This is an interesting topic. I've taken a number of those where are you politically tests and come up very close to center on both x & y axis. The thing is that's an aggerate. Depending on the individual issue I might be quite far from center. Add to that where I stand on an issue with respect to someone deciding my worldview, I might s…
This is an interesting topic. I've taken a number of those where are you politically tests and come up very close to center on both x & y axis. The thing is that's an aggerate. Depending on the individual issue I might be quite far from center. Add to that where I stand on an issue with respect to someone deciding my worldview, I might seem radical, or not. I speak in terms of myself here because that's who I have the best chance of objective evaluation of. Deciding someone's worldview based upon an aspect of a discussion is fraught with problems.
I must admit that I am prone to fall prey to an incorrect decision is when people mention a political party. I tend to dismiss them as partisan binary thinkers. That could be wrong since they can be talking about a specific thing, rather than a broad generalization - sometimes.
The BIG problem with that is that it tends to make us think we are mind readers and/or we assign meaning to the other person's words which may not have that meaning. I find it frustrating when people do that with (to) me, so I try to be mindful of when I'm doing it. But then the extreme bias of someone is sometimes hard to ignore. I'm often not so good at the discussion thing because of this.
"The BIG problem with that is that it tends to make us think we are mind readers and/or we assign meaning to the other person's words which may not have that meaning"
Absolutely. This is such a key point. So many people have become so confident in their mind reading skills, simply because somebody says something that can be interpreted to be left/right-wing or worse because they presented new information.
I do my best to address people's arguments without respect to their identity or their politics. Do your arguments make sense? Do you have evidence to support your claims? Nothing else is really relevant.
I have come to believe that misattribution of intention and motive to others is one of the most common cognitive pitfalls of our species. It's just extremely easy to attribute to opponents the motives, beliefs, or desires that make them look bad and easily mocked or dismissed or disparaged.
Sometimes we may be right in assessing motives, but many other times we are not.
So it's good to step back, whenever we say "the reason X supports Y is that X wants to do Z", and recognize how very often that last part is projection. This takes continual monitoring. I have come to detest neo-progressivism (wokeness) so much that I have to be careful about not doing this, or at least hold and present such characterizations as tentative, speculative, partial, and subject to change.
Let me give an example. Many neo-progressive arguments presuppose that the salient motive of red-lining was to keep Black people poor, that it was primarily a tool of the white hive mind to harm the Black hive mind. If confronted with the fact that the large bulk (over 90%) of those in category D were white, such activists shrug it off by assuming the intention to harm Blacks was so strong that harming ten times as many whites was an acceptable cost. Ascribing the worst of motives to the policy makers is key to Reinforcing the Narrative (of Oppression), the prime directive of neo-progressivism.
"Many neo-progressive arguments presuppose that the salient motive of red-lining was to keep Black people poor, that it was primarily a tool of the white hive mind to harm the Black hive mind."
The "hive mind" framing is probably a little much 😅 but certainly everything I've ever read on the topic suggests very strongly that the motivation behind redlining was to keep black communities not only poor but segregated.
And given that at the time of redlining, the U.S. government was very actively engaged in numerous measures designed to do just that, I don't find it difficult to believe that the was intention to harm black people.
I think once you move back in time past 1970 or so, it's extraordinarily difficult to argue that the oppression of black people in America was a "narrative."
I'm saying it's a narrative today, to interpret the core intention of redlining back then to be keeping Black people poor. I agree with you that there was substantial racial bias in those days, so my questioning that imputed intent is not about proclaiming that the folks were too moral to do so - it's more about looking at the facts. So let's examine the fuller context, generally omitted from consideration by those seeking to Reinforce the Narrative today.
In the following, I will make some assertions. For now, please just temporarily assume for the sake of argument that we can find confirming information when needed. That is, follow and agree or disagree with the logic IF the assertions can be evidenced. If you disagree with the logic even if the assertions were true, that's one thing to discuss. If you *conditionally* agree with the reasoning per se, then we can check whether the assertions are well evidenced. OK? Let's not get derailed by jumping on evidence until we have (conditionally) explored the reasoning first, be we can circle back.
