La Ron S. Readus
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How Redlining Created the 'Hood (VIDEO SCRIPT)
🕑 Added 2023-09-06 20:00:59 +0000 UTCReaders, have you ever watched a movie that took a subject that you became extremely passionate about thanks to your neurodivergent ability of hyperfixation, and saw that it succeeded in highlighting the aspects that needed to be addressed about it thanks to the fictional twist the movie gave it?
Well you...would NOT be surprised to hear that that’s EXACTLY how I felt when I watched They Cloned Tyrone.
/What started off as a fun nod to the blaxploitation movies of the 1970’s with a science fiction twist utilizing black folks’ love of conspiracy theories as its main plot device ended up being a very well mapped exploration of purpose and identity in the face of set societal expectations/
And I have no problem admitting that it took me a minute for me to realize that was the point of the movie regarding its trio of main characters: Jamie Foxx’s Slick, Teyonah Parris’s Yo-Yo and of course, John Boyega’s Fontaine
Don’t worry everyone who hasn’t seen it yet; there is, in fact, a Tyrone in this movie called They Cloned Tyrone
But the reason WHY it took me so long to realize that aspect is because of how the film uses its setting The Glen, an impoverished neighborhood in Atlanta, Georgia that’s majorly black.
For me, I was focusing too much on what the antagonistic force was doing to The Glen and its residents, instead of focusing on the challenges that the trio was dealing with regarding their own sense of self BECAUSE of what the antagonistic force was doing to The Glen and its residents
And, like I stated before, that’s mostly thanks to what I know about impoverished black neighborhoods -- aka hoods and ghettos.
Specifically how they got the way that they are, WHY they are the way that they are, and what ends up becoming the end goal for them that 100% of the time NEVER involves the people that had to make due with what they initially had in the first place.
But just like Slick, Yo-Yo and Fontaine’s journey is important to the movie, understanding the real-life history for why black neighborhoods like The Glen are the way that they are and what They Cloned Tyrone uses in its narrative to highlight the issues that plague them are also important. And for today’s lesson, I wanna explain what those are.
But I’m warning y’all know, Readers. When it comes to elements of segregation, redlining, sex work and the war on drugs, the truth can sometimes be stranger than fiction. Let’s begin.
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Hey, Readers. La’Ron here. Offering you analysis and perspective on your favorite bits of geek and pop culture media
If it wasn’t obvious from the intro, this video will in fact contain spoilers for Juel Taylor’s “They Cloned Tyrone.” It’s currently available to stream on Netflix, so give it a watch if you haven’t seen it yet, and don’t want me to spoil pivotal points of it for you in this video.
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That’s the syllabus. Now onto the lesson.
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Here’s How The Hood Was Honed
Like I stated before, Readers. What you saw in They Cloned Tyrone in the form of The Glen is pretty commonplace in a lot of impoverished neighborhoods in America where the majority of its population are African American.
It’s one of the reasons why the immersion was so easy for me, thanks to first-hand experience growing up in a black neighborhood that was in its decline, experiencing the tonal differences between other well-off neighborhoods both in the city and neighboring suburban cities, and researching governmental influence as an adult.
As you can imagine, the origins of the ‘hood in general came in the form of segregation before other forms of systemic racism helped define it.
/If you’ve seen my video essays on the horror film Candyman -- whether it’s the one I made for the 1992 original or the 2021 legacy sequel -- then you know that the word of the day in this instance is “redlining.”/
However, in order to understand how redlining was made as prominent as it was when it took place in 1934, we have to backtrack about 17 years prior and talk about the actions that made the zoning system in question a whole lot easier to apply.
That means talking about the 1917 case of Buchanan v. Warley in Louisville, Kentucky, where a black citizen wanted to buy a house on a predominantly white block where two out of the ten households were already owned by black folk.
The Supreme Court ruled in the favor of the black citizen thanks to the clause in the Fourteenth Amendment that granted freedom of contract protections; that racial zoning ordinances interfered with a property owners’ right to sell their property to whomever they pleased.
With this ruling in place, those in charge four years later -- aka the secretary of commerce and future 31st president of the United States of America Herbert Hoover -- created an Advisory Committee on Zoning, with the majority of the members on the committee being segregationists.
People like Frederick Law Olmstead Jr., who was responsible for building over 100,000 units of segregated housing during World War 1.
