CREW Chicago and Chi-AACREare proud to present an exclusive screening of Bruce Orenstein’s documentary film: The Shame of Chicago Part 3: The Color Tax, Origins of the Modern-Day Racial Wealth Gap. The 37-minute film segment will be shown, via stream, on December 8 at 11:30am.
This program is the second of a two-part series in which CREW and CHI-AACRE collaborate to examine the impacts of redlining. The term “redlining” was coined by sociologist John McKnight in the early 1960s and derives from how the federal government and lenders would literally draw a red line on a map around neighborhoods where they would not invest, based on black, inner-city demographics.
Although redlining was outlawed by the court decades ago, the impact of disinvestment in Chicago communities caused by redlining continues to this day. In the first of the CREW and CHI-AACRE collaborations, Daniel Aaronson, an economic researcher with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and co-author of the Federal Reserve’s working paper, “The Effects of the 1930s HOLC ‘Redlining’ Maps,” discussed the lasting effects of the maps on racial segregation, home ownership, house values, rents and credit scores.
Bruce Orenstein will lead the second part of our series. Bruce is a documentary filmmaker from The Samuel Dubois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Orenstein founded The Chicago Video Project, one of the nation’s first studios dedicated to producing organizing-driven videos for grassroots social change organizations.
The Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University is a research collective of scholars engaged in research on the social problems associated with inequality and deprivation, particularly inequality between groups differentiated by class, caste, race, ethnicity, religion and gender. Their goal is to coalesce Duke’s intellectual strengths to create an outstanding research hub devoted to the study of human disparity, especially group-based disparities. The aim is to provide policymakers with findings that will enable them to expand fairness in opportunity for all Americans and for the global citizenry.
The Color Tax tells the story of how a system of predatory home contract sales during the 1950s and ‘60s in Chicago plundered enormous sums of wealth from the pockets of black families seeking homeownership. The Color Tax also documents what happened when black families organized to fight back in one of Chicago’s most heart-wrenching and perilous campaigns for racial and economic justice. Reverend William Barber, co-director of the National Poor People’s Campaign, A National Call for Moral Revival writes, “The Color Tax paints with vivid clarity perhaps America’s most striking example of systemic racism.”
Following the film, Bruce Orenstein will be joined by Dr. Clinton Boyd Jr. to lead viewers in a discussion and Q&A. Dr. Clinton Boyd, Jr. is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. His areas of interest and study include race and ethnicity, social inequality, urban sociology, family policy and parenting and African American families.
To register for this event, click this link.
