don’t realize ‘Oh I know you from TV? You’re not a threat, or this or that.’ It’s sad that we’re seen as threatening. I been through that situation too many times.”

Miller’s encounter with the armed officer comes on the back of a recent and similar incident involving Power star Michael Rainey Jr. In an Instagram post, the Black actor claimed he would have been shot by a police officer after he was pulled over during a routine traffic stop had he not instinctively started recording their encounter.

In the video, Rainey, who is popularly known for his role as Tariq in the popular television series, Power, is seen trying to produce his license after the officer makes a demand for it. The officer, who is leaning over from the driver’s window of Rainey’s vehicle, appears to have his right hand on his gun at a certain point. He, however, appears to cover it after he realizes he is being recorded. Rainey claimed the decision to film the incident may have saved him from being shot by the officer.

Two armed White men who pulled up at the North Carolina home of an African-American mother and son while searching for a missing person are demanding an apology from the Black family for allegedly tarnishing their image after their actions were likened to mob violence.

According to CNN, the men, who were in the company of around 13 other White people at the time of the incident, claim what happened that night wasn’t racially motivated and they were simply trying to locate the whereabouts of a missing person. The demand from Jordan Kita and Austin Wood comes after they were acquitted in February for their involvement in the May 3 incident. Attorneys representing the two men say they want to have a sit-down with Monica Shepard and her son, Dameon, to thrash out the incident as they claim it was a misunderstanding.

Aside from that, they also want an apology from the Black family. Monica, however, told the news outlet she wants to have nothing to do with them and she isn’t concerned they were acquitted. Kita was charged with forcible trespass, breaking and entering and willful failure to discharge duties while Wood was charged with going armed to the terror of the public.

It is also likely the issue won’t be put to bed anytime soon as a civil lawsuit filed by the Shepards against the group that showed up at their home will still be pursued. The Shepards, who compared the group to Ku Klux Klan night riders, are seeking over $25,000 in damages, legal fees as well as “training concerning the history of racism and mob violence” for the White people who showed up at their residence, CNN reported.

The May 3 incident considerably drew the ire of the public who claimed it was racially motivated. Attorneys for the two White men, however, denied race played a factor despite acknowledging the dark history of mob lynching in North Carolina and how the incident similarly reeked of it. They also admitted Kita and Wood were armed. Nevertheless, they claimed they were desperately searching for the missing girl and accused the Shepards and their attorneys of lying about the incident being racially motivated.

Monica Shepard, however, told CNN she’s not interested in having any discussion whatsoever with them. “I’ve said this before: It’s about accountability,” she said. “You can’t just form a mob and go around being vigilante citizens. There’s laws against that. I’m not interested in sitting down. It’s all about accountability at the end of the day.”

What happened?

On the night of May 3, Kita, then a New Hanover County Sheriff’s deputy, joined Wood and 13 other White people to search for the former’s missing 15-year-old cousin. Following a tip-off about the missing girl possibly being with a young man at the Shepards’ address, the group moved to their home. Kita was in his uniform and was also out of his jurisdiction at the time.

The Shepards said though Dameon told them they had the wrong address and he wasn’t the person they were after, the group still refused to leave. The family also accused Kita of using his foot to block them from closing the door. He, however, denied that, CNN reported. During the encounter, Wood was also standing close by with a rifle.

Kita was dismissed from the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office in the aftermath of the incident. The missing girl was found at a different location the next day.

The mother of an 11-year-old sixth-grader at a Long Island Catholic school is accusing the institution’s headmaster of forcing her Black son to kneel and apologize after claiming that’s the “African way” of saying sorry.

In an interview with New York Daily News, Trisha Paul said St. Martin de Porres Marianist School headmaster John Holian forced her Haitian-American son to get on his knees and render an apology after his English teacher reported him for doing the wrong assignment. When Paul got in touch with Holian to discuss the incident after her son told him what had occurred, the headmaster allegedly justified his action by claiming he learned that disciplinary practice from a Nigerian parent who told him it’s an “African way” of rendering an apology. Paul said the explanation left her shocked.

“Once he started mentioning this African family, that’s when it just clicked,” Paul told the news outlet. “Like, this is not normal procedure. I felt there was no relevance at all. Is he generalizing that everyone who is Black is African? That’s when I realized something is not right with this situation.”

Paul, who said the February incident left her son embarrassed, believes race played a factor. “My son was humiliated, hurt, embarrassed, sad and confused,” she said. “He reads about things happening because of your skin color. To experience it… he’s just trying to process it in his 11-year-old brain.”

In a phone call on March 1 to discuss the incident, Paul said Holian admitted the punishment in question wasn’t a standard disciplinary procedure. He also couldn’t properly clarify how the kneeling story about the Nigerian family was relevant after making reference to it. And when the two met face to face to further discuss the incident, Holian alleged her son was made to apologize to the teacher for being disrespectful. Paul, however, said the school had never contacted her about her son’s conduct, adding that he is a “well-mannered, honor roll student.”

