It's a brave new world.
President Barack Obama has come up with a plan in which Americans will be profiled by a housing database, a mortgage database, a credit and employment database and a school data base – an unprecedented collection of data on Americans by race.
The Obama administration is compiling data on health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, how children are disciplined in school to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites to create a network of discrimination databases, which Obama is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough 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.
Obama hopes the databases will be operational before he leaves office, and that the data will be posted online for civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups to utilize o show racial disparities and segregation.
The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing database, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development is compiling is meant to help racially balance the nation by ZIP codes.
It maps 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 segregated will be encouraged to change their zoning laws to allow construction of more subsidized housing in affluent areas and relocate inner-city minorities to white areas.
HUD’s maps, which use dots to show the racial distribution in residential areas, will be used to select affordable-housing sites.
HUD plans to detail the proximity of black residents to transportation sites, good schools, parks and supermarkets. If the agency rules the distance between blacks and suburban “amenities” is too far, municipalities must find ways to close the gap or forfeit federal grant money.
Civil-rights groups will have access to the agency’s mapping software, and participate in city plans to re-engineer neighborhoods under 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.”
In addition, the Federal Housing Finance Agency is building a database meant to help racial balancing for home loans.
The National Mortgage Database Project will compile lending data, broken down by race, and will contain credit scores, employment records, credit cards, student loans, car loans — anything reported to credit bureaus on every individual in America and record assets and debts and the square footage and lot size of American’s homes.
The date will be shared with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to aid in investigating lenders for racial bias.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will amass a database to monitor citizens’ credit-card transactions - sorted by race —to discover “disparities” in interest rates, charge-offs and collections and collect employment data, broken down by race.
Through its Civil Rights Data Collection project, the Education Department gathers 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.
Since such databases have never before existed, Obama is presiding over the largest consolidation of personal data in US history which should allow the government to manage demographic outcomes in society.
Welcome to Obama transformational brave new world.