Some Want To Believe Blacks Caused The Financial Crisis

Evidently the Black poor bought so many homes that all of Wall Street collapsed under the forclosures. Yeah. And we have a bridge we want to sell you too.

Let us set the record straight: Black subprime mortgage purchases could NOT have caused the collapse of Wall Street. Not enough Blacks. Not enough Black mortgage purchases to do it. Nice try though if people who don't like Blacks anyway want just another excuse to scapegoat the Negro. You know who you are. Actually it is political too. Some want to tie this image to Barack Obama so he will lose the election. That is why ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is being highlighted, particularly ACORN-Chicago. Racialists are also vilifying the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 as the tool used to blackmail banks into just shoveling bad loans out to black poor. Please. And lastly, it is all brought together by tying Franklin Raines reign at Fannie Mae to Barack Obama to ACORN and CRA pimping and you have the black cause of the collapse of American capitalism. The lengths some go to to fuel bias against Blacks.

Let's look at the numbers. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Black homeownership rates went up from 44% in 1996 to 47% in 2007. This compares to a homeowner rate of 72% by Whites. Blacks make up 13% of the U.S. population and these stats show that about half of those households have mortgages. The 3% increase in homeownership among Black households from 1996 to 2007 simply does not have the numbers to serve as the stimulus for the foreclosure meltdown. In 2006 there were 8.4 million Black family households compared to approximately 116,011,000 total households in the U.S., according the the U.S. Census Bureau. Half of this total would equal 4.2 million mortgage-holding households. Even if half of those defaulted on their loans, it would still represent less than 2% of all mortgages. There is no way even this overestimated number of foreclosures could bring down even Fannie Mae, which routinely expected default rates of 1% in its annual portfolio.

Plus, one would have to ignore many other obvious reasons for the financial crisis before picking on the Blacks, including: mark-to-market, short selling, book cooking, speculators, and white household mortgage foreclosures.

Of course, numbers, facts and reality do not matter if one is determined to find a reason to hate African Americans.