During their discussion, Holian also told Paul he made her son kneel because simply saying sorry wouldn’t have changed anything. “If I had said to him ‘apologize and get back to class’… it would’ve meant nothing,” Holian told Paul in the video recording of their meeting, according to New York Daily News. “So it was changing the way you say ‘I apologize.’”

Holian also doubled down on forcing Paul’s son to kneel, saying he learned that form of punishment from a Nigerian parent whose child was enrolled at the school.

“This father came in and said, ‘you’re going to apologize to this teacher the African way, and you’re going to get down on your knees and apologize.’ I’ve never seen that before,” Holian said, adding that that form of punishment is justifiable irrespective of a child’s race.

“I have six kids, and four boys. And if one of them is really acting rude and arrogant… I will say at times, ‘get on your knees and apologize,’” he told Paul. “I was speaking to your son as I would my own son.”

Meanwhile, school authorities released a statement on Friday announcing Holian has been placed on temporary leave pending an investigation into the incident.

“I want to assure you that St. Martin’s neither condones nor accepts the actions of our headmaster,” acting headmaster James Conway wrote in the statement. “The incident does not reflect our long, established values or the established protocols regarding student related issues.”

Though Holian apologized to Paul over the incident, the mother said the harm has already been caused. “He showed no remorse until he realized how it’s impacted my son,” she told New York Daily News. “He’s going to therapy. He’s been very reserved and humiliated.” Paul also said her son now tries to “stay away from the headmaster and not speak to the teacher if need be.”

A resource officer with the Middleton High School in Florida was dismissed earlier this week after school authorities noted that Delvin White had on multiple occasions used the n-word.

Although White is Black, authorities believe his actions did not reflect their code of conduct. The Tampa Police Department also released a statement saying usage of the n-word constituted “violations of policy that prohibit discriminatory conduct”.

But White did not use the word only while he was working. According to material sourced from his body camera, although he used it on November 30, 2020, while arresting a trespasser, White also said the n-word off duty, once while driving home and on the phone, and another time, also on the phone, with his wife.

When questioned, White reportedly told his supervisor his intention was not to derogate but rather in line with how the word is “commonly used in today’s society as a means of shared culture and experiences among the African American community”.

But Tampa Police are not buying that. Chief Brian Dugan said language as White used “jeopardize the trust that our department works to establish with our community”. But the issue is not the first to prompt a debate about who can say the word that is mostly used among Black people for the reasons White elucidated.

America has grappled with, for the last few decades, the question of restrictions in language based on race and ethnicity. Only Black people are generally expected to use the word even though the spaces in which they can exercise this privilege outside of in-group conversations, are not that many. For instance, it is rare to see Black people use the words in primetime new media and on many TV programs, even among themselves.

Professional bodies like police departments have regulations that prohibit the use of the n-word. White’s incident will however re-ignite questions back and forth, especially owing to how he claimed to have used it.

Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall have disclosed that they were forced to put a White actor in Coming to America in order to prevent the cast in the iconic 1988 movie from being all-Black.

The two comedians and actors opened up on the reason behind that directive and also explained how Louie Anderson was ultimately cast during an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Monday, Independent reported. Anderson played the character Maurice, an employee at McDowell’s. The fictional restaurant was owned by Cleo McDowell (John Allen Amos Jr.), the father of Prince Akeem’s love interest, Lisa.

“I love Louie, but I think we were forced to put Louie in it,” Hall revealed to the show’s host. “We were forced to put [in] a White person.”

“The whole cast was Black and this was back in the Eighties,” Murphy added. “So it was like ‘We have to have a White person, there has to be a White person in the movie.”

The 59-year-old continued: “I was like, ‘What?’ So who was the funniest White guy around? We knew Louie was cool, so that’s how Louie got in the movie.”

Hall said he was presented with a list of three White actors to choose from, and he opted for Louie. “It was official. I had a list. They gave me a list with three White guys. They said, ‘Who would you rather work with?’ I said ‘Louie.’”

In the first installment of the movie, Prince Akeem (Eddie Murphy) leaves the Kingdom of Zamunda to America, where he seeks a wife. He is accompanied by his personal aide and best friend, Semmi (Arsenio Hall). For the second installment which is set to be premiered on March 5 on Amazon Prime, Prince Akeem finds out he has a son in America and travels back to Queens, NYC, with Semmi in search of the next heir of the Kingdom of Zamunda.

As previously reported, Coming 2 America features some popular Black actors and celebrities joining Murphy, Hall and some of the original cast members. The new faces in the sequel include Jermaine Fowler, Leslie Jones, Wesley Snipes, Tracy Morgan and Teyana Taylor.

Racial discrimination in the housing system in the United States is a systemic problem with several reports over the years exposing the significantly huge gap between Black and White homeowners.

Though the reasons for that, including redlining, challenges with securing home loans and undervaluing Black-owned homes aren’t hidden secrets, efforts to mitigate these setbacks have moved at a snail’s pace.

In California, a Black Bay Area couple shared their story on how their home was undervalued by a White appraiser despite making significant renovations amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. They believe race played a part.

