The article below was originally posted on TheGrio.com

This week, it was revealed that critical errors made by Jeffrey Stephan, the leader of an Ally Financial foreclosure document team responsible for approving approximately 10,000 foreclosures a month–may have caused people in as many as 23 states to be “illegally driven” from their homes. Ally, formerly known as GMAC Mortgage LLC, is the nation’s fourth-largest home lender.

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum is investigating three law firms for allegedly providing fraudulent affidavits in foreclosure cases, which allowed for the lender to proceed with a repossession without a trial.
Despite earlier reports that Ally was going to suspend foreclosures until the investigation is complete, the company issued a statement on Monday that read, “in fact, all new residential foreclosures are continuing in the ordinary course of business with no interruption in our usual practice.”

In a sworn deposition, Mr. Stephan testified that he repeatedly did not perform two functions that are critical to ensuring the integrity of the process: 1) conducting a review of cases to make sure the cases were legally justified, and 2) signing documents in the presence of a notary.

Is this the “usual practice” that Ally proudly states it will continue?

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Despite the efforts of some to explain the segregated elections in Nettleton, Mississippi as a case of “affirmative action gone bad,” numerous interviews with local parents and advocates reveal that this case is a very thinly veiled attempt to keep old systems of segregated opportunity in place. More needs to be done to uncover and reverse the unequal access to quality public services that still linger in this nation.

The following article was originally posted on TheGrio.

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Nettleton, Mississippi’s school district nabbed headlines last month for its segregated student elections policy. Though the district’s superintendent, Mr. Russell Taylor, issued a statement at the time that read, “student elections at Nettleton School District will no longer have a classification of ethnicity” and that it is the District’s intent that “each student has equal opportunity to seek election for any student office,” no new policy has been developed in the weeks since the news broke.

Aside from the creation of a diversity committee, little more has been done to end a culture of “separate and unequal” practices that included, but was not limited to, the elections policy.

According to advocates and parents in the district, a tremendous amount of personal privilege results in preferential treatment for students with families that are connected to powerful social networks, causing differential treatment for students of color, whose parents often function outside of these networks. In conversations that I have had with parents, advocates and administrators who spoke on the condition of anonymity, other illegal social policies and practices, including segregated proms or discrimination against same-sex couples, reveal discrimination that reinforces illegal segregation…

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This piece was originally posted by TheGrio

As a nation, we have overcome many racial barriers, but in too many of our cities and towns, the ugly legacy of a “separate and unequal” doctrine haunts environmental policies that negatively impact low-income communities of color. This became painfully obvious five years ago, when the hurricane season ripped through the Gulf Coast and unveiled the racial, social, and economic inequities that lay hidden beneath good times in “The Big Easy.”

The truth was on prime time–in New Orleans, de facto segregation was alive and there were entire communities that because of their built environment, were not able to flee, or recover from, disaster. But New Orleans was not alone. Poor communities across the nation, many of them communities of color–in the San Francisco Bay Area, rural Tennessee, industrial Midwest, or other parts of this country–continue to deteriorate from environmental racism.

Environmental racism is a policy, or structured practice having to do with the built environment that negatively impacts a racially homogenous group at a disproportionately higher rate than its (often) more affluent counterpart. These biased policies are reflected in deliberate efforts to concentrate toxins and other hazardous waste and pollutants in low-income communities of color or divert necessary infrastructure improvements from these very same communities. Research has confirmed that long-term exposure to toxins in the air, land, and water lead to long-term negative health conditions, including increased risk of asthma, cancer, and other chronic and deadly diseases. However, the impact of environmental racism is not only confined to health–the economic impact can be just as fatal…

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