It's not hard to see the connections between policies like redlining and poverty/incarceration today. Redlining meant people of color were relegated to failing communities that nobody was able to invest in. Poverty naturally breeds crime, due to limited opportunities. Community policing or "broken windows" policing was created to address this, leading to arrests and harassment for low-level "crimes" like turnstile-hopping or drug possession. These mostly black/Latino victims get stricter sentences for crimes that their while counterparts equally participate in. Black children are adultified more than white children and are thought of as guilty more often. They get suspended or expelled at higher rates than white children. So they are already in failing schools, punished harsher, drop out sooner, and on and on and on. Reparations should happen, not to address slavery but to address the very real economic fall-out from these communities and these families that were denied the chance to build any sort of wealth. Even today, a black man with a college degree has less wealth than a white man without one. It's insane.
