The New York Post is reporting on a little known effort by the Obama administration to mine massive amounts of personal information on American citizens by race. The ostensible reason for the collection of data is to address the problems of “racial and economic injustice.”
Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.
This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.
Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.
So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.
The granddaddy of them all is the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled out earlier this month to racially balance the nation, ZIP code by ZIP code. It will map every US neighborhood by four racial groups — white, Asian, black or African-American, and Hispanic/Latino — and publish “geospatial data” pinpointing racial imbalances.
The agency proposes using nonwhite populations of 50% or higher as the threshold for classifying segregated areas.
Federally funded cities deemed overly segregated will be pressured to change their zoning laws to allow construction of more subsidized housing in affluent areas in the suburbs, and relocate inner-city minorities to those predominantly white areas. HUD’s maps, which use dots to show the racial distribution or density in residential areas, will be used to select affordable-housing sites.
HUD plans to drill down to an even more granular level, detailing the proximity of black residents to transportation sites, good schools, parks and even supermarkets. If the agency’s social engineers rule the distance between blacks and these suburban “amenities” is too far, municipalities must find ways to close the gap or forfeit federal grant money and face possible lawsuits for housing discrimination.
This is a social justice warrior’s wet dream. Imagine the suits that are going to be clogging the dockets of federal courts in the near future as the citizenry trembles in the shadow of a threatening government. This is the real “hope and change” — the true “transformation of America” that President Obama had in mind when he took office.
Armed with the “disparate impact” weapon recently granted by the Supreme Court, it won’t matter if a city is working to alleviate segregated neighborhoods. Intent doesn’t matter now — all that matters is results.
Besides the issues surrounding our privacy, what makes this database so insidious is what it represents: the notion that the content of someone’s character doesn’t matter as much as the color of their skin. There are other reasons for segregated cities than racial prejudice. How about awful government policies? Or inept policing that prevents businesses like grocery stores from operating in poor neighborhoods?
Moving people about as if they’re pawns on a racial chessboard to achieve some Utopian vision of “equality” is an extraordinarily bad idea. Not surprising it’s come from the “hope and change” crew.
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