This category looks at many different forms of inequality that exists heavily within the United States. These posts will attempt to address universal issues, but many will be geared strictly towards the US. By address the many inequalities that exist today, we hope to create a brighter and more compassionate future.
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Keywords: LiveLifeLiberated, My Rage against Racism, Systematic Racism, My views on Racism, What is systematic racism? United States, Black Lives Matter, BLM, All Lives Matter, Blue Lives Matter, Protests, Current Events, Police Brutality, George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Breonna TaylorJamar Clark, Philando Castile, Police Protests
Life is really hard. Like, really hard. It’s confusing. It’s unpredictable. It’s a solo adventure. And sometimes, it’s just flat-out sad.
From one perspective, hell is all around the world. Tragedies occur every day. 27 million people are still enslaved this second. Roughly ten percent of the world’s population lives on less than $1.90 a day. And as we kill ourselves and each other, the very Earth we do these activities in is continuing to crumble.
Extremes like these are by no means the limit to this hell we call life. The systems of oppression we live within, limit the wellbeing and ability of minorities all throughout the United States. The imbalance of enforcement has led to mass incarceration in proportionately towards people of color and only .05 percent of sexual assault charges lead to time being served. Along with stigmas and social norms that ban the ideas and actions of anything not wanting to be heard.
Let’s get even less extreme. Let’s go to me. A white, straight, middle-class, relatively intelligent, blue-eyed male living in the United States. What do I have to complain about? Well, in one sense, a lot.
The biggest relationship of my life ended terribly. I have divorced parents who raised me in polar opposite environments. I was diagnosed with mild Asperger’s syndrome and celiac disease. I constantly go in and out of the ringer called depression. The occasional mild episode of insanity likes to sprinkle itself into my life. And some other shit I’m sure.
People around the world have their lives ruined by things that they have little or no control over. Things that we did not want to happen, yet do anyways. I feel that everyone must have their fair share of personal experiences that makes, or has made, our lives really fucking hard.
So what should we think of this? It would seem that no matter who you are, or where you are, life can sometimes be really hard. The thing is, and this is a tough pill to swallow, as hard as your life is now… it can always be harder.
I’ve had a hard life. I really think I have. It has been pretty gritty at things and my mental issues have rarely helped. But… as hard as it has been for me, it could be sooooo much harder.
Who would I be if the size and distribution of melanocytes in my skin tissue were large enough for society to deem me “black”? Genetically the same of course, so probably pretty similar intelligence and mental circumstances. But how many microaggressions would it take until I felt the effects? How many people zoning out as I raise my hand in class would it take until I stopped? And how much concern would I receive for my subjective mental health issues? Would anyone even bat an eye at my cries for help, or would it more likely be seen as an “emotional outburst”? (Oh wait, that’s just if I was classified female).
** I do not intend to justify or normalize the situations that I wrote above for people of color or women. I am simply referring to the case-proven studies that find microaggressions and subconscious biases as factors that influence how people of color and women are seen and heard. Of which are truly unfair and unjustifiable. **
Who would I be if I was born into poverty? If all I had to my name were the things I carried? They would probably weigh me down. Not the objects in my pockets of course, but instead the burdens lying within my mind. Would the stress of not being guaranteed dinner distract me from my algebra? Would my stained, handy-down clothing stop others from approaching me? And who knows, maybe I wouldn’t have been cheated on… because she would have never dated me in the first place.
Who would I be if I was born in Malawi? Or Somalia? Or Tanzania? Or are all of them just “Africa” in your mind? Haha, that’s assuming you knew they were in Africa. Who would I be when the average GDP per capita is only $596 (it’s $62,794.6 in the U.S). I suppose the stigma would go away, but how does one grow in such an environment? How can someone, assuming still me with their “relative intelligence”, prosper and add something to even themselves. And this is assuming we won the lottery of not having a deadly disease (such as HIV, Malaria, TB, etc.), not being owned (assuming poverty alone isn’t ownership), not being one of the 60 million children without primary education, and not being one of the 3.1 million children who die each year from undernutrition.
The point of this post is not to make you feel bad. And it’s definitely not intended to belittle your own suffering. It is instead to show that privilege, by sheer luck and systems of advantage society seems to pretend are natural, has allowed you, me, and so many others, to live a better life than the one we have now. And it’s still hard as hell at times, but damn, it can be harder.
Continuing from last week’s post, the second basic economic principle I would like to call into question is the regulation of businesses. I have heard many arguments that limiting the free market will restrict companies from doing the most profitable action. Which is fairly assumed to not help anyone. This restriction is most commonly done by government regulation of companies. Many people will point out that these regulations not only cost money, but they also limit the businesses they are attempting to ‘fix’.
