Redlining is a discriminatory practice from the United States, in which financial services are withheld from neighborhoods that have significant numbers of racial and ethnic minorities.^[2] Redlining has mostly been directed against African Americans, as well as Mexican Americans in the Southwestern United States,^[3] Jewish Americans,^[4] and Italian Americans. The most common examples involve denial of credit and insurance, denial of healthcare, and the development of food deserts in minority neighborhoods.^[5][6]

Reverse redlining occurs when a lender or insurer targets majority-minority neighborhood residents with inflated interest rates by taking advantage of the lack of lending competition relative to non-redlined neighborhoods.^[7][8] The effect also emerges when service providers artificially restrict the supply of real estate available for loanable funds to nonwhites, thus providing alternative pretext for higher rates. Neighborhoods which were targeted for blockbusting were also subject to reverse redlining.^[9]

In the 1960s, sociologist John McKnight originally coined the term to describe the discriminatory practice in Chicago, Illinois of banks classifying certain neighborhoods as "hazardous," or not worthy of investment due to the racial makeup of their residents.^[10] In the 1980s, a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles^[11] by investigative reporter Bill Dedman demonstrated how Atlanta banks would often lend in lower-income white neighborhoods but not in middle-income or even upper-income Black neighborhoods.^[12][13]

The documented history of redlining in the United States is a manifestation of the historical systemic racism that has had wide-ranging impacts on American society, two examples being educational and housing inequality across racial groups.^[14][15] Redlining is also an example of spatial inequality and economic inequality.