"The problem is less an issue of individual prejudice on the part of
white Americans and more about the way leading institutions and social
structures function..."
After reading the article, I decided the above sentence was sarcasm.
Carl Jarvis
On 10/16/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
By Paul Street
Truthdig
White Blindness and Denial Characterize U.S. Racial Attitudes at the End of
the Obama Era
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/white_blindness_denial_characterize_us_2 ;
Posted on Oct 12, 2016
Half a century after the policy triumphs of the civil rights movement, as
the nation's first black chief executive nears the end of his presidency in
the shadow of race riots, anti-black racism remains entrenched in the
United
States. The problem is less an issue of individual prejudice on the part of
white Americans and more about the way leading institutions and social
structures
function(https://www.amazon.com/Racial-Oppression-Global-Metropolis-Chicago/
dp/0742540820) to make black Americans disproportionately poor, sick,
injured, uninsured, jobless, homeless, underpaid, arrested, criminally
marked and incarcerated. The culprits include:
.A labor market rife with employers reluctant to hire anyone with a felony
record (thereby excluding one-third of adult black
males(http://thenewpress.com/books/new-jim-crow) ) yet more likely to hire
a
white job applicant with a felony record than a black applicant without
one(http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo5485761.html) .
.Real estate agents who steer prospective black homeowners and black
apartment-seekers away from all but predominantly black neighborhoods.
.Mortgage lenders who deny blacks the credit required for home ownership
and
business startups.
.Usurious "payday" lenders who target black neighborhoods devoid of regular
banking services.
.Police who target blacks for drug surveillance and arrest even though
whites use illegal narcotics at a higher rate than blacks.
.Police departments that target black communities for stop-and-frisk stops
as part of an arrest- and fine-based "shakedown" revenue strategy.
.Judges who give longer sentences to blacks than to whites convicted of
similar crimes.
.Legislators who push the racially disparate war on drugs and mass
incarceration in the name of "law and order."
.Policymakers who deny adequate resources to highly segregated black
schools
while bombarding those schools with mind-numbing standardized testing
regimes, disastrous privatization campaigns and prisonlike control.
.A financial and corporate elite that refuses to invest in destitute black
communities.
.Food retail chains that fail to build decent, full-service grocery stores
in black neighborhoods.
.Municipalities that steer development dollars, subsidies and other public
resources to mostly white and affluent neighborhoods.
.Gentrification policies and practices that push blacks further and further
away from opportunity and development.
.The packing of millions of black children into schools and neighborhoods
marked by massive poverty and scarred by an absence of basic services and
opportunities.
.State and local jurisdictions that set up special barriers to black
voting.
This is just the short list.
Savage Inequalities
It's no wonder that average black household wealth is 94 percent less than
average white household wealth ($6,314, compared with $110,500), that black
families' median
income(http://www.childrensdefense.org/library/state-of-americas-children/)
is less than half of white families' median income, or that the black
poverty rate(http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/fact-sheets/poverty/) is
nearly three times higher than the white poverty rate. A disheartening 40
percent of the nation's black children-including 49 percent of black
children under 6 years old-are growing up beneath the federal government's
notoriously inadequate definition of poverty, compared with 14 percent of
white children.
In Milwaukee, where the police killing of a young black man sparked rioting
in August, the official black poverty
rate(https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml) is 40
percent, more than double the white rate. More than a sixth of the city's
black residents live in "deep poverty," at less than half the official
poverty measure, as do a fifth of the nation's black children.
As serious cost-of-living research has long shown, families on average need
an income of about twice the poverty level to cover basic expenses. By that
standard, the National Center for Children in Poverty
finds(http://www.nccp.org/publications/pub_1145.html) that two-thirds of
the nation's black children live in low-income families, compared with just
less than a third (31 percent) of its white children.
Housing Markets Distribute More Than Dwellings
Residential segregation by race-still quite high in the U.S.-plays a
critical role in feeding these stark disparities. This is because one's
place of dwelling is strongly connected to economic status and opportunity.
As sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton noted in their important
1998 book "American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the
Underclass(http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674018211) ,"
"housing markets . distribute much more than a place to live; they also
distribute any good or resource that is correlated with where one lives,"
including jobs, education, safety, access to green spaces, civic community,
exposure to crime, services and wealth in the form of home equity. By
concentrating poor and working-class black people in a restricted number of
geographical places, including "downstate" (in Illinois) and "upstate" (in
New York and Michigan)
prisons(http://www.prisonpolicy.org/scans/theviciouscircle.pdf) , U.S. de
facto race apartheid reinforces blacks' persistently disproportionate
presence in the lowest socioeconomic places.
White Denial Lives
Sadly, however, most of white America continues its longtime pattern of
ignorance and/or denial regarding the persistence of racial oppression in
the United States. The most recent comprehensive racial attitudes
survey(http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/on-views-of-race-and-inequa
lity-blacks-and-whites-are-worlds-apart/) from the Pew Research Center
shows that less than half (47 percent) of white Americans understand even
the elementary fact that blacks are worse off financially than whites in
the
U.S. today.
Half of white Americans with an opinion on the matter actually think that
race relations in the U.S. right now are "good"-a remarkable belief to hold
in light of the extreme racial inequalities that persist and the
significant
black protest and police state response that has arisen over the epidemic
of
racist police shootings since 2014. Nearly two-thirds of black Americans
say
the opposite-no surprise.
Nearly four in 10 (38 percent) whites think that America has made all the
changes it needs to achieve black-white equality. By stark contrast, 88
percent of blacks think more changes are required.
Just barely more than a fifth (22 percent) of whites (as opposed to 64
percent of blacks) think that blacks are treated less fairly than whites in
the workplace.
A mere fifth of whites see disproportionately unfair treatment of blacks in
the electoral system.
Just a quarter of whites (in contrast to 66 percent of blacks) see
anti-black bias in mortgage applications.
Well less than half (43 percent) of whites see such bias in the courts
system. And just half of whites (as opposed to 84 percent of blacks) see it
in police behavior.
Overall, just barely more than a third (36 percent) of whites (as opposed
to
70 percent of blacks) see racial discrimination as a relevant "reason why
some blacks have a harder time getting ahead" in the U.S.
And whites are very widely unimpressed by the notion of institutional
racism. More than two-thirds of whites (70 percent) think that the "biggest
problem for blacks today is individual prejudice, not institutional
racism."
Fewer than half (48 percent) of blacks agree.
Whites also think that the problem of racial oppression gets too much
attention in the U.S. Just more than a quarter (27 percent) of whites (as
opposed to 58 percent of blacks) think the country pays too little
attention
to race as an issue.
Not surprisingly, just four in 10 white Americans support the Black Lives
Matter (BLM) movement. More than half of white Republicans oppose BLM, and
more than a third of those Republicans do so "strongly."
Still Separate, Unequal
What explains these clueless and even vicious white racial opinions as we
come to the end of the second term of the nation's widely heralded first
black presidency, in a nation that claims to celebrate the legacy of Martin
Luther King Jr. (whose bust sits behind Barack Obama in the Oval Office)?
Certainly not any increase in black economic status or government polices
to
advance racial equality and confront barriers to black advancement. Obama
has presided over a significant ongoing reduction in black net
worth(http://www.blackpressusa.com/is-black-america-better-off-under-obama/)
, reflecting the racially disparate impact of the Great Recession and the
subsequent weak "recovery" on more vulnerable black Americans.
Segregation by race-de facto apartheid-is still deeply embedded in American
life. In the Milwaukee metropolitan area, for example, the black-white
residential dissimilarity
index(http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/dis/census/segregation2010.html) is 81.
Eight of every 10 blacks residing in the region would have to move to
another census tract for black people to be evenly spread across the
region.
Harsh racial inequality and apartheid have continued with little protest or
even comment from the nation's first half-white president, a "vacuous to
repressive neoliberal(http://www.thebellforum.com/showthread.php?t=9456) "
(according to Adolph Reed, a political science professor at the University
of Pennsylvania), who rose to power in the name of "color-blind"
post-racialism(https://www.amazon.com/Barack-Obama-Future-American-Politics/
dp/1594516316) and has, as president, been reluctant to address U.S.
racial
oppression(https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-price-of-the-ticket-9
780199739677?cc=us&lang=en&) in a forthright manner that might ruffle
majority white feathers.
A Not-So-Split Decision
This white racial blindness and indifference is rooted in six key
interrelated and overlapping factors.