"Redlining" involved drawing geographic districts labeled A, B, C and D, as partial guides to the security of making loans in those areas; this could be taken into account along with the individual financial status of the loan seeker. The lowest rating, D, tended to be in poor parts of town, where the default rate was considered likely to be higher, and where it could be harder for a bank to recoup their principal after a default (harder to sell at a sufficient price). The primary purpose was to benefit loan makers (banks) with some very relevant information which might help them decide on an appropriate interest rate to cover the risk (or not make the loan at all, depending on their risk tolerance).
Of course, if a bank had better knowledge that a lower rating was not justified (ie: that the default risk was actually lower than implied by the geographic district), they could still choose to make lower interest loans at a profit (even after handling the actual default rate). Banks were not loaning out their own money, they loaned out the money of their depositors, so if they made bad loans that was bad for ordinary people who used the bank for saving.
Interestingly, Black owned banks also used the ratings in their loan making; they did not in general disagree with the ratings based on their knowledge of local conditions (or they would have made more loans at lower interest than white owned banks). Black owned banks had the same incentive to not unduly risk the deposits of their mostly Black customers, but also an incentive to make competitive loans (including to Black people in their community).
The large bulk of the people living in zone D were white in some analyses, and some of the districts where 100% white. Nevertheless, since Black folks did tend to live in poorer districts, even if the system had involved zero racial bias per se, they would have shown up disproportionately in zone D - an example of reverse causation (race neutral identification of poorer districts combined with an external correlation between race and wealth, will result in relatively more people of a less wealthy race living in poorer zones).
Of course, given the era, it's likely that race DID play some part in designating the neighborhoods; the districting was done by assembling local experts (eg: realtors or loan initiators with local experience), at least some of whom would likely have had biases and stereotypes which influenced any statistical data (or accurate knowledge) used in creating the boundaries. How much this subjective influence prevailed is hard to determine at this stage; were their loan risk assessments mostly accurate, or grossly distorted by unfounded racial stereotypes or somewhere in the middle?
If that biased influence had been major, then one would have expected Black owned banks to have been less influenced by the inaccurate risk summaries implied by the zones. They might have known from their own experience that the risks of default were not as high as the biased local experts had stereotyped them to be, and made loans accordingly - undercutting the interest rates charged by the misled white owned banks, or giving loans that the white owned banks would not have. But apparently that was not the case; they apparently followed the risk ratings just as much as white owned banks did.
Note that at this point we are still talking about the primary purpose being to help banks in risk assessment, with some degree of inaccuracy being hypothesized among the local real estate experts based on unconscious racial stereotyping. That is still not a case of intending to deliberately and consciously harm Black people by knowingly misleading banks against the financial interests of those banks (accuracy was in the best interest of the banks).
In my reading of the above, I have seen absolutely no evidence that there was systematic intention by the local experts drawing up the boundaries between A, B, C, and D zones, to knowingly provide false information to (white or Black owned) banks for the purpose of hurting the minority of those living in zone D who were Black.
The parsimonious interpretation would be that the core purpose of all 4 zones was to assist banks in accurately assessing geographic-related default risk as part of their loan making decisions. That desire for accuracy could have in some cases (and for some zones) have been somewhat inaccurate due to bias from unconscious racial stereotypes - but by far most of those assessed as zone D were white so this was probably a limited effect. The evidence I have seen is consistent with this interpretation.
(Aside: by an "unconscious racial bias", I mean somebody holding a false stereotype about race, without knowing that that it's false. The bias is unconscious, and the person falsely believes their model of things to be accurate, so is not consciously deceiving anybody. This is different than conscious deception.)
