Obama Restores Civil Rights

Good news this morning: the Obama Administration is "restoring" the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice - the agency for anti-discrimination enforcement in the areas of housing, voting rights, employment, and so forth.  Under Bush, the division was notoriously politicized, with conservative and Christian loyalists with little civil rights experience recruited and charged with prioritizing religious cases at the expense of the division's core focus on racial/ethnic discrimination.  Why am I writing about this at Poverty in America?  Because discrimination has historically reinforced racial, gender and other forms of inequality in housing, jobs, etc. - leading to the disproportionately high rates of women and people of color living in poverty.

A history of redlining - where policymakers, bankers, and lenders deny financial services or products in communities where racial minorities or the poor live - is one of the best examples of how our policies and practices prohibited African-Americans from building wealth during the 20th century.  They couldn't get mortgages in the neighborhoods where they lived; they couldn't build equity in their houses like a comparable white household could.  Racial minorities are disproportionately denied loans, or steered into subprime markets, even if they are income-eligible for prime loans.

The Bush DOJ tried to focus on cases only where intentional discrimination could be shown.  But discrimination in housing markets or in employment is often very subtle, difficult to prove, and - as the Lily Ledbetter case points out - has a cumulative impact over time before discrimination may even be known.

It's really difficult to fight poverty without acknowledging the role of racial, gender and other forms of discrimination that mire women, people of color, and the disabled in poverty regardless of how hard they work, how much money they try and save, how well they try and shelter themselves and their kids from crime and violence.  Expanding and enforcing civil rights is not a job to put behind us nor dismiss as political under the leadership of our first African-American President.  A strengthened and renewed Civil Rights division at DOJ is as essential to reducing poverty as an emphasis on stable rental markets and stimulus subsidies for social programs.

(Image from Kennesaw State University archives; Left photo: "Civil rights protest" by uwdigitalcollections
Right photo: "Obama delivers his speech" by ep_jhu)