Tagged: effects
“[Chief Justice John] Roberts’s ‘colorblindness’ bears only a superficial resemblance to the concept as understood by past champions of equal rights, since as applied by the conservative majority on the court the approach has had dire consequences for racial minorities. Since Roberts became chief justice, the high court has struck down school desegregation plans, narrowed affirmative action, crippled the Voting Rights Act, limited the circumstances under which Americans can sue for racial discrimination, and enabled the denial of health insurance to millions of financially struggling people of color. Though the opportunity has not yet presented itself, the conservative movement from which Roberts sprung would see the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 destroyed as well.”
With regards to civil rights related cases, especially those involving the rights of African Americans, it is clear that our judicial system is completely rigged and set up in a way that would ensure that many of the gains made during the civil rights movement, would be eviscerated over time while racism continues to thrive. Smdh.
Source: Adam Serwer. “Sonia Sotomayor: Court’s Right Wing ‘Out Of Touch With Reality.’” msnbc. http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/sonia-sotomayor-slams-supreme-court-right-wing-race-matters.
“[O]ur system applauds affording everyone equality of opportunity, but resists programs that assure equality of results.”
Source: Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. pg. 23. 2001.
“Congress directed the thrust of [Title VII] to the CONSEQUENCES of employment practices, not simply the motivation.”
One of the most obvious “consequences” of an employer’s violation of Title VII, is the existence of zero and/or a gross underrepresentation of qualified African Americans employed in meaningful positions throughout the workplace. If this occurs over a period of decades and no “legitimate, nondiscrminatory” reason can be provided by the employer to explain the dearth of blacks in the workplace, one must logically conclude that the employer’s employment practices, policies and procedures are NOT lawful and statistically, this is NOT “due to chance.”
Source: Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424, 432 (1971) (emphasis added).
Read Tina Gharavi’s article in The Telegraph: “America’s racist penal system is slavery by another name.”
When the unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot by a police officer in Ferguson violent protests broke out. Alarming pictures of police violence, siege-like militarism and a stand-off that recalls the Sixties Civil Rights era have since been beamed across the globe. However, for those who have been aware of the barometer of American civil rights struggles, this is unsurprising. What is surprising is that it hasn’t bubbled up before. Even under its first black president, America is a mostly segregated society. I grew up in New Jersey in the Eighties and Nineties, and people for the most part had either white friends or black friends. High-school lunch tables were codified by colour. The America I knew had a massive race problem and as an Iranian, neither white nor black, I experienced enough racism to know I couldn’t change it from within. So I left America in 1996, tired of the inequalities, particularly around race and social justice, and certain that a life as a free-thinking filmmaker wasn’t possible, certainly not when you had to wed yourself to a corporation in order to have health care.
This year, now a UK Citizen, I am returning to America to film a documentary which will look at the issue of race in America through the prism of the prison system. I have already visited one in Louisiana where I saw mostly black men picking cotton in fields – they were paid up to 13 cents per hour – while the predominantly white guards, armed and on horseback, watched over. Sound familiar? Unknown to most, slavery is still legal in the US: under the 13th Amendment it was outlawed “except as a punishment for crime”.
My film, From the Plantation to the Penitentiary, looks at the privatised prison system as a sanitised slave system. And in it, I ask whether America is heading towards another race war. It is not, as some have said, fanciful agit pop. What we have seen in Missouri over the past couple of weeks shows what is bubbling close to the surface. Eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, along with Eric Garner, Ezell Ford and John Crawford III all men who have been killed by the police, is another victim of the race wars in America.
And America’s race tragedy is, in part, the legacy of slavery. Although black people make up just 13 percent of the overall population, one in 10 black men in their thirties is in jail or prison on any given day. As Michelle Alexander points out in her book The New Jim Crow, more black men are in “prison or jail, on probation or on parole than were enslaved in 1850”. Slavery never ended in America, it just changed its face.
Why does a country seemingly so concerned with liberty, have such a high rate of incarceration (2.3 million and counting)? Because it pays to imprison. Prisons are increasingly owned by corporations that profit from incarceration. These private companies are either paid by the state, or they put the inmates to work thus creating a cheap and constant work force. If a product is “Made in America”, chances are it was made in a US prison. Ninety-three per cent of household paintbrushes in the states are made in US prisons, 30 per cent of consumer electronics. Companies such as Victoria’s Secret, Walmart, Starbucks, Microsoft and Nintendo have products made in prisons (often via subcontractors) and states attract business by boasting about large prison populations which can be put to work as cheap labour. The first prison in America, after all, was formulated by a Texas governor in the year that slavery was abolished (at the end of the day, who was going to bring all that cotton and crops back in?). This eventually led to the chain gangs and Jim Crow laws which continued to criminalise and incarcerate black people in America well into the Sixties.
Ironically, prisons don’t seem to do much to reduce crime. Studies suggest that very substantial increases in imprisonment will produce only a modest reduction in crime. Worse, there is evidence that prison acts only to increase recidivism. Locking up people in the States doesn’t make a safer society. But it is a profitable business made off the backs of mostly African-Americans (and increasingly Latinos and other migrants).
