Sunday, October 16, 2016

Re: [blind-democracy] White Blindness and Denial Characterize U.S. Racial Attitudes at the End of the Obama Era

"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@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> 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
By Paul Street

President Barack Obama. (Jacquelyn Martin / AP)
>
> 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.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Robert Scheer: Why Does Freedom of the Press Protect Newspapers but Not
> Whistleblowers? (Video)
>
>
>
>
> 'Saturday Night Live': Creepy 'Trump' Leaves Unsympathetic 'Clinton'
> Virtually Unchallenged (Video)
>
>
>
>
> Were Kansas Terrorism Suspects Self-Radicalized-or Were Their Actions
> Inspired by Donald Trump?
>
>
>
>
> Fact-Checking Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on the Billionaires' Tax
> Break
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Truthdig: Drilling Beneath the Headlines
>
>
>
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