Tagged: colorblind public policies
“When talking morality in the black community, Obama has always been very clear. Obama has argued that black kids, specifically, have a mentality which reflects shame in educational achievement. (‘I don’t know who taught them that reading and writing and conjugating your verbs was something white.’) He believes that black men, specifically, tend to be more apt to abandon ‘their responsibilities’ and act ‘like boys instead of men.’ He believes that black parents need to learn to ‘put away the X-Box’ and get kids to bed at a reasonable hour. Obama’s policy message to African Americans does not enjoy this level of targeted specificity. Instead he endorses the sort of broad policies which most progressives support — criminal-justice reform, ‘investment in infrastructure,’ improved healthcare coverage, ‘jobs in low-income communities’….I endorse all of these initiatives and ideas — but not because they are targeted policy. They are not. And you will hear no policy targeted toward black people coming out of the Obama White House, or probably any White House in the near future. That is because the standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy. It is not hard to see why that might be the case. Asserting the moral faults of black people tend to gain votes. Asserting the moral faults of their government, not so much.”
There’s no need to talk about the morality of racist white people or anyone supporting global white supremacy (racism), so I would have named the article “Color-Blind Policy in a Color-Conscious Society.” In 2010, Tim Wise wrote a book, Colorblind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity, which addressed these same issues and predicted that if Obama used this approach and ignored institutionalized and systemic racism, blatant white racism would rise and race relations in America would only worsen. Five years later, that’s exactly what’s happening. Smdh. Obama and the white majority cannot continue to ignore the elephant in the room for too much longer…
Source: Ta-Nehesi Coates. “Color-Blind Policy, Color-Conscious Morality.” The Atlantic. May 13, 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/05/color-blind-policy-color-conscious-morality/393227/.
“[S]everal studies have shown that judges appointed by Republican presidents since Reagan have ruled for conservative outcomes more often than have their peers. They have been more likely than their colleagues to favor corporations over regulators and people alleging discrimination, and to favor government over people who claim rights violations. They have also been more likely to throw out cases on technical grounds, like rejecting plaintiffs’ standing to sue.”
Source: Charlie Savage. “Appeals Court Pushed to Right By Bush Choices.” New York Times. October 28, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/us/29judges.html?pagwanted=all&_r=0.
“[T]he data is going to indicate — I said this before and I’m not happy about this, I don’t celebrate this. I don’t say it as a way of demonizing the president or casting an aspersion on him – but the data is going to indicate that black people lost ground in every single leading economic category during the Obama years.” — Tavis Smiley
i could see the powers that be saying: “O, you can be president, but only under one condition: don’t think about helping black people.”
15 FACTS which “prove” that AmeriKKKa has NEVER gotten “over racism” and that “post-racial liberalism,” as advocated by President Obama, is NOT the solution to eradicating global white supremacy (racism).
On July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, officially banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It also ended racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and in general public facilities. Fifty years removed from that milestone, it’s apparently easy to think that we’re over racism. Here are 15 facts that prove that’s not the case.
1) Affluent blacks and Hispanics still live in poorer neighborhoods than whites with working class incomes.
An analysis of census data conducted by researchers at Brown University found that income isn’t the main driving factor in the segregation of U.S. cities. “With only one exception (the most affluent Asians), minorities at every income level live in poorer neighborhoods than do whites with comparable incomes,” the researchers found.
2) There’s a big disparity in wealth between white Americans and non-white Americans.
White Americans held more than 88 percent of the country’s wealth in 2010, according to a Demos analysis of Federal Reserve data, though they made up 64 percent of the population. Black Americans held 2.7 percent of the country’s wealth, though they made up 13 percent of the population.
3) The racial wealth gap kept widening well after the Civil Rights era.
It nearly tripled between 1984 and 2009, according to a Brandeis study.
4) The Great Recession didn’t hit everyone equally.
Between 2007 and 2010, Hispanic families’ wealth fell by 44 percent, and black families’ by 31 percent, compared to 11 percent for white families.
5) In the years before the financial crisis, people of color were much more likely to be targeted for subprime loans than their white counterparts, even when they had similar credit scores.
The Center For Responsible Lending came to that conclusion after analyzing government-provided mortgage data for the year 2004, supplemented with information from a propriety subprime loan database.
“For many types of loans, borrowers of color in our database were more than 30 percent more likely to receive a higher-rate loan than white borrowers, even after accounting for differences in risk,” the authors of the report wrote.
6) Minority borrowers are still more likely to get turned down for conventional mortgage loans than white people with similar credit scores.
An Urban Insititute data analysis found that mortgage denial rates from government-sponsored servicers are higher for black applicants with bad credit than for white applicants with bad credit:
7) Black and Latino students are more likely to attend poorly funded schools.
“A 10 percentage-point increase in the share of nonwhite students in a school is associated with a $75 decrease in per student spending,” a 2012 analysis of Department Education data by the Center For American Progress found.
8) School segregation is still widespread.
80 percent of Latino students attend segregated schools and 43 percent attend intensely segregated schools — ones with only up to 10 percent of white students. 74 percent of black students attend segregated schools, and 38 percent attend intensely segregated schools.
9) As early as preschool, black students are punished more frequently, and more harshly, for misbehaving than their white counterparts.
“Black children represent 18 percent of preschool enrollment, but 42 percent of the preschool children suspended once, and 48 percent of the preschool children suspended more than once,” a Department of Education report, released in March, noted.
10) Perceptions of the innocence of children are still often racially skewed.
A study published this year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that participants estimated black boys to be older and less innocent than white boys of the same age.
When participants were told that the boys, both black and white, were suspected of crimes, the disparity in perceptions of age and innocence became more stark:
Separate research by Stanford psychologists suggests that these kinds of racialized perceptions of innocence contribute to non-white juvenile offenders receiving harsher sentences than their white peers.
11) White Americans use drugs more than black Americans, but black people are arrested for drug possession more than three times as often as whites.
This contributes to the fact that 1 in 3 black males born today can expect to go to prison in their lifetimes, based on current incarceration trends.
12) Black men receive prison sentences 19.5 percent longer than those of white men who committed similar crimes, a 2013 report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission found.
13) A clean record doesn’t protect young black men from discrimination when they’re looking for work.
Young white men with felony convictions are more likely to get called back after a job interview than young black men with similar qualifications and clean records,a 2003 study published in the American Journal of Sociology found.
14) Black job seekers are often turned away by U.S. companies on the assumption that they do drugs.
The presence of drug testing may actually help to correct this and increase black job seekers’ chances, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research study released in May.
15) Employers are more likely to turn away job seekers if they have African-American-sounding names.
Applicants with white-sounding names get one callback per 10 resumes sent while those with African-American-sounding names get one callback per 15 resumes, according to a 2003 National Bureau of Economic Research report. “Based on our estimates,” the researchers wrote, “a White name yields as many more callbacks as an additional eight years of experience.”
Check out the link to see the graphs that accompanied this article. This list is definitely not exhaustive, but it clearly demonstrates that much “progress” hasn’t actually been made, although from the outside looking in, it appears that way. Until we acknowledge and address the role institutionalized forms of racism play in maintaining these various race-based disparities, our nation will never achieve the intended goals of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Me Against Iniquity: Understanding the Complexities of Global White Supremacy (Racism) Through The Eyes of an Unapologetically BLACK Intellectual 