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3,581 voters
“How do we ensure…that the police do not become the agents of neighborhood bigotry?” they wrote. In the end, Kelling and Wilson weren’t sure. Their conclusion was that they just had to hope it wouldn’t turn out that way.
Hope. Is. Not. A. Strategy. Disturbing that the fates of so many people of color when it came to their interactions with police boiled down to the hope that cops wouldn’t be neighborhood racism valets (despite previous evidence to the contrary).
“The civil rights movement ended in a kind of negotiated compromise. Black Americans were granted legal equality, while white America was allowed to nurture and maintain an illusion of innocence, even as it continued to live in almost complete separation.”
― I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street
― I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street
“Even with the bundling and splitting of tranches, Wall Street needed more mortgage borrowers, so it created the subprime market. These were loans to borrowers who did not meet the underwriting standards set forth by the GSEs, or “prime” loans. Subprime borrowers were riskier borrowers, either because they had fewer assets, lower credit score, or lower incomes. But in finance, higher risk is rewarded with higher yield, so mortgage brokers made even higher premiums from subprime loans.”
― The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
― The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
“We might want to apply the following short litmus tests to any policy proposal: does the program require some collective sacrifice or does it place the burden of closing the wealth gap entirely on the black community? If the latter, this is a cop-out that refuses to acknowledge that the black community did not create the problem in the first place.”
― The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
― The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
“In Where Do We Go from Here, King had said, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him.”
― The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
― The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap
“On one side sat a group of mostly nonwhite Americans who believed (or knew from personal experience) that institutional racism is still a deathly serious problem in this country, as evidenced by everything from profiling to mass incarceration to sentencing disparities to a massive wealth gap. On the other side sat an increasingly impatient population of white conservatives that was being squeezed economically (although not nearly as much as black citizens), felt its cultural primacy eroding, and had become hypersensitive to any accusation of racism. These conservatives blamed everything from the welfare state to affirmative action for breeding urban despair and disrespect toward authority—in other words, these conservatives saw themselves as victims of malevolent systems and threatening trends but thought that nonwhite Americans were fully responsible for their own despair.”
― I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street
― I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street
Scott’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Scott’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
1,755 books
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36 friends
1,269 books
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68 friends
306 books
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63 friends
379 books
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30 friends
462 books
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221 friends
252 books
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105 friends
127 books
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19 friends
257 books
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71 friends
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