America has never formally broken its relationship with slavery – and black communities still live in its shadows. America needs to re-examine it’s past in order to be able to move forward. Missouri is not the beginning, nor will it be the end.
As Dr Martin Luther King, Jr said, “Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.”
Source: Tina Ghavari. “America’s racist penal system is slavery by another name.” The Telegraph. August 20, 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11046113/Americas-racist-penal-system-is-slavery-by-another-name.html.
Disparate impact is “based upon the premise ‘that some employment practices, adopted without a deliberately discriminatory motive, may in operation be functionally equivalent to intentional discrimination,’ Watson, 487 U.S. at 987, because the result ‘fall[s] more harshly on one group than another and cannot be justified by business necessity.’” Int’l Bhd. of Teamsters v. United States, 431 U.S. 324, 335-35 n. 15 (1977).”
Source: WME and Loeb & Loeb LLP’s Opp. to My Motion for Summary Judgment and Cross Motion to Dismiss. November 6, 2012 [ironically, the day Obama was elected to his second term.]
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.
do you know that the United States government has NEVER issued a FORMAL APOPLOGY for its role in the AFRICAN HOLOCAUST and its LINGERING EFFECTS?
wait, so you are going to lie us (and yourselves) for hundreds of years to promote this myth of “race” & continue to perpetuate this myth of white racial superiority in all areas of human activity and THINK that you don’t have to apologize for it and cut a significant check to people of African descent for these overall egregious crimes against humanity? P. Kevin Castel can’t stop me from pursuing THOSE CLAIMS against this corporation known as the United States of America.
“Such subjective decision-making processes, are particularly susceptible to being influenced not by overt bigotry and hatred, but rather by unexamined assumptions about others that the decisionmaker may not even be aware of — hence the difficulty of ferreting out discrimination as a motivating factor.”
Source: Thomas v. Troy City Bd. of Educ., 302 F. Supp. 2d 1303, 1309 (M.D. Ala. 2004).
“Much of [Marcus Isaiah Washington’s] theory of his case invokes his desire to achieve the eradication of what he alleges is a White supremacist Jewish regime and the corresponding structural redesign of the political, economic and social order of the United States.” — Arbitrator David L. Gregory’s Partial Final Award, December 17, 2013. pg. 11
“Recent black college grads ages 22 to 27 have an unemployment rate of 12.4 percent, more than double the 5.6 percent unemployed among all college grads in that demographic and almost a threefold increase from the 2007 level of 4.6 percent, before the Great Recession took its toll on the U.S. economy. More than half of black graduates, 55.9 percent, are underemployed.”
At age 33 and boasting an Ivy League graduate degree, Kitama Cahill-Jackson never thought he’d end up a security guard.
But after years of layoffs and coming in second in job interviews, the Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker took the job.
Cahill-Jackson dreamed of a career as a news producer. But now, after years of unsuccessfully searching for journalism jobs, he said he can’t even look at the news.
“When I got to work at 4:30 in the morning, I would listen to NPR. I don’t listen anymore because it makes me sad. That’s the career I didn’t have,” he said.
“I don’t read the paper because it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart that I put on this uniform every day and come in here, and I’m not seen as a professional. I worked so hard academically, and for all of that, to work at a job that only requires a GED.”
Cahill-Jackson is among the more than half of black college graduates who are underemployed, according to a study (PDF) released by the Center for Economic Policy and Research this month.
Recent black college grads ages 22 to 27 have an unemployment rate of 12.4 percent, more than double the 5.6 percent unemployed among all college grads in that demographic and almost a threefold increase from the 2007 level of 4.6 percent, before the Great Recession took its toll on the U.S. economy. More than half of black graduates, 55.9 percent, are underemployed.
Even for those who enter the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, areas where grads are the most needed and paid the highest, African-Americans still have a 10 percent unemployment rate and a 32 percent underemployment rate.
The study’s authors blame racism, a faltering economy and an unequal playing field.
“We live in a racist society,” John Schmitt, one of the authors, told Al Jazeera.
“We internalize a lot of views about the way people are that are deeply embedded in a lot of our economic and social policies. It’s extremely complicated, but the first step is that we need to acknowledge that we have a problem.”
While unemployment for blacks has almost always been higher than the national rate, the recession took an especially harsh toll, with an unemployment gap between blacks and the national rate growing from about 4 percentage points to nearly 6 points. And even for those who have jobs, the moribund economy has come with a financial cost.
“The old adage that sometimes nonblack folks are not always as familiar with but all black people are is that you have to work twice as hard to get half as much,” said Tressie McMillan Cottom, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Emory University.
“That’s something all of our parents have always told us, and it has been so fairly consistent.”
Cottom said that it’s widely known that blacks have a higher level of unemployment than the national rate but that this report is different because it dispels the notion that education shortcomings are keeping black Americans from upward mobility.
“The first thing people say is ‘Oh, well, black people don’t go to school’ or we don’t major in the right fields,” she said. “This report says it doesn’t matter if we go into engineering or the sciences … The report shows that race matters.”
Read more here: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/22/black-grads-doubleunemployment.html.
Me Against Iniquity: Understanding the Complexities of Global White Supremacy (Racism) Through The Eyes of an Unapologetically BLACK Intellectual 