That was kinda my point, but black communities being over-represented among the population at risk does not mean necessarily imply that this action was a targeted predatory action against the black community. If you sample the population of these areas, you're obviously going to find samples representative of larger marginalised communities.
It’s not as simple as deciding whether or not you want to poison a town.
Racism is probably an indirect cause in this particular case because it contributed to the community's lack of power. But I also think that labelling this as racism does more to confuse rather than clarify the issue, and points to solutions along the wrong axis. If the best solution is reduction of racism, then it makes sense to call this problem caused by racism. If it's actually best solved by economic policy or legal changes, then it's probably more helpful to phrase it as an economic problem or so on. Otherwise we'll be looking in the dark for a racist bad guy to punish and solve the problem, but we won't find one.
Does it sufficiently capture reality to say that this discrimination happens to the lower class? In that case, "systemic racism" is mostly acting as shorthand for statistics that black people have less wealth on average, and points to an explanation of why. Or does this happen to black communities over and above that of other communities of comparable wealth? In that case, it makes sense to say that racism is a separate factor, beyond just economics.
I guess what I'm saying is, these are two different concepts with two different implied solutions:
A) A history of racism is why black communities are poor, and all poor communities equally suffer these burdens.
B) Black communities suffer these burdens over and above equally poor communities.
In case A, measures to increase wealth equality might solve the problem. In case B, that might not be sufficient, and deeper causes of lingering racist discrimination might need to be sought.
Just labeling the issue "systemic racism" does more to confuse rather than clarify how to solve it, I think.
I know this is tangential and a bit of a nitpick, but I feel the semantic difference here is important.
So do poorer white communities.
Poor black communities tend to be urban or suburban, right near the cities and commercial hubs where you'd want to build a chemical plant or industrial mill.
Historically and in the current day that is where the black neighborhoods are. However, living in the area for over 20 years people have always spoken better of Shirlington.
PG always had an interesting problem: middle-class professional parents, but teenagers who bought into urban gang culture for no apparent reason. This lead to a higher crime and harassment rate there, leading people to feel like it was a ghetto even if income stats wouldn't reflect.
Annandale had a similar problem, but with the Hispanic crowd.
Disclaimer: I am black. My notions come from the black community.
Second, black neighborhoods are discounted in the public eye even in comparison to their income levels. I grew up in “progressive” northern Virginia, hearing about how PG County (a suburb of DC) was “ghetto.” Two decades later, when I moved next door, I was quite surprised to learn that PG County is just a middle class predominantly black county. One of the richest predominate black counties in the country, and richer than most counties in Virginia that nobody considers “the ghetto.” Those attitudes almost certainly impact peoples’ views about what places are desirable/undesirable/need renewal/etc.
Those two phenomena also intersect. Places are worth less because black people live there. Take the DC suburbs, for example. To the west and southwest of DC, you have the Virginia suburbs of Fairfax County, Alexandria, and Arlington. To the north, east, and southeast, you have the Maryland suburbs of Montgomery County and PG County. PG County is better served by Metro, both in number of lines and number of stations, than any other suburban county (and that's been true for 30+ years). In DC, property near a Metro station has appreciated incredibly over the past 25 years. Where has most of that growth happened? On the Virginia side, where there are white people and predominantly white schools. Even today, people are fighting through northern Virginia traffic from places like Reston to get to a Metro station that then takes 30 minutes to get to the city center. Meanwhile, they could get a house in a solidly middle class PG County neighborhood with a shorter trip downtown, for half the price. But they don't, because they do not want to send their kids to predominately black schools.