A first part of the problem is, of course, segregation. Beyond its role in
generating and reinforcing racial inequality, American apartheid helps keep
black experience invisible to most whites.
A second part of the explanation for white racial blindness and denial has
to do with the difference between what might be called "level-one racism"
and "level-two racism." "Level one" refers to open public bigotry and
prejudice. "Level two" denotes the underlying covert societal or
institutional racism that operates independent of subjective prejudice.
Level-one racism has a long and sordid history, but it has largely been
defeated, outlawed and discredited in the U.S., most dramatically in the
South, but across the nation as well. The deeper, covert level of racism,
however, has not been defeated-not by a long shot. It involves the more
impersonal and (to be fair) the more invisible operation of social and
institutional forces and processes in ways that "just happen," but
nonetheless serve to reproduce black disadvantage in the labor market and
numerous other sectors of American life. These processes are so ingrained
in
the social, political and institutional sinews of capitalist America that
they are taken for granted and barely noticed across the reigning media and
political culture.
This "split decision"-liberal victory on level-one racism and continuing
progressive defeat on level-two racism-is tricky. It's not about glass
half-empty versus glass half-full. Perversely enough, level-two
institutional racism may be deepened by civil rights victories and related
black upward mobility into the middle and upper classes, insofar as those
victories and achievements have served to encourage the great toxic
illusion
that, as black lawyer and author Derrick Bell once put it, "the indolence
of
blacks rather than the injustice of whites explains the socioeconomic gaps
separating the races."
The Oprah-Obama Effect
A third explanation is what some early 21st century anti-racism thinkers
called "the Oprah Effect." It's been harder than in previous eras to blame
millions of white Americans for believing that racism is dead at a time
when
U.S. public life is filled with affirmations of the integration ideal and
the nation's ostensible progress toward achieving it. Highly visible black
success stories also help exonerate white blindness. As black American law
professor Sheryl Cashin noted 12 years
ago(https://www.amazon.com/Failures-Integration-Class-Undermining-American/d
p/1586483390) , there are now enough examples of successful middle- and
upper-class African-Americans "to make many whites believe that blacks have
reached parity. . The fact that some Blacks now lead powerful mainstream
institutions offers evidence to whites that racial barriers have been
eliminated; [that] the issue now is individual effort. .
"The odd black family on the block . [or] examples of stratospheric black
success," Cashin wrote, "feed these misperceptions, even as relatively few
whites live among and interact daily with blacks of their own standing."
Now, there is Obama. His ascendancy and ubiquitous media presence has been
something of a final nail in the coffin of many white Americans' already
slight willingness to admit that racism continues to provide meaningful
barriers to black advancement and equality: Look, the president is black,
OK? Don't talk to me about racism anymore! Obama's presidency has provided
perhaps the ultimate opportunity for whites to congratulate themselves on
American racial progress.
Neoliberal Racism
A fourth factor is the continuing and longstanding reign of neoliberal
ideology, which privileges individual experience and pain over any and all
social categories and structural or institutional factors-not just race and
racism. With neoliberalism's ascendancy in the dominant public discourse,
the prolific left cultural theorist Henry Giroux has
noted(https://www.amazon.com/Terror-Neoliberalism-Authoritarianism-Democracy
-Cultural/dp/1594510105) , the nation's "pervasive racial hierarchies
collapse into power-evasive strategies such as blaming minorities of class
and color for not working hard enough" and for "refusing to exercise
individual initiative." Even as an insidious, increasingly invisible racism
"functions" as "one of the deep and abiding currents in everyday [American]
life," this discourse works "to erase the social from the language of
public
life as to reduce all racial problems to private issues [of] . individual
character and cultural depravity." This "neoliberal racism . can imagine
public issues only as private concerns." It sees "human agency as simply a
matter of individualized choices, the only obstacle to effective
citizenship
being the lack of principled self-help and moral responsibility" on the
part
of those most victimized by structural oppression. "Human misery is largely
defined as a function of personal choices" and "all problems are private
rather than social in nature."
The Nightly News and the Don Lemon Effect
A fifth factor is the Great Recession and the tepid "recovery" that
followed. White willingness to acknowledge societal racism and the need to
open doors to non-white opportunity is always negatively correlated with
whites' sense of economic security. The more precarious their material
situation and prospects, the less predisposed they are to support increased
opportunity for others.