Those segregationists and the committee itself were backed by the National Association of Real Estate Boards, who, according to its 1924 code of ethics, believed -- and I quote...
/“A realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood...members of any race or nationality...whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.”/
And we all know what that’s code for.
In response to the 1917 ruling of Buchanan v. Warley, moves were made so that instead of keeping low income black citizens from moving into predominantly white neighborhoods based on the merits of race, it was based on economy, finances and limiting the housing options in said areas.
“Single Family” zoning ordinances were put in place in suburbs and residential in-city neighborhoods still occupied by mostly white citizens that were middle class and higher. And because of the white majority present in said neighborhoods, actions were made to make sure nothing would be constructed in them that would allow low-income black citizens and families to move in.
Constructions like apartment buildings and complexes, that have been since painted as a “blight,” a “parasite,” and a nuisance to single-family neighborhoods that drove property value down according to committee member Justice George Sutherland -- zoning them as “first residential” in the process. More on the apartment building situation later.
Meanwhile, the zoning decisions created by Hoover’s team and used across the country forced a lot of low income African Americans into what were deemed industrial areas.
/Because of these zoning ordinances, a lot of things that were initially meant for industry zones that have since become hood staples in modern-day black neighborhoods exist; bars, liquor stores especially, and nightclubs for example./
The apartment complexes that have been frowned upon by the “first residential” zones were free to pop up in these zones of industry, also bringing with them slumlords that exploited their tenants because of who needs housing the most.
Even nowadays from my experiences, it isn’t uncommon for the side streets with houses on them in the hood to share a main road with a junkyard on the other side of it or something similar. Hell, sometimes it’s not even across the street; sometimes the homes are immediately BEHIND it, and now we know why.
So while this was the response for low-income black citizens and families moving into predominantly white neighborhoods, The National Housing Act of 1934 and the establishment of the Home Owners Loan Corporation was the response for middle-class black citizens and families moving into predominantly white neighborhoods.
Because middle-class black families were able to afford the housing markets in Hoover’s newly-deemed Single Family, first-residential zones, the NHA used what would soon be called redlining in order to mark those Hoover-stamped industrial zones that low income black families were forced to reside in as red and yellow, showing the banks that investing in both the property and the individuals residing in said zones was an incredibly high risk.
So even if black families had done everything they legally could to gain middle class status and could either afford a home in one of these single family first-residential zones or plant the seeds of generational wealth by investing in their own property, them being a resident of a reddened or yellowed zone would both lock them out of mortgages to move and federally backed loans to invest in themselves respectively because they were seen as a “high risk.”
Meanwhile, white families who resided in green and blue zones were given ample opportunities to build their generational wealth through all of the programs that low-income black and brown citizens were locked out of, thanks to the combined effort of the NHA and the HOLC before the Fair Housing Act of 1968 put a stop to them.
They were able to invest in better schooling and administration, public services like transportation and property upkeep, and establish a clear distinction between its residential, industrial, and shopping zones in ways that make their communities and industries thrive.
/And because of the lack of opportunities for black neighborhoods to reinvest in themselves like that of white communities -- which, in my opinion, was only made worse by larger institutions of Christian worship siphoning funds from the residents of said black neighborhoods and not properly giving back to them as a result -- they...become The Glen, from “They Cloned Tyrone.”/
Now because The Glen is in Georgia, they obviously had more things to tackle on top of what Hoover and redlining did. The South’s segregation situation was a lot more blatant because of Jim Crow, but most of the aftermath of what the Buchanan v. Warley case brought the Northern states still heavily applied to the southern ones.
There’s also the case of cities across America who experienced what is known as a White Flight; where white families decided to leave their homes in previously marked blue and green zones within the city borders for the surrounding suburban cities and townships, allowing black folk and other POC who have been previously locked out of those houses and neighborhoods to finally move in.
My parents took advantage of this when Detroit had their White Flight from the 50’s to the 80’s. They purchased my childhood home on the west side of Detroit near the Detroit-Redford border before they had me near the end of it, when over 300 thousand white residents left Detroit proper for the likes of the Metro-Detroit suburbs in the 70’s and 80’s that, upon their conception and the aftermath of the southern migration, prided themselves in NOT being Detroit by wanting to uphold aspects of the segregation during both the Hoover and redlining days.
