As our country becomes perpetually divided and the flaws in our judiciary and policing system are being revealed before our very eyes, it is increasingly more important for America to become informed on its own history regarding race and inequality. A country where all men aren't created equal when looking Lady Justice in the eye is a country with a broken system, regardless of your political alignment. In face, now in as good of a time as any to discuss the history of racist legislation. The needless murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and many others are just symptoms of the centuries of a racial divide facilitated by our very own government. As America slowly comes to grips with its racist past, it seems to forget the scars formed by redlining, gentrification, and the War on Drugs.

Redlining: "In 1933, faced with a housing shortage, the federal government began a program explicitly designed to increase and segregate America's housing stock. The government's efforts were "primarily designed to provide housing to white, middle-class, lower-middle-class families," Author Richard Rothstein says. "African-Americans and other people of color were left out of the new suburban communities - and pushed instead into urban housing projects." Redlining segregated the African-American community from housing not based on merit, but based simply on race. Despite housing’s seemingly innocent implications, it meant that the government was purposefully restricting African-American's social mobility, and creating poor neighborhoods that snowball into dismay while reserving the wealthy neighborhoods for white homeowners, creating a precedent of African-American poverty.

Gentrification: “Gentrification is a general term for the arrival of wealthier people in an existing urban district, a related increase in rents and property values, and changes in the district's character and culture. The term is often used negatively, suggesting the displacement of poor communities by rich outsiders”. At a glance, gentrification seems like a positive thing. Who wouldn’t want wealthier suburban neighborhoods, reduced crime, and increased economic activity? Unfortunately, the benefits of these changes are often enjoyed disproportionately by the new arrivals, while the established residents find themselves economically and socially marginalized. “Gentrification has been the cause of painful conflict in many American cities, often along racial and economic fault lines. Neighborhood change is often viewed as a miscarriage of social justice, in which wealthy, usually white, newcomers are congratulated for "improving" a neighborhood whose poor, minority residents are displaced by skyrocketing rents and economic change.”

The War on Drugs: I’ll just leave you this infamous quote by John Elrichman, counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under President Richard Nixon: “You want to know what this was really all about,” Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said, referring to Nixon’s declaration of war on drugs. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”