A sixth and critical factor is the "mainstream" corporate news media, on
which white America is overdependent for its understanding of black
experience, thanks in no small part to persistent apartheid. In any major
U.S. metropolitan area, smartly dressed and attractive, racially and
ethnically mixed and cross-gender news teams report a regular litany of
scary stories of violence and criminality from black inner-city ghettos and
black inner-ring suburbs. And just as the weather forecasters report ever
more alarming and extreme meteorological developments without the slightest
reference to the underlying problem of anthropogenic global warming, the
drumbeat of lurid news from black provinces is never accompanied by any
serious discussion of the horrific crime- and violence-generating
conditions
imposed on black America by historical and current societal U.S. racism.
Devoid of essential historical and societal context, the black misery that
whites see on the news strikes many Caucasians as self-imposed and richly
deserved.
The likeable, upper-middle class, black news anchors and reporters are
themselves part of whites' racial blindness problem. Call it the Don Lemon
Effect. They, too, are among "the good blacks" who function to demonstrate
that the far greater number of black Americans struggling to get by created
their own hard times. And the fact that whites like "good" blacks
reinforces
the majority white belief that racism (superficially understood at the low
bar of individual prejudice) has been defeated in the U.S.
How They Police vs. What They Police: Tinder and Spark
It is true that major corporate news media have in the last two years paid
unusually high attention to racially biased police conduct in connection
with protests sparked by an epidemic of police-generated black fatalities.
But the deeper racism-denying media pattern-itself a key component of
level-two racism-has not thereby been undermined. Excessive police force is
just one small, if critical, part of the bigger problem of institutional
racism just within the criminal justice system (see Loyola University New
Orleans law professor Bill Quigley's recent essay on "Eighteen Examples of
Racism in the Criminal Legal
System(http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/04/none-dare-call-it-justice-eigh
teen-examples-of-racism-in-criminal-legal-system/) ").
The attention is always fleeting. The recent black uprising in Charlotte,
N.C., was swept off the nation's telescreens by the first presidential
debate, wherein Donald Trump channeled widespread white
sentiments(http://www.npr.org/2016/09/26/495115346/fact-check-first-presiden
tial-debate) by voicing this opinion on how to approach the race problem
in
America: "We need law and order. And when I look at what's going on in
Charlotte . [a] city where I have investments, when I look at what's going
on throughout . our country . we need law and order. . And I just got . the
endorsement of the fraternal order of police."
At the same time, the major-media reporting on the rise of BLM has been
about how police carry out their tasks vis-a-vis black America: how they
police blacks. It's no minor matter, to be sure. Still, just as important
but missing from the national media coverage and commentary is the matter
of
what law enforcement polices when it comes to race, space and class. It
becomes easy to lose sight of the fact that the police enforce the
overlapping and interrelated evils of apartheid and inequality. It's about
keeping blacks in their place, in more ways than one. This is what they
police. And that is what provides the tinder for the riots and giant black
protests that have been sparked by police killings of black men (mainly)
during Obama's second term.
The roots of racial disparity are in the system. The underlying and
systemically entrenched conditions would not be any more acceptable if the
cops were less murderous and more "sensitive." They certainly will not be
undone by corporate Democrats' and corporate-media talking heads' favorite
solution: "community policing," which provides fake-liberal cover for
gentrification and enlists middle-class homeowners and upper-end renters in
the enhanced surveillance and racial/socioeconomic cleansing of
high-property-value neighborhoods.
Another media-ignored issue is the question of how and why American
government at all levels pours so much taxpayer money into ever more
militarized policing instead of meeting basic human needs. It's long past
time to trade in the police state and the vast U.S. military empire for
(among other things) free-lunch and green-jobs programs, for free health
clinics, for a guaranteed national income, for single-payer health
insurance, for true neighborhood revitalization, including community
gardens
and genuine public and popular education in the nation's many truly
disadvantaged ghettos, barrios and reservations.
By introducing real and environmentally sustainable social justice and
equality (as advanced by the officially marginalized Green Party), the
nation and its various jurisdictions wouldn't really "have" to police folks
at all.
Don't expect to hear anything about that on the evening news-or in the
next,
and thankfully final, ugly, white, ruling-class presidential debate.
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