Due to the Subprime loan crisis, it is now calculated that is will take 5,423 years for African-Americans to achieve parity!

United for a Fair Economy recently put out a report entitled “Foreclosed: State of the Dream 2008,” in the face of a U.S. economic recession that could delve as deep as the Great Depression. Not too long ago, Hurricane Katrina revealed a prejudice of our country, and we were forced to confront that prejudice in the images of the media and the inadequate rescue efforts and unfulfilled promises of our government. The Subprime loan scandal being revealed just three years later is surfacing consequences and proofs of discrimination far worse and more damaging.

As the federal government stood aside, the Subprime mortgage industry grew from a $35 billion to a $665 billion-a-year business from the mid 1990s until now. Statistics of the “State of the Dream” report show in cold proof that the largest recipients of the subprime loan are African-American and Latino individuals and communities. People of color are more than three times more likely to have subprime loans than white people.

Mortgage companies and banks, such as Wells Fargo, have twisted the average prime mortgage loan into something much more incapable of paying by the recipient, but profitable to the company. Subprime loans, as “adjustable rate mortgages,” are packed with deceiving modifications that have low “teaser” rates that expand in interest exponentially after an initial low pay period. Families that have received Subprime loans have bit into a bitter center of the sugar-coated American dream.

The estimated loss of wealth for people of color is between $164 billion and $213 billion just in the last eight years! What is worse is that this crisis has a spillover effect. When one home is foreclosed due to incapability to pay back loans with such interest, the property tax has a spiraling effect in the community.

Though the Subprime loan crisis was indeed aimed at low-income people of color, the consequences of the crisis have become a major contributor to the economic recession that is upon us now. The absolute lack of regulation in the market has bared the fangs of the corporate players that are in it for absolute profit with no rules involved. But it has come at the cost of this.

Is such avarice and prejudice worth an economic recession and an even deeper expansion of poverty-stricken and crime ridden communities for people of color? The truths behind the veil of Hurricane Katrina and the Subprime loan crisis must be exposed. In the words of W.E.B. DuBois, “The colorline remains the central problem to the 20th century.” It remains so today.

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