A good opinion piece.
It asks a key question that if crime rates are decreasing & racial intolerance among Americans is also decreasing, & esp. among the millennials, there's pretty much no intolerance, then why are we still seeing such wealth gaps & unemployment problems among African-Americans? Why do American cities which are predominantly African-Americans, demographically, are burning, even though, those cities have African-Americans in the political arena & other influential areas of the city / region?
Although, the opinion piece gives the answer that "once an institution (a city, a police force, a school system, an economy) is set up to create a racial divide, it will continue to do so, regardless who’s running it, unless there’s a dramatic intervention," I'd further add into that answer that those institutions only bring those people up through their ranks who have been successfully molded into that institution's thinking / culture. That "culture" is still of racial discrimination against "coloured" people, be it Africans, Latinos, South Asians, Asians, etc.
To have a dramatic intervention, the institution needs someone who will think radically different & have the full support to bring about that radical changes. We have multiple examples of these "radicals" successfully changing corporate cultures in the business world. We need the same in the public / political arena.
But the problem in public arena is that politicians think short-term & how will it affect their political prowess. If the answer is negative, then either an absurd action is taken or no action at all. Final result is that the society keeps itself on a downhill spiral & problems keep snowballing to the point that the general public then takes dramatic steps, which then, result into violent protests & riots.
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You can’t help thinking that the US has gone back to 1965. You see it in the fury over racially charged killings by police in Ferguson, Baltimore, Staten Island & Charleston – the latter of which even involved that staple of sixties old-boy racism, the “broken tail light” police stop.
You see it in the mass protests provoked by that fury & the riots that often ride the coattails of those protests, making Baltimore & Ferguson resemble Watts & Detroit. And in the barren, boarded-up streets of those cities, so shocking in an era when “the ghetto” has all but disappeared from larger cities. And in the broken, isolated, impoverished lives of the young men taking part in those protests & riots. Has America regressed?
On one hand, it hasn’t: The past decade has seen the US move sharply away from that divided era. Crime rates have plunged to record lows & crime rates among black Americans – including violent crimes – have fallen even more sharply, to well below where they were when measures began in 1964. Many other social measures – teen pregnancies & school-dropout rates, especially among African-American youth – have dropped to all-time lows.
Attitudes have changed even more. Racial intolerance, by almost any measure, is more rare in the US today than it has ever been; among Americans in their 20s today, acceptance of interracial marriage & dating (a key measure of tolerance) is now nearly 100%. American white millennials are growing up without measurably racist attitudes.
But if the attitudes are becoming a thing of the past, the outcomes aren’t. Black Americans are, on average, even further apart from white Americans in income (where black people earn $27,000 [US] a year less than white people, up from $19,000 in the sixties) & wealth (an $85,000 gap, up from $75,000 in the eighties). African-Americans face double the unemployment rate of white people, poverty rates are higher & the incarceration rate is shockingly high, cutting holes in half of black families (& having almost nothing to do with the fall in crime rates).
“When it comes to race relations, America is better than it’s ever been,” the Washington journalist Jamelle Bouie writes. “With that said, we shouldn’t confuse optimism about race relations (or, again, how whites view blacks & other groups) with optimism about racial progress, or how groups fare in relation to each other. There, the news isn’t just bad – it’s bleak.”
Why have the huge improvements in American racial attitudes & general social measures not brought about an improvement in racial equality? Why do police attack & discriminate against black Americans disproportionately – even when, as is the case in Baltimore, most of the police force, its chief, its mayor & its president are African-American?
This is the paradox of the US today: A population of voters & leaders who have largely moved beyond racial discrimination continue to produce often grotesquely racist results. Why does the reality not change with the attitudes toward it?
The answer is found in the cities & towns where these explosions of violence & deprivation are taking place: Once an institution (a city, a police force, a school system, an economy) is set up to create a racial divide, it will continue to do so, regardless who’s running it, unless there’s a dramatic intervention.
Too many Americans don’t see these institutions, but only their victims, who then get blamed for the outcomes: It has become popular again on the North American right to claim, in pseudo-scholarly language, that “that’s just how they are” – that African-American culture, or families, must be to blame (even though culture & family structures are always consequences, not causes, of larger ills).
This view has been decisively disproven this month in a vast & expensive study by economists Raj Chetty, Lawrence Katz & their colleagues at Harvard University, in which thousands of randomly selected low-income (mainly black) families were given vouchers in the nineties to move out of deprived neighbourhoods (& thousands more stayed put as control groups).
The results, a generation later, found that poor, crime-addled families prone to intergenerational poverty & broken homes become, within a generation of leaving their context, prosperous, educated & marriage-prone families, with outcomes similar to those of average Americans.
The Obama administration has attempted the sort of big interventions (such as the ones of the sixties & nineties) that are needed turn around this trajectory of inequality. The post-2008 stimulus & the “Obamacare” medicare system have stopped the rise in inequality & poverty. But many large urban-policy & education programs have been blocked by a recalcitrant US Congress. It might take flames from the cities, as it did 50 years ago, to provoke a change.