Contrast that with the Narrative today: that the zones were systematically created (by The Government or by the white hive mind) for the purpose of harming Black people and keeping them from getting ahead. I see no evidence supporting this, and significant evidence countering it. However, imputing such evil motives to those drawing the maps is 100% convenient for reinforcing the narrative, not coincidentally.
Consider a different area. Observing that Asians tend to do the best on SAT and whites come in second, while Blacks tend to do the worst - the Narrative could interpret this outcome as the very motivation for creating and using the SAT from the very beginning - designed and intended specifically to keep Black people down. The purveyors of the Narrative have no interest in honestly evaluating the real motives for the SAT based on consideration of the full evidence, they thrive on ideologically driven subjectivity in Reinforcing the Narrative.
I see the imputation of nefarious racial motives to real estate default risk zoning ("redlining") as similar.
But I'm willing to hear your reasoning otherwise.
(I will note that I originally believed the Narrative on the motive behind redlining, but shifted as more evidence arrived - not from the neo-progressive sources pushing the Narrative of course.)
And one more thing - the EFFECTS of redlining, regardless of intention, may have been to make it harder for poor people of all races to rise. So I am NOT saying there is no residual problem from risk zoning left to be addressed (that issue can be discussed separately); I am using this example purely as an example of narrative-reinforcing bias in imputation of bad intention and motive.
Indeed, I believe that most of the neo-progressive ideology is well intentioned. Good intentions do not automatically lead to good outcomes, and likewise bad outcomes need not have been caused by bad intentions.
"If you disagree with the logic even if the assertions were true, that's one thing to discuss. If you *conditionally* agree with the reasoning per se, then we can check whether the assertions are well evidenced. OK?"
Ooof, this is an entire essay!😅
Yeah, if your claims can be well evidenced (and there are a lot of claims here), your logic isn't necessarily flawed. But the analysis is missing important context even if everything you say here is accurate. It's not reasonable to entirely separate the practice of redlining from the society it existed in and then declare it race-neutral.
For example, you note that black-owned banks followed the same risk assessments as the white owned banks, but don't note that banks were more likely to offer loans in poor white areas than in middle and high income black areas. I find it very hard to believe that race wasn't a factor in those risk assessments. Though proving that would admittedly take more legwork than I'm ready to put in here.😄
You also don't mention practices like "blockbusting", where real estate agents encouraged white families to sell their houses at below market rate by telling them that black families were moving in. These houses were then sold at significant markups to black families.
Or contract buying, that once again, massively disproportionately (I think even exclusively?) targeted black families with onerous lending practices, leaving them homeless if they missed a single payment on their mortgages, whilst simultaneously charging obscene rates of interest that white families didn't have to pay. This, combined with redlining, is one of many reasons why black home ownership lags so far behind white home ownership.
And, of course, the biggest factor is that black families were forced into poor neighbourhoods by segregation and the lack of opportunity and upward mobility that permeated society. To argue that a system that first says "we'll make it incredibly hard for black people to succeed financially, and give them no choice but to live in these poor areas," and then says "we're just appraising these areas based on wealth, race has nothing to do with it!", isn't racist, is a tough argument to make.
But fundamentally, after a certain point, the bad intentions don't lie in applying the prevailing system. They lie in the failure to fix a system that's so transparently discriminatory. And I guess, this is where the "hive mind" framing enters the picture. So many people saw how these practices disproportionately impacted black people. And extraordinarily few did anything about it. Same with segregation. Same with slavery. The hysteria and distrust builds because of the long history of indifference to transparently racist systems.
Hanlon's Razor: we should not infer malice from conduct which can be adequately attributed to incompetence.
I temper that with the idea that it should not be an automatic default assumption. The thing is it can be malice, but not always.
The idea that people of different races cannot have the same disagreements that they have with people of their own race, and it can only be about race is an example of a default assumption of malice. Clearly, people of different races can have disagreement/problems other than race since we are all humans. It would almost be wonderful if there were no "issues" other than racism between people of different races.
Was redlining malice, indifference, or incomitance? The damage was done without regard to motivation. But motivation could be the difference in it happening, or not.
