This time last year, almost to the very day, I was in the building pictured above. And while today's tragedy in India is quite horrifying, the (possible) destruction of the Taj Hotel in Mumbai is hard to ignore. Located at the historic Gateway of India, legend has it that the hotel's founder Jamsetji Tata built the hotel as a reaction to being snubbed for the color of his skin:

From The Independent:

At the time, the best hotels in Bombay were run by the British - and did not accept Indian guests. Legend has it that Jamsetji decided to build a hotel when, already a seriously wealthy man, he was refused entry to a local hotel where whites far less rich were lording it over him because of the colour of his skin. Jamsetji decided he would own the best hotel in India - and it would be open to Indians.

The result was the Taj. Which, before it was attacked, was a majestic sight that looked like this:

Speaking of white privilege, this week I wrote an article for the news section about how the people hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis in Portland have so far been African American and elderly people.

There was a big forum last weekend at the PCC on Killingsworth addressing the fact that North Portlanders are losing their homes (and the situation looks like it will get worse) and a couple people there pinned the racial disparity on cultural issues: African Americans in that neighborhood tend not to trust banks, thanks to a long history of discrimination, so they don't call their lenders and try to work something out until they're way buried in debt.

But it's not just cultural. A year ago, when no one really cared about mortgage foreclosure, the Oregon Center for Public Policy in-depth study on subprime lending and found that in Oregon, black and Hispanic borrowers were twice as likely to get a subprime loan as whites of the same income level. They looked at Washington Mutual, specifically, and found a significant, racially-skewed pattern of loans.

That doesn't mean WaMu is racist. Loans from WaMu's big main banks were actually pretty good -- only 1 out of 28 loans were subprime. But WaMu makes a lot of its loans through smaller sort of franchise mortgage companies (the kind of mortgage storefront you'd see in a strip mall or somewhere) and those were really awful. At one of those smaller, WaMu-backed companies OCPP investigated, Long Beach Mortgage, 9 out of 10 loans were subprime.

That means, irregardless of race, if you walked into a Long Beach Mortgage to get a loan, you were pretty much screwed. But black and Latino people tended to walk in there much more than whites: 63 percent of African American customers and 74 percent of Latinos got their loans through Long Beach, while only 17 percent of whites did.

Why this happens? That's below the cut.