It asks a key question that if crime rates are decreasing & racial intolerance among Americans is also decreasing, & esp. among the millennials, there's pretty much no intolerance, then why are we still seeing such wealth gaps & unemployment problems among African-Americans? Why do American cities which are predominantly African-Americans, demographically, are burning, even though, those cities have African-Americans in the political arena & other influential areas of the city / region?
Although, the opinion piece gives the answer that "once an institution (a city, a police force, a school system, an economy) is set up to create a racial divide, it will continue to do so, regardless who’s running it, unless there’s a dramatic intervention," I'd further add into that answer that those institutions only bring those people up through their ranks who have been successfully molded into that institution's thinking / culture. That "culture" is still of racial discrimination against "coloured" people, be it Africans, Latinos, South Asians, Asians, etc.
To have a dramatic intervention, the institution needs someone who will think radically different & have the full support to bring about that radical changes. We have multiple examples of these "radicals" successfully changing corporate cultures in the business world. We need the same in the public / political arena.
But the problem in public arena is that politicians think short-term & how will it affect their political prowess. If the answer is negative, then either an absurd action is taken or no action at all. Final result is that the society keeps itself on a downhill spiral & problems keep snowballing to the point that the general public then takes dramatic steps, which then, result into violent protests & riots.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You can’t help thinking that the US has gone back to 1965. You see it in the fury over racially charged killings by police in Ferguson, Baltimore, Staten Island & Charleston – the latter of which even involved that staple of sixties old-boy racism, the “broken tail light” police stop.
You see it in the mass protests provoked by that fury & the riots that often ride the coattails of those protests, making Baltimore & Ferguson resemble Watts & Detroit. And in the barren, boarded-up streets of those cities, so shocking in an era when “the ghetto” has all but disappeared from larger cities. And in the broken, isolated, impoverished lives of the young men taking part in those protests & riots. Has America regressed?
On one hand, it hasn’t: The past decade has seen the US move sharply away from that divided era. Crime rates have plunged to record lows & crime rates among black Americans – including violent crimes – have fallen even more sharply, to well below where they were when measures began in 1964. Many other social measures – teen pregnancies & school-dropout rates, especially among African-American youth – have dropped to all-time lows.
Attitudes have changed even more. Racial intolerance, by almost any measure, is more rare in the US today than it has ever been; among Americans in their 20s today, acceptance of interracial marriage & dating (a key measure of tolerance) is now nearly 100%. American white millennials are growing up without measurably racist attitudes.
But if the attitudes are becoming a thing of the past, the outcomes aren’t. Black Americans are, on average, even further apart from white Americans in income (where black people earn $27,000 [US] a year less than white people, up from $19,000 in the sixties) & wealth (an $85,000 gap, up from $75,000 in the eighties). African-Americans face double the unemployment rate of white people, poverty rates are higher & the incarceration rate is shockingly high, cutting holes in half of black families (& having almost nothing to do with the fall in crime rates).
“When it comes to race relations, America is better than it’s ever been,” the Washington journalist Jamelle Bouie writes. “With that said, we shouldn’t confuse optimism about race relations (or, again, how whites view blacks & other groups) with optimism about racial progress, or how groups fare in relation to each other. There, the news isn’t just bad – it’s bleak.”
Why have the huge improvements in American racial attitudes & general social measures not brought about an improvement in racial equality? Why do police attack & discriminate against black Americans disproportionately – even when, as is the case in Baltimore, most of the police force, its chief, its mayor & its president are African-American?
This is the paradox of the US today: A population of voters & leaders who have largely moved beyond racial discrimination continue to produce often grotesquely racist results. Why does the reality not change with the attitudes toward it?
The answer is found in the cities & towns where these explosions of violence & deprivation are taking place: Once an institution (a city, a police force, a school system, an economy) is set up to create a racial divide, it will continue to do so, regardless who’s running it, unless there’s a dramatic intervention.
Too many Americans don’t see these institutions, but only their victims, who then get blamed for the outcomes: It has become popular again on the North American right to claim, in pseudo-scholarly language, that “that’s just how they are” – that African-American culture, or families, must be to blame (even though culture & family structures are always consequences, not causes, of larger ills).
This view has been decisively disproven this month in a vast & expensive study by economists Raj Chetty, Lawrence Katz & their colleagues at Harvard University, in which thousands of randomly selected low-income (mainly black) families were given vouchers in the nineties to move out of deprived neighbourhoods (& thousands more stayed put as control groups).
The results, a generation later, found that poor, crime-addled families prone to intergenerational poverty & broken homes become, within a generation of leaving their context, prosperous, educated & marriage-prone families, with outcomes similar to those of average Americans.
The Obama administration has attempted the sort of big interventions (such as the ones of the sixties & nineties) that are needed turn around this trajectory of inequality. The post-2008 stimulus & the “Obamacare” medicare system have stopped the rise in inequality & poverty. But many large urban-policy & education programs have been blocked by a recalcitrant US Congress. It might take flames from the cities, as it did 50 years ago, to provoke a change.