>"The "hive mind" framing is probably a little much 😅"
Let me clarify. Rather than just suggesting that the few dozen local real estate experts who consulted on drawing the boundaries of zones A, B, C and D had the intention of harming Black people thereby - they tend to frame it as the "whites" doing that to the "Blacks".
There are many, many other examples, where any misdeed (real or distorted) by some white person becomes attributed to whites or whiteness. To me that bespeaks an odd kind of gross over-generalizing, or collective guilt, which would only be appropriate if the individual actors in question had obtained group consent (including that of future generations) - or if there was one white hive-mind responsible anything any white person or group does. If one white person (or 2% of white people) did something, then all white people should be held accountable.
Obviously one could do the same for any other race or population group, implying that they have a "hive mind" which justifies speaking of them as a unitary agent with shared beliefs, motivations, and responsibility. However, today at least, such imputation would likely be challenged and rightly so. "Black people" didn't carjack you, some individuals did - without first consulting with any Black hive mind. There's no collective guilt for what other people did, which was not under one's control or strong influence. And that principle should be applied to all population groups. "Right handed people" did not steal your bicycle or break into your shed, a particular person or small group did. Others in that broad group are not responsible.
Today's tendency in some quarters is to disavow personal responsibility for what one has actually done or failed to do, while highlighting the putative collective responsibility of designated other population groups.
Right handers control our destiny in every democracy. Think about it.
"Rather than just suggesting that the few dozen local real estate experts who consulted on drawing the boundaries of zones A, B, C and D had the intention of harming Black people thereby - they tend to frame it as the "whites" doing that to the "Blacks"."
Yeah, sadly this kind of logical fallacy is rife in all social justice movements at the moment. Men vs women, gay vs straight, trans vs "cis", black vs white. The same people who condemn people for judging them for a particular immutable trait gleefully condemn everybody whose immutable traits match their "oppressors."
Finding a bogeyman to blame for all of life's injustices (or your personal failings) on isn't a new instinct unfortunately. The tricky thing is finding the balance between recognising that some people do this, and acknowledging that others really do have genuine grievances.
This is an interesting topic. I've taken a number of those where are you politically tests and come up very close to center on both x & y axis. The thing is that's an aggerate. Depending on the individual issue I might be quite far from center. Add to that where I stand on an issue with respect to someone deciding my worldview, I might seem radical, or not. I speak in terms of myself here because that's who I have the best chance of objective evaluation of. Deciding someone's worldview based upon an aspect of a discussion is fraught with problems.
I must admit that I am prone to fall prey to an incorrect decision is when people mention a political party. I tend to dismiss them as partisan binary thinkers. That could be wrong since they can be talking about a specific thing, rather than a broad generalization - sometimes.
The BIG problem with that is that it tends to make us think we are mind readers and/or we assign meaning to the other person's words which may not have that meaning. I find it frustrating when people do that with (to) me, so I try to be mindful of when I'm doing it. But then the extreme bias of someone is sometimes hard to ignore. I'm often not so good at the discussion thing because of this.
"The BIG problem with that is that it tends to make us think we are mind readers and/or we assign meaning to the other person's words which may not have that meaning"
Absolutely. This is such a key point. So many people have become so confident in their mind reading skills, simply because somebody says something that can be interpreted to be left/right-wing or worse because they presented new information.
I do my best to address people's arguments without respect to their identity or their politics. Do your arguments make sense? Do you have evidence to support your claims? Nothing else is really relevant.
I have come to believe that misattribution of intention and motive to others is one of the most common cognitive pitfalls of our species. It's just extremely easy to attribute to opponents the motives, beliefs, or desires that make them look bad and easily mocked or dismissed or disparaged.
Sometimes we may be right in assessing motives, but many other times we are not.
So it's good to step back, whenever we say "the reason X supports Y is that X wants to do Z", and recognize how very often that last part is projection. This takes continual monitoring. I have come to detest neo-progressivism (wokeness) so much that I have to be careful about not doing this, or at least hold and present such characterizations as tentative, speculative, partial, and subject to change.