To begin this rebuttal, I feel an example of when deregulation backfired would be best. In 1933 the Glass-Steagall Act was put in effect. This act separated commercial banking from investment banking. By doing so, it created trust in the American banking system, which was a crucial step out of the Great Depression. By having the two separated, less risky financial behaviors occurred and the economy began to stabilize.
** Just to clarify, I do understand that this one act was one of many that existed under the New Deal. And when all summed up, the economic benefits the New Deal caused for the United States was most likely less significant than that gained from World War Two. Regardless, I find this act to be very beneficial through what I have read and the effects of the economy once it was removed. **
Lasting until 1999, this act was eventually repealed in hopes of boosting the economy. With less regulation, banks and individuals were able to more freely take out loans and purchase commodities that they may not have been able to before (Amadeo, 2018). In this time, from 1999 to 2007, banks encouraged individuals to take out high mortgages, which quickly created a bubble in the housing market. Knowing they were insured; the banks had no economic reasoning to prevent this bubble from forming. Once the bubble popped, these loans were then bundled and sold to bigger banks. Which were then bundled again to even bigger banks, until they made their way to the few banks who were ‘too big to fail’ (Reich, 2017). Holding the economy hostage, the government was forced to bail these big banks out knowing that if they failed so would the entire economy.
With the Great Recession costing the average American seventy thousand dollars in their lifetime income (Gibson, 2018), this deregulation proved to temporarily paralyze the economy. And only a decade after the Glass-Steagall Act was removed, in 2010, Dodd Frank put in effect. This act restricted banks more than the Glass-Steagall Act had ever before and government policy was exactly where it was in 1933.
The basic theme of the example above is that when a company is allowed to act freely it will usually harm the economy in the long run. One could attempt to argue that this example is an anomaly or that the principle does not always hold true, but that would be fundamentally incorrect.
Corporations ideally exist in a perfectly competitive market (notice the wording “ideally exist”, this does not reiterate the point of how inequality decreases competition due to rent-seeking). This means that companies are in a constant fluctuation of survival within a market. To do so they need to generate a profit and outperform their competitors.
This is a high-stakes situation, one of which has the sole goal of making money, and nothing more. Of course, some companies can be moral and wish to better their worker’s pay and/or conditions, but unless forced to, they never will. They will not because they cannot. If they do then they are losing potential profits, which would allow a different competitor to outperform the morally good corporation. Thus, we see a basic ‘race to the bottom’ among companies that have the liberty to do so.
**‘Race to the bottom’ refers to the socio-economic low road mentality to address increasing globalization. In an effort to bring corporations and competition to one’s own country, governments attempt to decrease the expenses of starting a business in their country. This can be done through decreased taxation and deregulation of work conditions. **
Hence why regulation to decrease inequality in many ways is actually efficient. By forcing all corporations to think long-term and for the betterment of their workers, the economy as a whole can improve.
By seeing inequality as both immoral and inefficient, it seems clear that something must be done to minimize this issue. The historically common answer would be increasing welfare states. Yet this solution has its limits. Stand Together wrote about this issue when addressing the stress that impoverished individuals every day. Their lack of social stability, dangerous communities, and financial struggles generate a destructive atmosphere for families to develop in (Fijacko, 2018). Hence why so many families struggle to make long-term financial decisions. When living day by day, it can be impossible to see the bigger picture.
** Stand Together is an organization committed to breaking the self-perpetuating cycle of poverty. Their goal is to discover and innovate solutions that uproot the destructive norms and traditions that have developed around poverty. **
This is why I instead advocate for the implication of universal basic income. UBI is a system that gives an equal amount of money to people no matter their social or economic status. By providing a constant stream of income, regardless of people’s employment status, people would not have to carry the burden of economic stress. They would have the means of providing food, clothing, and shelter for themselves, which would allow them to live without the stress of poverty. And in other words, without the stress of survival.
A common misconception with this idea is that people would stop working. This argument may make sense at first, but in areas, this system has been tested no such actions were taken. An example of such is the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend Program. Providing all Alaskans with two thousand dollars a year, researchers found that full-time employment status has remained the same, and part-time has risen by seventeen percent (Gaskell, 2018). With dozens of other examples proving similar results, it would appear the lower class, once relieved of the burden of poverty, are more capable to set long-term goals and seek employment opportunities.