Suburban cities like Livonia, which used to be a sundown town and is still 90 percent white. Dearborn may have a huge Arabic population now, but their old mayor Orville Hubbard was a known racist and segregationist that dedicated the 36 years he spent in office to keeping the city unseasoned.
But as those neighborhoods were moved into, elements of a lot of black neighborhoods that were already affected by the one-two combo of Hoover and redlining began to show up and affect those neighborhoods newly populated by black folk just as harshly. And while the use of the organization controlling The Glen in “They Cloned Tyrone” is fiction, the constant elements of strife that it, and every other neighborhood listed as “the ghetto” goes through that’s featured...
Is Based on Fact.
Yes. A lot of real-life allegories that keep black neighborhoods impoverished are featured in “They Cloned Tyrone” as aspects of the underground organization that’s controlling The Glen. And don’t worry, I’ll be breaking two of those specific elements down in a little bit.
/But as far as the systems that we see in the film after our trio of Yo-Yo, Slick and Fontaine discover the bunker in the trap house, we see that what’s already out on the street simply highlight and amplify situations that continue to affect real-life impoverished black neighborhoods that currently exist. Both ones that were forced to be from jump, and ones that slowly deteriorated into one after a citywide White Flight./
The one that made me initially aware of said situations...
/Was watching the relaxer at work in the beauty salon scene, and seeing what happened when it was applied to a black teacher as she was venting to her black hairstylist/ (at this point, I’m using my gas money to pay for school supplies for my classroom. And now the board members saying they gonna cut our pay again. Shit is just...maybe I’m just trippin’, you know...)
No, but let’s talk about it.
So, we already know that there was an aftermath of the National Housing Act and the Home Owners Loan Association in regards to housing, segregation and systemic oppression regarding police harassment in redlined areas.
But the aftermath of redlining -- and even Hoover’s segregationist zoning committee that took place 17 years before it -- also continues to impact education. Specifically the public school systems across the country.
Schools in neighborhoods that were originally red-zoned according to the HOLC’s guidelines of the 1930’s currently receive less district funding than those in suburbs and neighborhoods that are in the previously green, blue, even YELLOW zoned areas.
And while the funding on the federal side is decent, actions that were put in place to make sure that the black, brown and poor white inhabitants of previously red zoned areas sent their kids to schools in previously red zoned areas and STAYED there, so that they didn’t venture off into schools in predominantly white neighborhoods, causing the funding on the federal level to not be enough due to constant overcrowding.
And depending on where you are in America, if you -- a black or brown parent residing in a previously red zoned neighborhood -- TRY to enroll your child in a different public school district that reflected the blue and green zones of yesteryear with better funding, you’ll be made an example of by those who still wanna stick to the status quo of being segregationists in economists clothing.
Segregation, overcrowding, poor math and reading scores for standardized testing due to the overcrowding, and also being grossly underfunded due to the overcrowding are a constant problem for schools in impoverished neighborhoods that majorly consist of a black populace.
They caused board members of various cities and counties to look at said schools under the previous red areas with these problems and not only constantly cut programs and departments that, like I stated in my Goofy Movie video essay, are commonplace in school districts in previously green and blue areas like AV Club, music and fine arts...
But -- as the teacher in They Cloned Tyrone was venting about -- also constantly reduces the pay of the teachers, and forces them to provide for their students out of their own pocket if it’s not covered by either the federal or district funding if they want to keep the school open.
And sometimes, THAT isn’t even enough. Mary Emmet Weatherby Elementary, the neighborhood school part of the Detroit Public School system that was literally down the street and around the corner from my childhood home that I spent 3rd through 5th grade in, closed in 2005 -- 6 years after I “graduated” 5th Grade to attend my middle school.
Despite it being built to fit 250 students, the majority of us being black kids like me who lived in the predominantly black neighborhood surrounding it...
Weatherby constantly had the issue of -- you guessed it -- overcrowding, having well over 300 students at a time that were restricted to it being the only option because of other neighborhood schools failing for the same reasons why Weatherby would inevitably close; not having the funds from both the district or the federal level to keep up.
I’ve seen so many schools in the Detroit Public School system fail this way -- Elementary, Middle and High School alike.
And like Weatherby, the majority of the ones that have failed are schools smack-dab in the middle of previously red zoned neighborhoods that don’t get the funding they need on either level, regardless if the black folk there had good-paying jobs that made them closer to middle-class like my dad who had a union-paying job working at Mazda for a good chunk of my childhood.