Let me give an example. Many neo-progressive arguments presuppose that the salient motive of red-lining was to keep Black people poor, that it was primarily a tool of the white hive mind to harm the Black hive mind. If confronted with the fact that the large bulk (over 90%) of those in category D were white, such activists shrug it off by assuming the intention to harm Blacks was so strong that harming ten times as many whites was an acceptable cost. Ascribing the worst of motives to the policy makers is key to Reinforcing the Narrative (of Oppression), the prime directive of neo-progressivism.
"Many neo-progressive arguments presuppose that the salient motive of red-lining was to keep Black people poor, that it was primarily a tool of the white hive mind to harm the Black hive mind."
The "hive mind" framing is probably a little much 😅 but certainly everything I've ever read on the topic suggests very strongly that the motivation behind redlining was to keep black communities not only poor but segregated.
And given that at the time of redlining, the U.S. government was very actively engaged in numerous measures designed to do just that, I don't find it difficult to believe that the was intention to harm black people.
I think once you move back in time past 1970 or so, it's extraordinarily difficult to argue that the oppression of black people in America was a "narrative."
I'm saying it's a narrative today, to interpret the core intention of redlining back then to be keeping Black people poor. I agree with you that there was substantial racial bias in those days, so my questioning that imputed intent is not about proclaiming that the folks were too moral to do so - it's more about looking at the facts. So let's examine the fuller context, generally omitted from consideration by those seeking to Reinforce the Narrative today.
In the following, I will make some assertions. For now, please just temporarily assume for the sake of argument that we can find confirming information when needed. That is, follow and agree or disagree with the logic IF the assertions can be evidenced. If you disagree with the logic even if the assertions were true, that's one thing to discuss. If you *conditionally* agree with the reasoning per se, then we can check whether the assertions are well evidenced. OK? Let's not get derailed by jumping on evidence until we have (conditionally) explored the reasoning first, be we can circle back.
"Redlining" involved drawing geographic districts labeled A, B, C and D, as partial guides to the security of making loans in those areas; this could be taken into account along with the individual financial status of the loan seeker. The lowest rating, D, tended to be in poor parts of town, where the default rate was considered likely to be higher, and where it could be harder for a bank to recoup their principal after a default (harder to sell at a sufficient price). The primary purpose was to benefit loan makers (banks) with some very relevant information which might help them decide on an appropriate interest rate to cover the risk (or not make the loan at all, depending on their risk tolerance).
Of course, if a bank had better knowledge that a lower rating was not justified (ie: that the default risk was actually lower than implied by the geographic district), they could still choose to make lower interest loans at a profit (even after handling the actual default rate). Banks were not loaning out their own money, they loaned out the money of their depositors, so if they made bad loans that was bad for ordinary people who used the bank for saving.
Interestingly, Black owned banks also used the ratings in their loan making; they did not in general disagree with the ratings based on their knowledge of local conditions (or they would have made more loans at lower interest than white owned banks). Black owned banks had the same incentive to not unduly risk the deposits of their mostly Black customers, but also an incentive to make competitive loans (including to Black people in their community).
The large bulk of the people living in zone D were white in some analyses, and some of the districts where 100% white. Nevertheless, since Black folks did tend to live in poorer districts, even if the system had involved zero racial bias per se, they would have shown up disproportionately in zone D - an example of reverse causation (race neutral identification of poorer districts combined with an external correlation between race and wealth, will result in relatively more people of a less wealthy race living in poorer zones).
Of course, given the era, it's likely that race DID play some part in designating the neighborhoods; the districting was done by assembling local experts (eg: realtors or loan initiators with local experience), at least some of whom would likely have had biases and stereotypes which influenced any statistical data (or accurate knowledge) used in creating the boundaries. How much this subjective influence prevailed is hard to determine at this stage; were their loan risk assessments mostly accurate, or grossly distorted by unfounded racial stereotypes or somewhere in the middle?
