Living while black

The other presidential candidate has written Equality Index Catalogues Economic Gap by Ralph Nader (Common Dreams), covering the recent release of the National Urban League on The State of Black America 2004. This list provides “a statistical measurement of the disparities which exist between African American and whites in economics, housing, education, social justice and civic engagement.”

There are some pretty significant differences between blacks and whites in America today, where whites still make up 69% of the population (US census). (Note that the initial figure of 81% for ‘White only’ counts Hispanics as part of the white population. In the interest of objectivity, I’ve used the ‘White only, non-Hispanic’ figure given further down.) Blacks make up about 13% of the population.

The figures that are the most disturbing are the ones indicating that things aren’t going to get any better. It is in the training and handling of the next generations of Americans that disparity should be closed, but in two very important areas, education and incarceration, this is not the case. Education is markedly worse for blacks, with 40% fewer blacks achieving a college degree than whites.

“…teachers with less than three years experience teach in minority schools at twice the rate of those who teach in white schools. For every ten whites who graduate with a college degree, only 6.3 blacks do. The 2000 census found that 91.8 percent of white students graduated from high school compared with 83.7 percent of black students.(emphasis added)”

This is dozens of years after legislation (e.g. Brown vs. Board of Education) was introduced requiring equal education for blacks; there is no enforcement of these equal rights laws and so they have no power. While education is bad enough, it’s in the area of incarceration where America’s racism really comes to the fore.

“…a black person’s average jail sentence is six months longer than that of whites charged with the same crime. It also found that blacks who are arrested are more than three times as likely to be imprisoned than whites. (emphasis added)”

This isn’t just a matter of more blacks being arrested or arguing that more blacks commit crimes or that societal repression of blacks and the ghettoizing of blacks makes them commit more crime. While important issues, they are not salient in the face of the above statistic: given the exact same crime for a black person and a white person, the black person is 3 times as likely to go to jail and will go to jail on average for 6 months longer.

That’s an absolutely horrifying level of institutionalized racism, one that is probably unequaled even by comparisons to South Africa in its heyday. Consider also that people in jail, or on parole or with felonies on their record have their right to vote revoked and you see a more insidious, even evil influence at work. Disenfranchisement is far too pretty a word for it.

Suppose you’re black and you’ve managed to get a college degree and stay out of jail. Now we’ve got the bad economy dumping jobs right and left. Well, you’re in luck, while “for white workers, the unemployment was at 4.9 percent, … for African Americans the figure stood at 9.8 percent in February and hovered between 10 to 11 percent through most of 2003.” Where was the outcry? All we heard was the horrible news that the average unemployment was “5.6 percent last month”. 11%? That’s a time-bomb.

If you’ve got a job, you then get to the next hurdle: financial solvency. As a black person, “you’re 500 percent more likely than whites to find [yourself] in bankruptcy”. How is Congress helping out? By “actively pushing for a punitive bankruptcy law”. Imagine if that many white people were insolvent … do you honestly think banks, credit card companies and other lenders would be lobbying the Congress to crack down on those good-for-nothing debtors? I doubt it. Think about it … 500%. Even a staunch racist would be hard-pressed to explain how blacks mismanage themselves that poorly.

And I know this is a needless barb at the democratic process, but take a look at the byline of the referenced article. Is Ralph Nader writing this because he has no hope of being elected? Or does he have no hope of being elected because he writes articles like this? Maybe it’s because you can’t publicly take notice of racism in America (or other touchy issues, like Israel or the grotesque military-industrial complex) and have a hope of getting elected.

Why isn’t John Kerry concerned about this issue? At the very least, it should be important to the 13% black population; they should demand better representation of him (the Democratic candidate is usually seen as a magnet for black votes). But somehow it’s seen as far too risky a position to take, even though the facts are out there for all to see, and he’s easily forgiven in the media and a large percentage of black people will send him their votes though he won’t do a thing for them.

Kerry’s stance on the drug war is that is must continue. His stance on Marijuana legalization is against (any wobbles he has had on the issue are pure show). We can construe his stance on massive incarceration sentences for victimless crimes from these positions. And from that, no matter who wins, we can only assume that the chasm between white and black experience in America will continue to widen.