Leave it to conservatives to inject a racial component into the current economic crisis.

Over the last week, leading conservative commentators like Charles Krauthammer, Ann Coulter, Lou Dobbs, and the Wall Street Journal editorial writers have been trying to blame the crisis on minorities getting subprime mortgages.

They blame the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which was enacted to address a practiced called “redlining,” in which banks deliberately withheld credit from minority communities in the ’60s and ’70s. The act was intended “to encourage depository institutions to help meet the credit needs … in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.”

Coulter has written that the Community Reinvestment Act fostered granting loans based on “nontraditional measures of creditworthiness, such as having a good jump shot or having a missing child named ‘Caylee.’ ”

While Coulter’s words can be dismissed as crude and obnoxious, they echo a line of thought that asserts that since many of the subprime mortgages were given to minority borrowers, this “affirmative action” measure is at the root of the current crisis.

But that line of thinking is extremely flawed.

First, since the Community Reinvestment Act was crafted over 30 years ago, why is it that only now subprime mortgages have created a crisis?

Second, most of the disastrous subprime loans were made by mortgage brokers and disreputable lenders unregulated by the Community Reinvestment Act.

Third, white and affluent borrowers took out 58 percent of higher-cost loans, with blacks and Latinos accounting for 18 percent each, according to data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act,

Just last week The New York Times reported that the Nehemiah housing program, which provides housing for minorities in that city’s outer boroughs, has reported 10 defaults on 3,900 households in the last 27 years. Hardly what you’d call an irresponsible group.

The true culprit in our current financial crisis is the policy of the Bush administration that rewrote rules for our lending and banking institutions that have enriched high-rolling financiers and bankrupted powerless average Americans.

Now more than ever, it is clear that this country needs to reassess its domestic economic policy in a way that serves the majority of its hardworking citizens, rather than blame them for the excesses of a privileged few.

Ed Morales is a contributor to the New York Times and Newsday and is the author of “Living in Spanglish” (St. Martin’s Press, 2002). He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.