Editor’s note: This commentary is by Carol Ode, who is a state representative from Burlington’s District 6-1 and has served for two terms on the House Natural Resource, Fish and Wildlife Committee. She is on the Lake Champlain Citizens Advisory Committee and is a legislative trustee on the University of Vermont’s board of trustees.
Racism was something we learned about in school, but systemic racism was not.
In school, I learned that after World War II, the American Legion urged the U.S. Congress to pass the GI Bill to help American war veterans attend college, train for vocations, and buy homes, farms, and businesses with low-cost mortgages and low-interest loans. I learned that the GI Bill grew America’s middle class and made achieving the American dream a reality for hundreds of thousands. My father was one of those veterans. He was the son of immigrants and the first in his family to go to college, and only because of the GI Bill.
The educational gains that lifted so many veterans and their families into the middle class — the middle class that makes our nation strong — did not occur for Black Americans at anywhere near the same rate. College enrollment for Black Americans went from 1.08% in 1940 to 3.6% in 1950 and occurred almost exclusively in the North, where only 21% of Black Americans lived. Seventy-nine percent of Black veterans lived in the South where most universities refused to admit Black Americans until after the 1960s civil rights movement.
I did not learn that after WWII, banks and mortgage agencies could refuse loans to Black Americans. I read that in the late 1940s in New York City and its New Jersey suburbs, 67,000 mortgages were issued but only 100 went to non-whites. Homeownership is an opportunity to build equity and credit, take advantage of tax incentives, and build savings — opportunities denied to most Black veterans and their families. Additionally many new housing developments were closed to Black families.
This is but one example of systemic racism. Not one of us would have wanted this and I believe we do not want this now.
Americans treasure the ideals of equal opportunity for all and the belief — enshrined in the U.S. Constitution — that all of us are created equal. People around the world look to us because of these ideals.
Now we begin with renewed commitment — and in light of the horrific loss of Black lives across our nation, in the midst of a global pandemic that is disproportionately impacting communities of color and where people of color comprise an enormous number of essential workers — to end systemic racism.
After 420 years, there is no time to waste.