Speaking to ABC7, Paul and Tenisha Tate Austin said they purchased their Bay Area home in 2016 after initially struggling to close deals on properties they were interested in due to challenges including being outbid. They said they eventually became homeowners thanks to another Black family that wanted to sell their property off to a Black couple.

The couple said when they moved into the 1960s-built home, they invested heavily in renovations, spending $400,000 in constructing new floors, a deck and a fireplace. They said they also installed new appliances and added 1,000 square feet of space as well as a whole new floor.

When their massively-renovated home was subsequently appraised, however, it was far below their expected valuation. “I read the appraisal, I looked at the number I was like, ‘This is unbelievable’,” Tenisha Austin told the news outlet.

The couple said the appraiser – an older White woman – used coded language including “Marin City is a distinct area” in her appraisal. She valued the couple’s home at $989,000 – $100,000 more than its previous estimate before their $400,000 renovation, reported. The Austins said they believe race played a part in the White appraiser’s estimation of their home.

“It was a slap in the face,” Austin said.

Dissatisfied with the estimate, the couple said they complained to their lender and requested a second appraisal. They were granted that after a month of following up. Before the second appraiser came in, however, the couple said they had a White friend pretend to be the owner of their home.

“We had a conversation with one of our white friends, and she said ‘No problem. I’ll be Tenisha. I’ll bring over some pictures of my family,’” Austin said. “She made our home look like it belonged to her.”

That plan worked as the second appraiser valued their home at $1,482,000 – almost $500,000 more than the first appraisal. The couple said their home being initially undervalued is a stark manifestation of the much broader issues pertaining to systemic racism in the United States.

“There are implications to our ability to create generational wealth or passing things on if our houses appraise for 50% less than its value,” Tate Austin told.

Glaring Reality

Racial discrimination in the housing system in the United States continues to persist, with Black Americans usually struggling to secure home loans compared to their fellow Whites, The New York Times reported in 2020. The former are also subjected to redlining, where they are denied mortgages in some neighborhoods. This practice further devalues homes in Black neighborhoods. Black homeowners also reportedly claim their properties are usually appraised far less than that of their neighbors in mixed-race and predominantly White neighborhoods.

A 2018 report by researchers at Gallup and the Brookings Institution also shed some light on the devaluation of properties in Black neighborhoods compared to similar homes in White neighborhoods. According to the report: “Owner-occupied homes in black neighborhoods are undervalued by $48,000 per home on average, amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses.”

Speaking to The New York Times, Andre Perry, one of the writers of the Brookings Institution report, said Black homeowners still continue to bear the brunt of their homes being devalued – irrespective of the neighborhood they find themselves in.

“We still see Black people as risky,” Perry said. “White appraisers carry the same attitudes and beliefs of white America — the same attitudes that compelled Derek Chauvin to kneel casually on the neck of George Floyd are shared by other professionals in other fields. How does that choking out of America look in the appraisal industry? Through very low appraisals.”

A report by Redfin also revealed only 44% of Black Americans managed to own homes in 2020 as compared to 74% of White Americans. President Joe Biden has proposed financial reforms to make it less cumbersome for Black Americans to purchase homes.

The family of a Black deceased Allen Parish Sheriff’s Office deputy were left astonished when an employee at a Louisiana cemetery told them they couldn’t be allocated burial space because it’s a Whites-only cemetery.

According to KPLC, the Oaklin Springs Cemetery had a 1950s Jim Crow-era by-laws that prohibited non-Whites from being buried there. The by-laws in question have since been amended by the cemetery’s board members to make it all-inclusive following the incident.

“It was in their by-laws that the cemetery was ‘whites only,’” Deputy Darrell Semien’s widow, Karla, told the news outlet. “I just kinda looked at her and she said ‘There’s no coloreds allowed.’”

Deputy Semien passed away last week after suffering from cancer. Prior to his death, he told his family he wanted to be buried at the cemetery as it was near their home. That wish, however, could not come to pass.

“Just blatantly, with no remorse: ‘I can’t sell you a plot for your husband,’” Kimberly Curly, Semien’s daughter recalled.

In the aftermath of the incident, the president of the Oaklin Springs Cemetery Association, Creig Vizena, issued an apology to the family, although he admitted their initial cemetery contract permitted only “white human beings” to be buried there. He said he was unaware of that clause.

“It never came up,” he said. “I take full responsibility for that. I’ve been the president of this board for several years now. I take full responsibility for not reading the by-laws.”

The deceased’s family told KPLC the incident exacerbated their grief and left them disappointed as Semien selflessly served the community as a law enforcement officer. “There was nothing none of us could do, but we did it,” Karla said. “And to be told this is like we were nothing. He was nothing? He put his life on the line for them.”

Curly added: “Everybody dies. They bleed the same. You die. You’re the same color. Death has no color, so why should he be refused?”

Vizena tried making amends by offering the family a plot at the cemetery for his burial but they declined. “I even offered them, I can’t sell you one, but I can give you one of mine,” he said. “That’s how strongly I feel about fixing it.”

Semien was rather buried at the Sonnier Cemetery in Oberlin on Saturday, January 30, according to NBC News.