At the time, I was making $28,000 a year — nothing much, especially when you live 10 minutes away from Manhattan — but credit was free flowing, and I qualified for a $250,000 “no doc” adjustable loan. It wasn’t a lot, but with some savings and some money that my mom and great-aunt promised to give me — a privilege a lot of black people don’t have — I knew I’d be able to make a 20 percent down payment.

Almost all of my closest family members owned their home: My grandparents, my great-aunt and, most important, my mother. She bought her home several years after I was born and constantly talked about how tough that was to do in the early 1980s as a single woman. She was always clear about the importance of owning your own things. It meant having control over your life; it meant freedom.

So back in 2005, it seemed like a good idea to buy an apartment. I looked in Englewood, where I grew up, but across town from where I was raised, in the East Hill neighborhood. My mortgage broker told me I needed to get out of my adjustable loan in two years and get a conventional mortgage. She sort of warned me it was a bad deal, and I could understand why. But she didn’t warn me against doing it at all. She was black, middle-aged and seemed to take a “by any means necessary” approach to black people owning property. I understood that, too. I marched up to my new, small, one-bedroom apartment on the Hill, satisfied. It felt as if I’d broken barriers.

But when I got a notice in the mail about five years after I closed, I felt dizzy. It was not long after the financial crisis. The letter said that my mortgage company had been charged with giving subprime loans to black and Hispanic people around the country and asked if I wanted to join a class-action suit. I had most likely been the target of predatory lending. I had known from the start that my income could make me a target. I’d heard the words of the broker. But because of my race? It hadn’t crossed my mind. I was devastated.

I was reminded of this moment years later, when I was talking to a young man named Bleu who lived in Florida.

He loved playing basketball, did well at his charter school and hoped to become a forensic scientist — the version of the American dream that rewards merit and achievement, his version of saving for a mortgage. His family had no resources to get him to college, though, and he took a job at a fast-food restaurant after graduating from high school. He tried to enroll in a for-profit college, but the monthly fees got too expensive . He dropped out after he missed the third payment.

We were talking by phone as he drove home from work one night, through Tampa. He was talking about the political climate and racism today. “Not only do you have to worry,” he said, “about not having food to eat, but as a black person, you have the added burden of just trying to make it home alive.”