[rayiner]

> That was nearly 90 years ago.

Did government bureaucrats micro-managing the economy stop being racist in that time?

> Redlining was made illegal under federal law - i.e. by the government - in the 70s, not least because the private sector had absolutely no interest in doing anything to stop it.

Redlining was invented by the government! The term refers to markings on FHA maps. The FHA massively distorted the mortgage market by insuring mortgages, but refusing to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods. That made such mortgages vastly riskier for private sector lenders.

[wholinator2]

Okay, call me naive but would we rather the government have done nothing? I understand racism still exists but you can't act like we haven't made any progress. Could you imagine the protests if segregation or something akin to it started now? I understand horrific actions have been made in the past, I understand there are still bad people in the government. Should we let that prevent us from doing anything to help people? What about people who die of hunger or homelessness? Millions and millions of Americans are in extremely difficult positions right now, my parents included. Should we tell those people we don't even want to try because we're scared of something that happened 90 years ago? Can't we progress? Can't we be better? We certainly can't if we never even give ourselves the chance.

[rayiner]

> Okay, call me naive but would we rather the government have done nothing? I understand racism still exists but you can't act like we haven't made any progress.

The Black-white income and wealth gaps are as large today as they were in the 1960s: https://images.app.goo.gl/s1YD3sxKeuG289GfA. While the reasons for that are complex, New Deal programs that redlined African Americans, strengthened unions that excluded them, introduced segregation through the WPA into northern cities that hasn’t been segregated before, etc., played a significant role.

I’m not objecting to the government doing things. My objection is to OP’s invocation of the New Deal as the template for action. Last time we tried empowering white central planners to construct housing and infrastructure, they played out their prejudices in their decisionmaking to the detriment of non-white people.

There’s lots of things you can do that aren’t in the New Deal model. For example, if you’re worried about homelessness, instead of having the government build public housing (the New Deal approach) you can give people money to buy housing (the Nixon-Ford Section 8 voucher model). That’s what the government is doing now. It’s just giving people money and stabilizing the economy. (That’s also what every OECD country is doing.) It’s a better approach.