So seeing that teacher in They Cloned Tyrone vent like that, while personally knowing good and damn well how much truth there was in that scripted line having experienced and witnessed what teachers and students have to go through in schools located in impoverished neighborhoods like The Glen, definitely made me feel a certain type of way.
And what made me feel even harder about it was seeing that the relaxer being put in her hair -- unbeknownst to her stylist -- was causing her to stop focusing on the struggles she was going through.
/And it wasn’t being done as a sense of respite, either. Even before we learn that the Glen was the perfect location for this organization to conduct their experiments based on aspects of control, just seeing her shift gave off the impression that it was made in order to keep her from paying attention to the more systemic reasonings for why The Glen is the way that it is./
And speaking of the more systemic reasonings for why hoods are the way that they are, I think it’s finally time that we talk...
About Slick and Fontaine.
If you’ve seen They Cloned Tyrone, then you know that Slick, The Glen’s resident pimp, and Fontaine, one of its drug dealers, are one of many clones that are located in it and every other impoverished black neighborhood that the organization experiments in across America, in order to KEEP them impoverished so that they can continue their research without the fear of gentrification -- aka, the culmination of segregation’s relationship with capitalism -- coming in to throw them off.
/And while both of them were shocked to learn that their main purpose is basically to act as rent control, with Fontaine experiencing the most existential dread between the two of them from what we were allowed to see, it shouldn’t really surprise you to know that yes, there are real-life establishments of both prostitution and drugs being linked to black ghettos in America that these two characters represent./
Even moreso, because they were given agency by those responsible for the segregation and impoverishment of said neighborhoods in the first place.
/Slick and every clone of Slick in other hoods in the world of They Cloned Tyrone being a pimp goes back to the Herbert Hoover days of 1917./
As I stated before, one of the biggest threats to white neighborhoods that consisted of middle class homeowners and higher that wanted to make sure African Americans didn’t move into their neighborhoods were apartment buildings and complexes.
Compared to owning homes, renting was a significantly cheaper alternative to a mortgage for lower income families that would help make predominantly white neighborhoods more accessible to black folks back in the day.
However, the reason why apartment complexes were originally deemed as blights, parasites and nuisances that just lowered the overall property value of neighborhoods back in the day is because they came with a strong association with sex work in the form of brothels and whatnot.
It’s an association that’s still linked with complexes in the 21st Century, actually, even if the housing is based in a low-income project like mine. One of the things that the leasing office wanted to make sure of when I moved into it and I told them I’m self-employed was that my business didn’t involve me selling my body, and providing payouts from both my MCN and my Patreon assured them of that.
Some complexes even have rules established in their buildings that need to be followed to keep track of how many guests a tenant has in one day to try and stop solicitations from happening, like security check-in with valid ID and recording both the name and unit number of the tenant they’re visiting in case there’s enough regular visits to suspect them of solicitation.
And when you think about it, the same system can also be utilized to keep track of drug trafficking and distribution. But we’ll be talking about Fontaine in a minute.
As you can imagine, using the association that apartment buildings had with brothels for prostitution as the main reason for white residents that were middle class and higher in these “first residential” neighborhoods to protest them popping up and lowering the property value, as opposed to outright racism and segregation to keep black folk out, was pretty much the way to go for them to not be built for as long as they did.
While there are plenty of apartment complexes in lots of the suburbs and townships outside of Detroit now, a lot of them weren’t built until near the end of the White Flight. And when they were, some weren’t built with the same security measures in mind.
The apartment complex in the suburban city of Westland, Michigan that I stayed in for 10 years of my life before its new owners kicked me out because they wanted to charge inflation rates for my unit wasn’t built until 1967; one year before the Fair Housing Act was established across the country. And even then, the front door to every complex is free for anybody to walk in and head to your unit; no door buzzers, entrance key or security measures at all.
So just like I said in the earlier segment, those complexes were instead built in the industrial zones that black folk would be forced to stay in, and that would later be deemed red zones thanks to the combination of the NHA and HOLC 17 years later to make sure middle-class black families couldn’t move out or better their own communities.
And while we don’t believe in shaming or criminalizing sex work in the Readus Household, the association of the hood being where to go to find sex workers and the abusive pimps that “managed” them before the 21st century nearly made pimping obsolete was VERY heavy as a result.
