(Note: This diary got so long that I decided to divide it in two. The first part briefly recounts US oppression of African Americans up to the Civil Rights movement of the sixties. This second part will discuss persistent and systemic marginalization of African Americans since the Civil Rights movement. Link to Part 1)
Over the 350 years prior to the Civil Rights movement both the brutal exploitation and suppression of blacks and the myths that justified it—myths that blacks are lazy and irresponsible, that they are violently aggressive, that they are wildly sexual, that they are inhuman animals—had become self-sustaining, pervasive, and habitual. So how do we overcome 350-year-long cultural habits? After nearly 250 years of slavery and 100 years of policies designed to replicate its effects, how can we who are white imagine that a few laws, inconsistently enforced, will have freed us from the officially endorsed myths that justified our pernicious institutions? After 350 years of brutally exploiting and suppressing black people, how can we overcome the habit of such mistreatment?
And how can we expect African Americans, whose grandparents and parents, uncles, aunts, and neighbors had for 350 years suffered enforced poverty, injustice, and oppression of every kind, to put aside their amply justified distrust, fear, anger, and outrage? How might those of us who are white react to such persistent discrimination and marginalization? To learning from one’s parents not to be too ambitious, that striving and excelling will draw unwanted attention? To constantly feeling the stress of being regarded as a lazy, violent, and ignorant “thug”? To being expected by the authorities, particularly the judicial system, to be aggressive? Might we not fight out of anger or run out of fear or escape through drugs?
Opponents of civil rights in the 60’s argued that “you can’t legislate a social change.” I fear they were right. For even today the attitudes and habitual behaviors inculcated by slavery and its aftermath continue to infect our culture and institutions. In fact, it did not take long for the civil rights victories of the 50’s and 60’s to be overturned.
Only fourteen years after Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, Title VII and affirmative action were effectively dismantled by the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision. And we see all around us the systematic denial of suffrage rights following the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County vs. Holder. Today, neighborhoods and schools remain segregated, economic inequality persists, criminal justice is still inequitably administered, and minority neighborhoods suffer from pollution at far greater rates than white neighborhoods.
The widespread assumption that the presence of minorities in a neighborhood reduced the value of all homes within that neighborhood did not end with the legal end of redlining in 1968. White flight to the suburbs continued. That residential segregation persists is patently obvious. Few of us today live in genuinely desegregated neighborhoods. The common use among us of the word “’hood” testifies to that segregation. Moreover, though discrimination in home sales is less widespread and blatant than before 1970, real estate agents continue to show subtle discrimination against blacks. According to a 2012 study by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, blacks seeking to buy homes were given 17% fewer choices than whites.
During the housing bubble, over forty percent of African Americans who, because of good credit ratings, should have qualified for prime mortgages, were sold subprime mortgages instead (The Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual, a project of Strike Debt/Occupy Wall Street, 2012: 44). As a result, following the 2007-08 crash, many blacks lost their homes while the empty homes blighted their communities and left many homeowners under water. From 2007 to 2013, the median value of African American owned homes fell 37.7% compared to 20.3% for white owned homes.
Partly as a result of such declines the average value of African American owned homes in 2010 was $75,000 compared to $217,000 for white owned homes.
At the end of 2014, whereas the net worth of the average white household was $141,900, that of the average black household was $11,000.
Compounding this wealth gap is a significant earnings gap between white and black workers. Median household income among blacks in 2011 was $32,068 compared to $54,620 among whites. Black unemployment, at 12.6%, was nearly twice that of whites.
Clearly, the black poor remain poor not because thy want to, not because they do not want employment, but because they lack the advantages provided by inherited wealth and lack employment opportunity.
Of course, disparities in educational opportunities also contribute to black poverty. White flight, segregated neighborhoods, and the explosive growth, particularly in the South, of segregation academies, have weakened efforts to desegregate. More than sixty years after Brown vs. Board of Education, many of our public schools are as segregated as they ever were. In the Northeast, over 50% of black students attend schools that are 90-100% minority while even in the least segregated regions of the country, the South and West, roughly 1/3 of black students attend 90-100% minority schools.
And segregated schools mean poorer and weaker schools for black students.
As the Supreme Court’s Brown decision made clear, 90 years worth of evidence demonstrate that separate schools are decidedly not equal schools. Impoverished black communities have been unable to provide equal resources for their schools. The richest school districts in the country spend over nine times as much per student as the poorest.. Poorer school districts are simply unable to hire the best teachers or as many teachers. Thus, poorer students have larger classes with fewer resources. Moreover, the punishment of poor-performing schools under No Child Left Behind has exacerbated inequities in funding, consigning poor communities to a downward spiral in educational opportunity. According to the National Education Association:
Instead of raising student achievement, NCLB has perpetuated a system that delivers unequal opportunities and uneven quality to America’s children based on the zip code where they live and created a culture of high-stakes testing that makes it impossible for educators to do what is most important: instill a love of learning in their students.
The racism that pervaded our criminal justice system prior to the civil rights victories of the 60’s continues today. In spite of the pernicious myth among conservatives that it favors blacks, our justice system is overwhelmingly and oppressively stacked against them. Three and a half centuries of constant propaganda that blacks are violent has contributed to a widespread assumption, most notably among police, that people of color are more likely to commit crimes than white people. There is ample evidence that police intentionally target minorities and their neighborhoods. The Justice Department investigation of the Ferguson, MO, police department revealed that whereas Ferguson’s population is 67% African American, 86% of drivers stopped by police and 93% of those arrested were people of color even though over 33% of whites were harboring “contraband” compared to 20% of African
Americans.
