Nobody ever thinks they are on the wrong side of history at the time it’s being made.

Everyone dogs on the South for being racist, as if it’s only ever been located there. Yet as we’ve joked about often, that shit is pervasive everywhere, but especially on the east coast (Google searches using the n-word are almost from east of the Great Plains) like Boston. That’s the dirty little secret liberals and moderates really don’t like is how every “liberal” city like Boston, Austin, Portland, San Francisco—they’re also the most racially segregated and gentrified. As Dave Chappelle said about SF, they put all the [black people] on the other side of the [Bay] bridge, i.e. Oakland. When it became a state, Oregon was expressly founded as a white separatist enclave where black people weren’t even allowed in. Chicago is notoriously segregated north and south of the Loop. In Boston, there are areas where certain races just know to never enter for their own safety.

People talk about the Civil Rights Act and the Voters Rights Act, but there was a third component, the Fair Housing Act of 1968–the “Northern Civil Rights Act.” No one really lauds its successes because there really aren’t any. It was supposed to end redlining and more subtle but active discrimination such as in housing, and was what led to the busing programs in the 1970s — all of which were most ferociously fought by people in the north like New York, New England, and the Rust Belt where there have always been large minority communities which have also faced pervasive discrimination and de facto segregation. But it’s a lot easier to desegregate under Jim Crow because that created clear and overt divisions, but people can discriminate in hiring and in lending, renting, or selling to minorities and get away with it a lot more easily because unless they actually say “I’m not selling to any n-words” or racially-exclusive property covenants, there are innumerable legal excuses that can justify discrimination. This doesn’t even get into sideways forms of racial discrimination such as using criminal backgrounds or poor credit ratings as reasons not to hire or lend to people given how disproportionately negative marks affect minorities. Even when it is pointed out that, for example, non-whites were disproportionately steered towards subprime loans, are generally loaned money at higher rates, and were more likely to be defrauded by banks such as all those accounts Wells Fargo illegally opened in people’s names, it only comes after the fact because there’s rarely a manual from the CEO saying, “Fuck black people. Charge them more.” It’s just how things are done. And so when Hillary Clinton said breaking up the big banks wouldn’t end racism and Bernie Sanders whiffed on this remarkably slow pitch it was because both of them have their heads in the sand to this; but Matt Taibbi pointed out that this is where Bernie could’ve nailed his cred with minorities at the time (He has since, as if that matters now) because Yes, it would. Those banks are the institutions making these rules and engaging in and then profiting off of discrimination. They are the problem, just as they’ve always been. Just as the banks profited off the slave trade—as investment capital, chattel slavery was immensely profitable for owners and for the banks that lent money to and benefited from the return on investment by chattel slave labor—I hate to use pop culture to make a point, but I’ll make this one exception that it is now so clear but yet so opaque to most people that Game of Thrones pointed it out two episodes ago how the Iron Bank took a huge financial hit when Dany ended the slave trade in her conquered lands and yet only a few people and media outlets (That’s to say, black media) made the connection between that and the effect slavery had on banks in this country (and how they overcame that problem).

The most telling thing in how pervasive and unconscious racism is in housing and education, for example, are in articles about white liberals and progressives using the exact same coded or even explicit language to justify de facto segregation in their communities, e.g. in newly-gentrified parts of Brooklyn or any rapidly-growing and -gentrifying areas, as people in more overtly racist communities, i.e. the South, use to justify the same thing that both end up seeking—exclusion of The Other from their communities where The Other just happens to be everyone who doesn’t look like them, earn like them, and have the same backgrounds and “cultures” as them.