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Digital Racism: From Redlining to Routers
They don’t need highways to divide neighborhoods anymore
In our rapidly growing digital age, access to opportunity runs through fiber-optic cables and Wi-Fi signals.
But in Black communities, those cables too often stop short. And it’s not an accident.
It’s the practice known as digital redlining. The systemic denial and limiting of internet infrastructure and digital tools by race, zip code (i.e. race) and economic status.
Students of history know digital redlining’s 20th-century older cousin that kept Black families from buying homes in certain neighborhoods. Housing redlining was a government-sanctioned practice that denied Black people access to home ownership, loans, and neighborhood investment.
The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation helped people refinance during the Great Depression, but color-coded the U.S. map based on race and denied participation to Black communities. Banks also used those same redlined maps to deny loans. Our own government’s Federal Housing Administration refused to insure loans in redlined areas. The result? Black families are locked out of the suburbs and locked out of wealth accumulation.
While that physical practice officially ended in the late 1970s, digital redlining now…
