Abstract
First came racial redlining. Then came racial targeting of toxic and predatory loans. Both spelled economic disaster for African Americans. No other recent economic crisis better illustrates the saying "when America catches a cold, African Americans get pneumonia" than the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. African Americans, along with other minorities and low-income populations, have been the targets of the sub-prime mortgage system. Blacks received a disproportionate share of these loans, leading to a "stripping" of their hard-won home-equity gains of the recent past and the near future. To fully understand how this has happened, we need to place this in the context of the continuing racial-wealth gap, the importance of home equity in the wealth portfolios of African Americans, and its intersection with the new financial markets of which sub-prime is but one manifestation.