The FHA literally drew up the redlining map and then basically

In the voice of Ta-Nehisi Coates, there echoes the solemn truth of a wound long buried beneath the foundation of a nation: “The FHA literally drew up the redlining map and then basically distributed—I'm sorry, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation actually did it, and then distributed to banks who used that as policy to determine how they would lend and who they would lend to. The racism in the system was pervasive and total.” These are not the words of accusation alone—they are words of remembrance, of revelation, of a historian who has gazed upon the hidden architecture of inequality and found that it was built not by accident, but by design.

In ancient times, the builders of cities inscribed their laws in stone; in the modern age, the builders of nations inscribed their laws in ink and policy. The redlining maps, drawn in the shadowed rooms of bureaucracy, were more than mere cartography—they were instruments of power. With a single stroke of a pen, they divided the land between those deemed “worthy” of investment and those cast into financial exile. Entire neighborhoods, marked in red, were deemed “hazardous,” not because of poverty or decay, but because of the color of the people who lived there. Thus was born a geography of inequality, where race determined destiny, and racism became law disguised as economics.

Coates, like a prophet of modern memory, reveals how the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and later the Federal Housing Administration codified this injustice, turning private prejudice into public policy. Banks were given maps colored like wounds—green for “best,” blue for “still desirable,” yellow for “declining,” and red for “hazardous.” And in those red zones, the dreams of countless families were denied. Mortgages were refused, property values withered, and the wealth that could have been passed from parent to child was stolen before it was ever born. The racism in the system was not an accident of hearts, but an order of law, a machine of exclusion that ran without conscience or pause.

Think of Bronzeville in Chicago, or Harlem in New York—communities radiant with culture, music, and intellect, yet confined within invisible borders. The jazz that echoed through their streets, the laughter of their children, the genius of their poets—all existed under the weight of economic oppression. In the 1930s, 1940s, and beyond, the people who built America’s cities were barred from sharing in their prosperity. And though the maps have long since been taken down, the scars remain, etched into the soil itself. Where once red lines were drawn, poverty and segregation still echo like an ancient curse.

Coates reminds us that the past is never dead—it breathes beneath our feet. The neighborhoods once redlined remain the same ones where schools are underfunded, where hospitals are few, where opportunity withers in the shadow of forgotten promises. This is the legacy of systemic design, not individual failure. The ancients might have called it a curse of kings; we call it policy. And though the architects are gone, the structure endures, built of silence, denial, and neglect.

Yet the purpose of his words is not despair, but awakening. For to know the truth of one’s history is the first act of freedom. A people who understand how their present was shaped can begin to reshape their future. Coates calls upon us to look unflinchingly at what was done—not to drown in guilt, but to rise in justice. Like the prophets of old who called nations to repentance, he asks not for vengeance but for reckoning—an honest accounting of what has been lost, and a commitment to make it right.

So, let this be the lesson to future generations: the structures of injustice do not vanish when their builders die. They must be torn down by the living, brick by brick, with truth as hammer and compassion as mortar. Learn the histories that others have hidden; speak their names; walk through the neighborhoods still bound by invisible lines and see them not as places of despair, but as living testaments to endurance.

And above all, remember this: the measure of a nation’s greatness is not how high it rises, but how it repairs the harm it has caused. The racism in the system may once have been pervasive and total—but the power to heal it lies now in the hearts of those who dare to face it. For if injustice was drawn by human hands, then by human hands, too, it can be erased.