"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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