After all, The Whispers made a whole-ass song about keeping women away from pimps in 1978 in the form of Olivia: Lost and Turned Out. It was damn near a PSA
I have black boomer parents, so yes; I DID actively and consistently listen to The Whispers enough to develop first-hand knowledge of that song.
As far as the capitalistic concerns of white realtors, however, if a black neighborhood had a pimp, then it had prostitutes. And if it had prostitutes, then it wasn’t worth investing in.
This is pretty much why out of the two professions associated with sex work that were to be constantly cloned and planted in the impoverished black neighborhoods featured in They Cloned Tyrone, it made sense for the organization to use not prostitutes, but pimps as the expendable role to keep things under control.
They utilized Field of Dreams logic in that regard; if you build it -- it, being The Pimp -- they -- the sex workers who can’t manage themselves -- will come.
/And this is partially why the agent Nixon felt so confident in displaying the power he had over both Slick and Fontaine in order to invalidate the existence of Yo-Yo./ (you know what my friend Chester, Fontaine and Slick all have in common? They’re expensive. You? A dime a dozen, just a regular ol’ hoe)
Fontaine’s purpose on the other hand, because he’s a drug dealer, both has more obvious ties to keeping The Glen impoverished while at the same time connects to a much larger picture in real life. Like I said; he’s a drug dealer, and that’s a pretty common association to the decline of a community when looked at from the outside if you don’t already have knowledge of the racism behind how most street level drugs became outlawed in the first place. But part of the reason why that’s the case goes all the way back to Dark Alliance.
Thanks to the reporting of the late Gary Webb in the early 90’s revealing it, redlined neighborhoods that were predominantly black were hit with a HUGE wave of crack cocaine in the 1980’s that the CIA, DEA, DIA and the FBI turned a blind eye to, just so that the United States could wage their proxy war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
/It started in LA -- which, considering how They Cloned Tyrone actually ended fits the bill -- and then quickly spread to other predominantly black neighborhoods across the country./
Both ones that were already impoverished by redlining like The Glen, and others, like my childhood neighborhood, that the situation in question soon brought down to their level.
So while Slick and Fontaine -- as clones -- represent an aspect of the organization that in the world of They Cloned Tyrone, to quote Fontaine, only exist to keep the place fucked up, another portion of that truth is realizing who’s fault it is that the place is fucked up to begin with.
Conclusion
As you can imagine, this is part of the reason why I initially had a problem with They Cloned Tyrone
It was hard for me to see an organization that’s so coded in systemic oppression say that they’re doing this for the sake of peace, when I know that the allegory they represent is the reason neighborhoods and the hardships they deal with on the regular is their fault in the first place.
That, and in the case of impoverished neighborhoods that make up black families, seeing them run out of their homes because of white financers taking interest in the land the neighborhood consists of now being dirt cheap because of everything that’s happened to it and its people is how gentrification happens. And keeping things as they are -- even for the sake of making sure the organization continues their experiments uninterrupted and unaltered -- goes against how capitalism and systemic racism synergize with each other IRL.
But seeing Fontaine struggle with wanting to be more than what the organization planned for him, and seeing Yo-Yo fight to show that the world shouldn’t underestimate her because of her profession made me realize that while all of these aspects about what the hood goes through are important and should be shown, so is the growth that they have.
/Especially when it comes to convincing and uniting the rest of The Glen -- the rest of their community -- that their lives are worth reclaiming as their own; that they matter./
But, I digress, Readers. Your homework assignment for the day:
Write in the comment section below what you thought of They Cloned Tyrone if you’ve seen it
Or, if you feel like sharing with the rest of the class, write in the comment section below a film or a tv show you’ve seen that you had to sleep on because your experience with the subject matter in question made you look at the plot with a bit of a tilted head.
Whichever question you decide to answer, I’d love to know your thoughts.
/A HUGE shoutout to my Patrons both big and small for helping make this channel possible.
Make sure you check out the card at the end of the video to join, or click the link to it or any of my affiliates in the description box below.
But until then, this is Readus 101. Class dismissed./
Comments
Loelinverse
Trinidad James took Chamillionare’s blueprint and brought it back to the community through conscious action (supporting queer artists, building his agency in grassroots fashion, etc.) instead of replicating the frameworks of draining capital out of marginalized communities.
