Numbers don’t lie: Black people are becoming less equal — not more

Greetings,

Numbers don’t lie: Black people are becoming less equal — not more

Last week on ABC’s This Week, President Obama said, “My own experience tells me race relations continue to improve,” and “There’s no way to say race relations are worse than 20, 50 years ago.”

It’s impossible to ignore this assessment spoken by the leader of the free world, who just happens to identify as African American. It’s an attention grabber, especially because his assessment came just days in advance of a grand jury decision to not indict a white police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri.

Anxiety has been sky high there since the shooting three months ago and civil unrest shows the depth of pain and misunderstanding, and police action shows the depth of fear.
The nation’s attention is now focused on the St. Louis suburb and its handling of the situation. It should come as no surprise that some may not see as much improvement in race relations as does President Obama. There were violent protests in Ferguson after the grand jury’s verdict: a dozen buildings were badly damaged; cars were set on fire; 29 people were arrested. In fact, many blacks disagree completely with Obama’s assessment. As do some whites. How could this be true?

A legacy of disparities

A serious read of history demonstrates that black lives have been treated as less valuable than white lives, and that well-meaning whites have, on the whole, failed to appreciate the origins of racial-ethnic disparities in health, wealth, education, and incarceration – or to see them as a problem. Many believe in justice, but feel perfectly comfortable when and where racial-ethnic inequality is the norm.

Unfortunately, belief in justice does not necessarily engender frustration with the status quo or empathy for the marginalized. Regardless, the present moment presents an opportunity to address three social facts that guarantee it won’t be long before the nation’s attention focuses on another divided community or telling videotape/audiotape or insensitive Tweet or heart-wrenching statistic or incredible news story that yet again reveals the permanence of racism.

Numbers never lie

The first social fact, to paraphrase the ESPN show, is that numbers never lie. The black-white disparity in infant mortality has grown since 1950. Whereas 72.9% of whites are homeowners, only 43.5% of blacks are. Blacks constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million people incarcerated. According to Pew, white median household wealth is $91,405; black median household wealth is $6,446 – the gap has tripled over the past 25 years.

Since 2007, the black median income has declined 15.8%. In contrast, Hispanics’ median income declined 11.8%, Asians’ 7.7% and whites’ 6.3%.

Rather than focusing on race relations – or the degree to which individuals of different races appear to be civil and friendly toward each other, and to a lesser extent, the degree to which black and white lives remain segregated – it seems more sensible to talk about parity. On that score, there is evidence of an unfinished civil rights agenda.

Institutional inequality

The second social fact is that improvement in race relations is not about asking apologetically: “can’t we all just get along?” There are powerful structural forces that organize our nation and its institutions such that white lives are considered more valuable than black lives. There is institutional inequality that happens without the ill-will of any one individual…..MORE HERE

Social

Numbers don’t lie: Black people are becoming less equal — not more