If that biased influence had been major, then one would have expected Black owned banks to have been less influenced by the inaccurate risk summaries implied by the zones. They might have known from their own experience that the risks of default were not as high as the biased local experts had stereotyped them to be, and made loans accordingly - undercutting the interest rates charged by the misled white owned banks, or giving loans that the white owned banks would not have. But apparently that was not the case; they apparently followed the risk ratings just as much as white owned banks did.
Note that at this point we are still talking about the primary purpose being to help banks in risk assessment, with some degree of inaccuracy being hypothesized among the local real estate experts based on unconscious racial stereotyping. That is still not a case of intending to deliberately and consciously harm Black people by knowingly misleading banks against the financial interests of those banks (accuracy was in the best interest of the banks).
In my reading of the above, I have seen absolutely no evidence that there was systematic intention by the local experts drawing up the boundaries between A, B, C, and D zones, to knowingly provide false information to (white or Black owned) banks for the purpose of hurting the minority of those living in zone D who were Black.
The parsimonious interpretation would be that the core purpose of all 4 zones was to assist banks in accurately assessing geographic-related default risk as part of their loan making decisions. That desire for accuracy could have in some cases (and for some zones) have been somewhat inaccurate due to bias from unconscious racial stereotypes - but by far most of those assessed as zone D were white so this was probably a limited effect. The evidence I have seen is consistent with this interpretation.
(Aside: by an "unconscious racial bias", I mean somebody holding a false stereotype about race, without knowing that that it's false. The bias is unconscious, and the person falsely believes their model of things to be accurate, so is not consciously deceiving anybody. This is different than conscious deception.)
Contrast that with the Narrative today: that the zones were systematically created (by The Government or by the white hive mind) for the purpose of harming Black people and keeping them from getting ahead. I see no evidence supporting this, and significant evidence countering it. However, imputing such evil motives to those drawing the maps is 100% convenient for reinforcing the narrative, not coincidentally.
Consider a different area. Observing that Asians tend to do the best on SAT and whites come in second, while Blacks tend to do the worst - the Narrative could interpret this outcome as the very motivation for creating and using the SAT from the very beginning - designed and intended specifically to keep Black people down. The purveyors of the Narrative have no interest in honestly evaluating the real motives for the SAT based on consideration of the full evidence, they thrive on ideologically driven subjectivity in Reinforcing the Narrative.
I see the imputation of nefarious racial motives to real estate default risk zoning ("redlining") as similar.
But I'm willing to hear your reasoning otherwise.
(I will note that I originally believed the Narrative on the motive behind redlining, but shifted as more evidence arrived - not from the neo-progressive sources pushing the Narrative of course.)
And one more thing - the EFFECTS of redlining, regardless of intention, may have been to make it harder for poor people of all races to rise. So I am NOT saying there is no residual problem from risk zoning left to be addressed (that issue can be discussed separately); I am using this example purely as an example of narrative-reinforcing bias in imputation of bad intention and motive.
Indeed, I believe that most of the neo-progressive ideology is well intentioned. Good intentions do not automatically lead to good outcomes, and likewise bad outcomes need not have been caused by bad intentions.
"If you disagree with the logic even if the assertions were true, that's one thing to discuss. If you *conditionally* agree with the reasoning per se, then we can check whether the assertions are well evidenced. OK?"
Ooof, this is an entire essay!😅
Yeah, if your claims can be well evidenced (and there are a lot of claims here), your logic isn't necessarily flawed. But the analysis is missing important context even if everything you say here is accurate. It's not reasonable to entirely separate the practice of redlining from the society it existed in and then declare it race-neutral.
For example, you note that black-owned banks followed the same risk assessments as the white owned banks, but don't note that banks were more likely to offer loans in poor white areas than in middle and high income black areas. I find it very hard to believe that race wasn't a factor in those risk assessments. Though proving that would admittedly take more legwork than I'm ready to put in here.😄
You also don't mention practices like "blockbusting", where real estate agents encouraged white families to sell their houses at below market rate by telling them that black families were moving in. These houses were then sold at significant markups to black families.
