When Whites Just Don’t Get It - Racism's Poison Lingers

I don't go to court often in my legal practice (truthfully, I avoid it whenever possible), but when I do go, it is usually for a commercial client whose business has received some sort of summons for a code violation.  Since these are technically criminal charges, one finds them self sitting in criminal court watching a parade of charges, many drug related.  It doesn't take long to notice that blacks, especially young black males are charged at an astonishing high rate, generally by white police officers.  Likewise, it doesn't take long to also note that the white defendants generally get less severe punishments (often because their more affluent parents have retained legal counsel), again, often at the hands of white judges.  To claim that something egregious isn't going on is to be purposely blind.  Yet, many Americans refuse to face the reality that our criminal justice system disproportionately targets blacks and treats them far more severely.  A column in the New York Times looks at this phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

WHEN I write about racial inequality in America, one common response from whites is eye-rolling and an emphatic: It’s time to move on.

But we in white society should be equally ready to shoulder responsibility. In past articles in this series, I’ve looked at black/white economic inequality that is greater in America today than it was in apartheid South Africa, at ongoing discrimination against African-Americans in the labor market and at systematic bias in law enforcement. But these conversations run into a wall: the presumption on the part of so many well-meaning white Americans that racism is a historical artifact. They don’t appreciate the overwhelming evidence that centuries of racial subjugation still shape inequity in the 21st century.

Indeed, a wave of research over the last 20 years has documented the lingering effects of slavery in the United States and South America alike. For example, counties in America that had a higher proportion of slaves in 1860 are still more unequal today, according to a scholarly paper published in 2010. The authors called this a “persistent effect of slavery.”

One reason seems to be that areas with slave labor were ruled for the benefit of elite plantation owners. Public schools, libraries and legal institutions lagged, holding back working-class whites as well as blacks.

Whites often don’t realize that slavery didn’t truly end until long after the Civil War. Douglas Blackmon won a Pulitzer Prize for his devastating history, “Slavery by Another Name,” that recounted how U.S. Steel and other American corporations used black slave labor well into the 20th century, through “convict leasing.” Blacks would be arrested for made-up offenses such as “vagrancy” and then would be leased to companies as slave laborers.

Job and housing discrimination also systematically prevented blacks from accumulating wealth. The Federal Housing Administration and other initiatives greatly expanded home ownership and the middle class but deliberately excluded blacks.

That’s one reason why black families have, on average, only about 6 percent as much wealth as white households, why only 44 percent of black families own a home compared with 73 percent for white households.

The inequality continues, particularly in education. De jure segregated schools have been replaced in some areas by de facto segregation.

Those of us who are white have a remarkable capacity for delusions. A majority of whites have said in opinion polls that blacks earn as much as whites and are as healthy as whites. In fact, black median household income is $34,598, compared with $58,270 for non-Hispanic whites, according to census data. Black life expectancy is four years shorter than that of whites.

[O]ne element of white privilege today is obliviousness to privilege, including a blithe disregard of the way past subjugation shapes present disadvantage.  

If we whites are ahead in the relay race of life, shouldn’t we acknowledge that we got this lead in part by generations of oppression? Aren’t we big enough to make amends by trying to spread opportunity, by providing disadvantaged black kids an education as good as the one afforded privileged white kids?

Can’t we at least acknowledge that in the case of race, William Faulkner was right: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”