© AP/Alex BrandonProtesters at Meridian Hill Park, also known as Malcom X Park, Aug. 14, 2014 in Washington, to protest the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Mo.
Privileged pundits love to insist that race is no longer a factor in American life. The numbers say they're wrongIn the wake
of the Ferguson shooting, a recent Pew poll
finds that 47 percent of whites believe that "race is getting more attention than it deserves," with regards to the death of Michael Brown, while only 18 percent of African-Americans feel the same. Meanwhile, a similar Pew study found that whites
are far less likely to see discrimination in the treatment blacks receive by the education system, the courts and hospitals. Such views are held by many Americans,
who believe that "blacks are mostly responsible for their own condition." Police killings of unarmed blacks are certainly the most visible manifestation of systemic racism, but data show that racism still manifests itself frequently in everyday life.
In America, race determines not just where someone lives and what school he or she attends, it affects
the very air we breathe. Although many whites wish to believe we live in a "post-racial" society, race appears not just in overt discrimination but in subtle structural factors. It's impossible to delineate every way race affects us every day, but a cursory examination of major structural racial problems can give us a feeling for how far we still have to go.
1) EducationEducation is an important key to fostering upward mobility and alleviating inequality. However, schools today
are becoming more segregated, rather than less segregated. At the peak of integration, 44 percent of black Southern students attended majority white schools. Today, only 23 percent do. This is particularly worrying because recent research by Rucker C. Johnson finds that school desegregation benefited black students,
because it "significantly increased both educational and occupational attainments, college quality and adult earnings, reduced the probability of incarceration, and improved adult health status."
Researchers have increasingly referred to a rise of "apartheid schools," which are almost entirely non-white. In 2003, one-sixth of all black students
were educated in such "apartheid schools." These districts are
underfunded and understaffed, and
frequently referred to as "dropout factories." So students of color are
far less likely than their white peers to attend schools with a full range of advanced courses.
As ProPublica
documents, more and more schools are squeezing out of court oversight. The result,
according to Sam Reardon and his colleagues, is increased racial segregation.
(
Source)
At the college level, the situation is little better. A recent
report by Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl finds that college education in America consists of "a dual system of racially separate and unequal institutions despite the growing access of minorities to the post-secondary system." They find that students of color are less likely to end up in the most selective schools than white students with the same qualifications.
2) WealthThere is a large racial wealth gap between blacks and whites in America, partially driven by income but exacerbated by racially biased housing policies (which will be examined below). A recent
research brief by the Institution on Assets and Social Policy finds that the wealth gap between white families and African-Americans has tripled between 1984 and 2009. The recession has
only exacerbated the gap, with whites losing 11 percent of their wealth between 2007 and 2010, while blacks lost 31 percent and Hispanics 44 percent.
© Urban Institute
(
Source)
The housing crash disproportionately affected blacks and Hispanics, who were more likely to receive sub-prime loans
even when compared to whites with similar credit scores. In one
instance reported by the
New York Times, a loan officer at Wells Fargo said the bank "
saw the black community as fertile ground for sub-prime mortgages, as working-class blacks were hungry to be a part of the nation's home-owning mania." However, even before the recession, disparities in
employment, college education, home ownership and inheritance helped
solidify racial wealth gaps. Instead of wealth, more and more Americans,
particularly people of color,
are burdened with debt.3) Job MarketsUnemployment is particularly high among African-Americans, the result of both explicit discrimination and occupational segregation.
Occupational
segregation, or the delegation of blacks to jobs with low upward mobility and wages, is rife. People of color are
primarily affected by practices like just-in-time scheduling, which gives workers little warning before a shift.
© Salon
Part of the problem is infrastructure and education. People of color are far more likely to rely on public infrastructure, and therefore suffer from cuts to public transportation. Decades of
housing segregation have trapped African-Americans in jobless areas with badly understaffed schools. Social networks
reinforce the patterns, since most Americans get their jobs through friends and family connections. Outright discrimination plays a role as well: Marianne Bertrand
finds that
applicants with white-sounding names are 50 percent more likely to receive a call-back than applicants with black-sounding names with the same credentials.