Or contract buying, that once again, massively disproportionately (I think even exclusively?) targeted black families with onerous lending practices, leaving them homeless if they missed a single payment on their mortgages, whilst simultaneously charging obscene rates of interest that white families didn't have to pay. This, combined with redlining, is one of many reasons why black home ownership lags so far behind white home ownership.
And, of course, the biggest factor is that black families were forced into poor neighbourhoods by segregation and the lack of opportunity and upward mobility that permeated society. To argue that a system that first says "we'll make it incredibly hard for black people to succeed financially, and give them no choice but to live in these poor areas," and then says "we're just appraising these areas based on wealth, race has nothing to do with it!", isn't racist, is a tough argument to make.
But fundamentally, after a certain point, the bad intentions don't lie in applying the prevailing system. They lie in the failure to fix a system that's so transparently discriminatory. And I guess, this is where the "hive mind" framing enters the picture. So many people saw how these practices disproportionately impacted black people. And extraordinarily few did anything about it. Same with segregation. Same with slavery. The hysteria and distrust builds because of the long history of indifference to transparently racist systems.
Hanlon's Razor: we should not infer malice from conduct which can be adequately attributed to incompetence.
I temper that with the idea that it should not be an automatic default assumption. The thing is it can be malice, but not always.
The idea that people of different races cannot have the same disagreements that they have with people of their own race, and it can only be about race is an example of a default assumption of malice. Clearly, people of different races can have disagreement/problems other than race since we are all humans. It would almost be wonderful if there were no "issues" other than racism between people of different races.
Was redlining malice, indifference, or incomitance? The damage was done without regard to motivation. But motivation could be the difference in it happening, or not.
>"The "hive mind" framing is probably a little much 😅"
Let me clarify. Rather than just suggesting that the few dozen local real estate experts who consulted on drawing the boundaries of zones A, B, C and D had the intention of harming Black people thereby - they tend to frame it as the "whites" doing that to the "Blacks".
There are many, many other examples, where any misdeed (real or distorted) by some white person becomes attributed to whites or whiteness. To me that bespeaks an odd kind of gross over-generalizing, or collective guilt, which would only be appropriate if the individual actors in question had obtained group consent (including that of future generations) - or if there was one white hive-mind responsible anything any white person or group does. If one white person (or 2% of white people) did something, then all white people should be held accountable.
Obviously one could do the same for any other race or population group, implying that they have a "hive mind" which justifies speaking of them as a unitary agent with shared beliefs, motivations, and responsibility. However, today at least, such imputation would likely be challenged and rightly so. "Black people" didn't carjack you, some individuals did - without first consulting with any Black hive mind. There's no collective guilt for what other people did, which was not under one's control or strong influence. And that principle should be applied to all population groups. "Right handed people" did not steal your bicycle or break into your shed, a particular person or small group did. Others in that broad group are not responsible.
Today's tendency in some quarters is to disavow personal responsibility for what one has actually done or failed to do, while highlighting the putative collective responsibility of designated other population groups.
Right handers control our destiny in every democracy. Think about it.
"Rather than just suggesting that the few dozen local real estate experts who consulted on drawing the boundaries of zones A, B, C and D had the intention of harming Black people thereby - they tend to frame it as the "whites" doing that to the "Blacks"."
Yeah, sadly this kind of logical fallacy is rife in all social justice movements at the moment. Men vs women, gay vs straight, trans vs "cis", black vs white. The same people who condemn people for judging them for a particular immutable trait gleefully condemn everybody whose immutable traits match their "oppressors."
Finding a bogeyman to blame for all of life's injustices (or your personal failings) on isn't a new instinct unfortunately. The tricky thing is finding the balance between recognising that some people do this, and acknowledging that others really do have genuine grievances.