"Redlining: Still a thing"

"Neighborhoods were ranked and color-coded, and the D-rated ones — shunned for their "inharmonious" racial groups — were typically outlined in red.

This government practice was swiftly adopted by private banks, too, during an era of massive homeownership expansion in the U.S. And the visual language of the maps became a verb: To redline a community was to cut it off from essential capital...

The federal government eventually retreated from the practice, and it was outlawed by the Fair Housing Act in 1968. But black communities have warned that it still exists in subtler and changed forms, in bank tactics that have targeted these same neighborhoods for predatory lending, or in new patterns like "retail redlining." Some of the persistent redlining, though, still looks an awful lot like the original.

Case in point: This week the Department of Housing and Urban Development settled with the largest bank headquartered in Wisconsin over claims that it discriminated from 2008-2010 against black and Hispanic borrowers in Wisconsin, Illinois and Minnesota."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/05/28/evidence-that-banks-still-deny-black-borrowers-just-as-they-did-50-years-ago/

I really like the phrasing of this - "black communities have warned". Just let it sink in. We've been warned.

Also, I feel like this is an example of what reparations are - not just paying something, but addressing the ills directly and being responsible on a community level -
"Associated Bank has agreed to a long list of actions to make amends over the next three years: It must finance nearly $200 million in home loans in majority-minority census tracts within these cities, and pay nearly $10 million in down payment assistance to borrowers or in lower interest rates. It must also open four new offices in minority neighborhoods in Chicago and Milwaukee, and invest $1.4 million in marketing loans in many of these same underserved communities."