4) Upward MobilityPossibly the defining American attribute is the dream of upward mobility. Sadly, this tends to be more
farce that fact - America lags
behind other developed countries in measures of upward mobility. But
recent research by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Patrick Kline, Emmanuel Saez, shows that levels of upward mobility vary across the country - and is strongly predicted by income inequality and racial segregation. They write: "Income mobility is significantly lower in areas with large African-American populations." (Whites in the areas also had lower levels of mobility.)
Specifically, they note the importance of segregation, "areas that are more residentially segregated by race and income have lower levels of mobility."
© Harvard
(
Source)
A recent Pew Research Center
study shows that not only do blacks have lower levels of upward mobility; among those that do make it into the middle class, their children are more likely to slide back into poverty. In what may be the most depressing footnote I've ever seen in a chart, Pew notes that
there are not enough observations of blacks in the fourth and fifth (read: highest) quintiles of income to make observations about upward mobility.
© Pew Research
© Pew Research
(
Source)
In a recent study, Bhashkar Mazumber finds that out of all children born between the late 1950s and early 1980s, 50 percent of black children born into the bottom 20 percent of the income scale remained in the same position, while only 26 percent of white children born into the bottom 20 percent of the income scale remained in the same position. He also finds, like Pew, that African-Americans in the middle class are on far more precarious footing than whites: 60 percent of black children born in the top half of the income distribution fell to the bottom half later in life, but only 36 percent of white children born in the top half of the income distribution fell to the bottom half later in life.
Surprisingly, Mazumber finds that "[w]hile these results are provocative, they stand in contrast to other epochs in which blacks have made steady progress in reducing racial differentials." While we like to believe we are constantly progressing, these data suggest we may be backsliding with regard to mobility and race.
5) The War on DrugsThe socioeconomic realities discussed above cannot be divorced from the war on drugs: It is a war that is primarily fought against people of color in the country.
One in 12 working-age African-American men is incarcerated;
and while whites and blacks use and sell drugs at similar rates, African-Americans comprise 74 percent of those imprisoned for drug possession.
The U.S. prison population
grew by 700 percent between 1970 and 2005, while the general population grew only 44 percent. According to the
Bureau of Justice statistics, around half of federal prisoners' most serious offense is drug-related. The war on drugs has undermined the legitimacy of law enforcement and
eroded their esteem in the eyes of the public. Even before the Ferguson shooting, 70 percent of blacks
agreed that, "blacks in their community are treated less fairly than whites" when dealing with the police.
Instead of housing those who have committed violent crimes, U.S. prisons are increasingly teeming with nonviolent offenders. Formerly incarcerated people
struggle to find work, and are therefore more likely to turn to crime in the future, creating a vicious and counterproductive cycle. A Pew study
finds that the costs of incarceration are often hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost wages. Even when they are no longer incarcerated, former inmates are often deprived of basic rights,
including franchise. Around 13 percent of African-American men
have been denied the right to vote.
This is to barely touch on the empirical literature on
school punishment,
access to healthcare, a
history of racially biased
federal policy and the other deep issues that we face. The most disturbing fact is that in almost all of these areas, we have actually seen previous progress eroded, even while we proclaim ourselves a post-racial society. It's time to take an honest look at race in America. We probably won't enjoy it. But we need it.
Any of these reasons is sufficient to hate one another, and under humanities rules more than sufficient cause to slaughter each other.
The most amusing part is every single one of you are exactly the same. Youre all denying it right now, you all believe you are the exception (myself included), and because of how we've been conditioned from a community mindset to a personal mindset theres also a perceived sense of pointlessness/hopelessness to affect change socially by any means that doesnt involve genocide. We are all equal (equally worthless). We all behave like children. Look at it on the larger scale and deny it. Even our motivations are limited to greed and lust.
If we cant learn then by all means...let us die. Its hard to listen to claims of sentient status, intelligence, and 'humane' behaviour when the evidence says we are nothing more than violent primates killing each other to sit a little closer to the fire.