Living in certain areas and being a certain race can determine how well your quality of life will be. While reading “Racial Capitalocene” by Francoise Vergès, and “New York’s Invisible Climate Migrants” by Sophie Kasakove, I realized how race affects housing. In Francoise’s piece, she discusses how race is linked to global warming and climate change. Francoise talks about how there is a lot of toxic waste dumped in lower class communities, consisting of mainly blacks and hispanics. She argues that global warming is affecting these specific races much more than it is other races. In her article she states, “It showed that race was the single most important factor in determining where toxic waste facilities were sited in the United States and that the siting of these facilities in communities of color was the intentional result of local, state, and federal land-use policies.” Although this is extremely unfair, this is how it’s always been, and the author is bringing attention to it.
Similarly, Sophie Kasakove argues in her text that housing is harder to obtain for black families. Sophie discussed the different prices of houses in different areas, but came back to elaborate that it’s not easy for black people to keep their houses, as rent keeps increasing in those areas. She talked specifically about Canarsie and how this area is made up of mostly black people. Although it was full of life at one point, over the years it has become less populated and more foreclosures occurred. In her article she states,”Even before Sandy, though, it wasn’t easy to keep a home in these neighborhoods. Targeted intensely by subprime lenders during the housing bubble, they have consistently had some of the highest foreclosure rates in the city. But after Sandy, it became even harder; the government programs designed to help people with recovery costs have been notoriously inadequate.” This shows how the government doesn’t care to assist the already suffering people of Canarsie and other neighborhoods, but more about driving them away.
These articles both contain a similar theme — finding and maintaining a place to live as a black person in a black neighborhood can be extremely difficult. Many of these black neighborhoods are neglected and underdeveloped, leaving the residents to take care of it themselves. Although the first article focused more on climate change, and the second article discussed pricing, both articles explained how black neighborhoods aren’t being taken care of like they should be. Living in New York, we’re able to see the way certain areas are extremely different than other areas, despite being handled by the same government.
Your theme of housing quality and location being a concern for black residents was brought out well throughout your piece. You made good use of textual evidence from both articles such as the mentioning of “Subprime leaders” taking advantage of people during a vulnerable period and the target of toxic waste disposal being mainly black and Hispanic communities.
I totally agree with what you said on the poor communities have a higher rater of recovery cost. The government does not want to face their problems in the poor area, they do not even want to fix the problems for them. Since then, the minorities live in the poor area too, that even make the situation worse.