Your Big Brother Obama is gathering your
personal information to track your “unconscious racism.”
A key
part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of
sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most
personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial
and economic justice.”
Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining
data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods,
even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities”
between minorities and whites.
This
Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network
of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate
impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities;
schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8
and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down
African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.
Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office,
and much of the data in them will be posted online.
So
civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them
to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.
Housing database
The granddaddy of them all is the
Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database, which the Department of Housing
and Urban Development rolled out earlier this month to racially balance the
nation, ZIP code by ZIP code. It will map every US neighborhood by four racial
groups — white, Asian, black or African-American, and Hispanic/Latino — and
publish “geospatial data” pinpointing racial imbalances.
The agency proposes using nonwhite
populations of 50% or higher as the threshold for classifying segregated areas.
Federally funded cities deemed overly
segregated will be pressured to change their zoning laws to allow construction
of more subsidized housing in affluent areas in the suburbs, and relocate
inner-city minorities to those predominantly white areas. HUD’s maps, which use
dots to show the racial distribution or density in residential areas, will be
used to select affordable-housing sites.
HUD plans to drill down to an even more
granular level, detailing the proximity of black residents to transportation
sites, good schools, parks and even supermarkets. If the agency’s social
engineers rule the distance between blacks and these suburban “amenities” is
too far, municipalities must find ways to close the gap or forfeit federal
grant money and face possible lawsuits for housing discrimination.
Civil-rights groups will have access to the
agency’s sophisticated mapping software, and will participate in city plans to
re-engineer neighborhoods under new community outreach requirements.
“By opening this data to everybody,
everyone in a community can weigh in,” Obama said. “If you want affordable
housing nearby, now you’ll have the data you need to make your case.”
Credit database
CFPB is separately amassing a database to
monitor ordinary citizens’ credit-card transactions. It hopes to vacuum up some
900 million credit-card accounts — all sorted by race — representing roughly
85% of the US credit-card market. Why? To sniff out “disparities” in interest
rates, charge-offs and collections.
Employment database
CFPB also just finalized a rule requiring
all regulated banks to report data on minority hiring to an Office of Minority
and Women Inclusion. It will collect reams of employment data, broken down by
race, to police diversity on Wall Street as part of yet another fishing
expedition.
School database
Through its mandatory Civil Rights Data
Collection project, the Education Department is gathering information on
student suspensions and expulsions, by race, from every public school district
in the country. Districts that show disparities in discipline will be targeted
for reform.
Those that don’t comply will be punished.
Several already have been forced to revise their discipline policies, which has
led to violent disruptions in classrooms.
Obama’s educrats want to know how many
blacks versus whites are enrolled in gifted-and-talented and advanced placement
classes.
Schools that show blacks and Latinos
under-enrolled in such curricula, to an undefined “statistically significant
degree,” could open themselves up to investigation and lawsuits by the
department’s Civil Rights Office.
Count on a flood of private lawsuits to
piggyback federal discrimination claims, as civil-rights lawyers use the new
federal discipline data in their legal strategies against the supposedly racist
US school system.
Even if no one has complained about
discrimination, even if there is no other evidence of racism, the numbers
themselves will “prove” that things are unfair.
Such databases have never before existed.
Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US
history. He is creating a diversity police state where government race cops and
civil-rights lawyers will micromanage demographic outcomes in virtually every
aspect of society.
The first black president, quite brilliantly,
has built a quasi-reparations infrastructure perpetually fed by racial data
that will outlast his administration.
Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media
fellow and author of “The Great American Bank Robbery,” which exposes the
racial politics behind the mortgage bust.
