Redlining
Etymology
From the 1930s American practice of drawing red lines on lending maps around neighborhoods, often those with Black residents, deemed too risky for federally backed mortgages. The community organizer John McKnight is generally credited with naming the practice, which entered wide use in the 1960s and 1970s.
noun · /RED-ly-ning/
The systematic denial of loans, insurance, or services to residents of certain areas, usually on the basis of race.
What it names
A concrete handle for how discrimination gets built into maps and money — not through open bigotry but through the quiet geography of who is refused a mortgage.
Example
Decades of redlining explain why two neighborhoods a mile apart can differ so starkly in wealth, tree cover, and school funding today.
Related idea
A structural mechanism behind the broad condition of precarity; redlining names the specific institutional lever — denied credit drawn along a map — that manufactured such insecurity for entire communities.