Perhaps the most notorious example of police targeting blacks is New York’s “stop and frisk” program, which stopped and arrested residents of minority neighborhoods for even very minor offenses. Of New York residents stopped under the “stop and frisk” program, 93% were African American, yet African Americans who were stopped were only about half as likely to possess firearms as whites and only about 2/3 as likely to possess “contraband” such as drugs.
Nor are New York and Ferguson alone in their use of “stop and frisk.” Chicago used “stop and frisk” at nearly four times the rate of New York, and Washington, DC, for years used an even more aggressive tactic called “jump outs.”
Baltimore has also had a history of such tactics.
There is, I fear, a dangerous and pernicious feedback loop operating in this targeting of black neighborhoods. Assuming that they are more likely to commit crimes and acting in accordance with policies that assume the same, police confront African Americans far more often than whites. African Americans, reacting to centuries of oppression can hardly be blamed for resisting out of anger or for fleeing out of fear. Either action is likely to reinforce the negative police attitude toward African Americans. Either may also quite possibly get them shot.
As the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Holder, Walter Scott, and most recently, Freddie Gray exemplify, over the past few years, police officers have murdered hundreds if not thousands of unarmed black people. These killings are not anomalies or random acts. They are symptoms of a pervasive racism, a racism that leads to disproportionate brutalizing of African Americans. The Baltimore Sun reports that in Baltimore alone over the last four years, 317 lawsuits have been filed against the city for police brutality or violation of civil rights. Plaintiffs have won settlements in 102 such cases with the city paying out $5.2 million to settle them.
Recently published e-mails from Ferguson and from California graphically illustrate the racism of some members of the law enforcement community. A federal judge ordered New York City to end its “stop and frisk” program because it was racially biased. Though defenders of the program argued that it was responsible for the significant reduction in New York’s crime rate over the past few decades, the fact is that New York’s crime rate has continued to drop since “stop and frisk” ended.
As of September, 2014, the justice department was investigating “at least” 35 law enforcement agencies from all over the country for racial bias.
The racist culture in our law enforcement system extends beyond the police to the court system. As Michelle Alexander has copiously documented in The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2010), people of color are jailed and imprisoned at far higher rates than whites. Survey after survey has shown that blacks use drugs at about the same rate as whites, and hospital records show that whites are admitted to hospitals for drug abuse at three times the rate of whites (96-97). Yet, according to Alexander, African Americans constitute 80% to 90% of offenders sent to prison for drug abuse. By the new millennium blacks were being arrested for drug offenses at 26 times the rate of 1983, when the War on Drugs began (96). Alexander recounts incident after incident where prosecutors bullied black defendants, whether guilty or innocent, into confessions or plea bargains. Of the more than 7.2 million people arrested for marijuana possession between 2001 and 2010, blacks were 3.72 times as likely to be arrested as whites. Only 13% percent of the US population is black, yet black people constitute 38% of the prison population.
Among the consequences of those inequitable arrests are loss of job opportunities, disenfranchisement, and disqualification for government assistance.
https://www.aclu.org/...
And sentences for blacks average 20% longer.
It seems to me that the primary reason our judicial system targets blacks more than whites is not so much that blacks commit more crimes but that the police, prosecutors, judges, and juries expect them to have committed more crimes. And the primary reason for that expectation is that our entire culture remains systemically racist. In a 2012 survey, 51% of the people responding were “explicitly” racist, assuming that blacks are inferior in any number of ways.
Studies on racial bias have shown that job applicants with African American sounding names are 50% less likely to be called for interviews than those with white sounding names. This was found to be true even among employers who said they valued diversity in the workplace. Other studies showed that used car salesmen offered lower prices to whites than blacks, that physicians were less likely to prescribe aggressive treatment for blacks than for whites, and that all-white juries were more likely find black defendants guilty than juries with even one black juror. Still other studies with clear relevance to police shootings of young black men have shown that in video simulations unarmed blacks are more likely to be perceived as having a firearm than unarmed whites.
Is it any wonder that a recent study reviewed by Public Health Watch found that 85% of black youth had experienced stress from racial prejudice, contributing to clinical depression and anxiety as well as “sociaphobia”?”?
Finally, many poor and minority communities have become dumping grounds for toxic wastes, both wastes created by corporations and those created by government. In such places as Pensacola, FL, Corpus Christi and Houston, Texas, and Warren County, NC, blacks face serious threats to their health from toxic waste.
Following its massive oil spill, BP dumped 40,000 tons of toxic waste from the clean-up in Gulf Coast communities with 60% going to the 28% of communities that are predominantly minority.
Blacks are 79% more likely than whites to live in areas where industrial toxins can cause serious health problems, and 96% of poor urban black children live among concentrations of lead sufficient to cause “learning disabilities and neurological disorders.”
The US military, far and away our country’s (and probably the world’s) largest, most toxic, and most secretive polluter, has designated such toxic waste sites “’sacrifice zones.’”
So there it is: “sacrifice zones.” Our government is willfully sacrificing the well-being of poor minority communities to the military-corporate complex. Given the persistent racial oppression documented here, oppression not merely limited to a few hateful, biased individuals, but built into our economic and social systems, how can conservatives, moderates, and even some white liberals argue that black disadvantage stems from black irresponsibility? What about those whites’ irresponsibility in refusing to discuss or even acknowledge their complicity in injustice? I’m sick of hearing other whites’ whining about the “race card.” The so-called “race card” is a perfectly legitimate point of discussion. To refuse to consider it is in itself an injustice.