Today’s residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.
— Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Use these videos, articles, and websites to learn more about redlining and housing discrimination in New York.
VIDEO | Race and Redlining
What is redlining and how did it affect BIPOC Americans? Watch the NPR video to the left for an examination of the origins of redlining and the effects it has had on generations of Americans of color.
MAP | Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America
Mapping Inequality was created through a partnership between four universities working to illustrate redlining in the United States and the effects it has had on its cities. Click on Boroughs of New York to view the HOLC graded neighborhoods within New York City and its corresponding demographics.
ACTIVITY | DO JUSTICE. LOVE KINDNESS. WALK HUMBLY.
The Diocese of Long Island has partnered with FaithX to create a set of interactive maps that reveal the presence and power of systemic racism within Brooklyn, Queens, and on Long Island.
Spend some time exploring the maps for your neighborhood and throughout the Diocese. The entirety of Long Island has been mapped to illustrate the effects of institutional racism within our communities.
What is your race and ethnicity? What is the primary race in your neighborhood?
What is your access to supermarkets, highly rated healthcare, parks and green spaces, good schools, reliable utility services, and city services like police and fire stations?
How does that differ from other communities nearby?How do the FaithX maps illustrate the effect of systemic racism on your daily life?
If your parish has partnered with another church or churches as part of Indaba or a discussion project, look at the location of their parish and compare your neighborhoods.
a. What is the primary ethnicity of your partner church? How does that compare with your parish?
b. Look with compassion at their neighborhood’s history and discuss the effects of systemic racism within their community as a window into understanding its effects on their lives.
REPORT | The Roots of Structural Racism Project
A project undertaken by The Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, “The Roots of Structural Racism Project was unveiled in June 2021 after several years of investigating the persistence of racial residential segregation across the United States. Among the many components included in this project are the national segregation report which contains startling findings about the intensification of racial residential segregation in recent decades; an interactive mapping tool that illustrates the level of segregation in every city, region and neighborhood in the country; a collection of tables which list cities and metropolitan regions by various measures of segregation and political polarization; nine city profiles noteworthy for their levels of segregation or integration; and a literature review featuring dozens of local city histories.”
Click here to view project report for The Roots of Structural Racism Project.
Click here to experience the interactive map
VIDEO | Fair Housing Act and the Roots of Segregation
VIDEO | Urban Displacement
MAP | Renewing Inequality
Renewing Inequality is another experience from the American Panorama Project. It is an interactive map that illustrates displacement by the United States displaced in order to “urban improvement projects” build highways and housing projects. The map displays projects between 1950 and 1966, demographics of the neighborhoods and people displaced, and the redlining grades for these areas.
REPORT | The Great Real Estate Reset
Review a 2020 report by the Brookings Institution analyzing how segregation persists in today’s real estate market and its roots in redlining.