To sum up both parts of this issue, it seems clear that inequality is much more than just a moral issue. Economic inequality can very clearly be seen as both immoral and, arguably more important, inefficient. These inefficiencies have generated more inequality, which has, in turn, created more inefficiency. Although there does not exist enough data to know for sure that UBI is the right solution (Pistono, 2019), Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend appears to be the current best/most realistic solution for America. Giving one thousand dollars to every American every month, these individuals will be able to live a secure life, which is projected to decrease inequality and increase the efficiencies of the market (Kronen, 2019). This policy would allow for both a moral and an efficient economy. One with a growing middle class, unstressed lower class, higher competition in the markets, and higher consumption for all people.
Before I end this post I would like to quickly point something out. As I said at the beginning of my part one post, these are just models and ideas but when it comes down to it, nobody fully understands the economy. So please feel free to reflect with me, or anyone else, on these debatable issues and solutions. Because at the end of the day, nobody knows anything, so we might as well not know together.
Work Cited
Amadeo, Kimberly. “This 1933 Law Would Have Prevented the Financial Crisis.” The Balance, 22 Sept. 2018, www.thebalance.com/glass-steagall-act-definition-purpose-and-repeal-3305850.
Fijacko, Tommy. “The Toxic Stress of Poverty and Its Effects.” Stand Together, 25 July 2018, www.stand-together.org/toxic-stress-poverty-effects/.
Gaskell, Adi. “Does A Universal Basic Income Discourage Work?” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 5 Mar. 2018, www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2018/03/05/does-a-universal-basic-income-discourage-work/#347689f1541b.
Gibson, Kate. “How Much the 2008 Financial Crisis Cost You in Dollars.” CBS News, CBS Interactive, 13 Aug. 2018, www.cbsnews.com/news/how-much-the-2008-financial-crisis-cost-you-in-dollars/.
Kronen, Samuel. “In Defense of Andrew Yang’s Freedom Dividend.” Quillette, 13 Mar. 2019, quillette.com/2019/03/06/in-defense-of-andrew-yangs-freedom-dividend/.
Pistono, Federico. “The Freedom Dividend: Universal Basic Income in America?” Medium, Medium, 15 Feb. 2019, medium.com/@FedericoPistono/the-freedom-dividend-universal-basic-income-in-america-2439719f24ae.
Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited: Anti-Globalization in the Era of Trump. W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.
Before I begin today’s post, let’s open with a disclaimer: We do not know how the markets will move, we only predict it. We have models that can guess quite well, but like anything, they hold true until the day they do not. And only once they fail will the need for a new model be unavoidable. Today I plan to challenge a common misconception of economic inequality, I challenge a model, by showing that it is not only a moral issue but also an economic efficiency one. So yes, it may go against the postulates of your economic reasoning, but bear with me as I play with an idea that if developed could employ a new basis for market predictions. And if you get through the post and still disagree, please please please reach out about your concerns with my work. I love feedback.
There are dozens of different definitions for economic inequality, therefore, for the sake of consistency, I will use my definition of the term. Economic inequality is the unequal distribution of wealth and opportunity between people. This inequality is what leads to the basic capitalist principle of the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. By limiting people’s opportunities, they have a worse chance of gaining an increased sum of wealth, which then leads to a higher chance of receiving less or the same wealth over their lifetime. Thus, feeding into a continuous cycle that limits the poor from rising and the rich from ever falling in economic status.
One way people have thought to minimize this inequality is through taxation. By raising taxes, the government can fund social welfare programs, which will help the poor and limit the rich. An argument against this philosophy, of increased taxation, is that it is partially counter-intuitive. By increasing taxation, corporations will have a tougher time collecting a profit, which could have gone to improving the lives of their workers. Yet it should be noted that historically “trickle-down economics” has only seemed to remain “trickled up”.
Although, another valid argument against high taxation is commonly referred to as deadweight loss. Deadweight loss is defined as the loss of economic efficiency when equilibrium, for a good or service, is not achieved. The image above represents this concept. Showing an overly simplified market supply and demand curve, you can very clearly see that both the consumers and buyers were able to buy or sell their products at six dollars before any taxation occurred. After the tax, the buyers had to buy their product at seven dollars, while the producers had to sell their product at four dollars. This would not be an issue if the entire amount lost to the market was obtained by the government. Yet as the yellow portion of the second graph shows, this is not the case. Representing the deadweight loss, this portion is the amount of money that was neither received by the government nor the market once the tax was imposed. It is in many respects, wasted money.
The flip side of this introductory-level economics idea is showing the many market efficiencies that taxation can bring. For one, imposing taxes on luxury goods can bring the supply and demand of those products back to its original equilibrium. To elaborate on this idea, a luxury good is a good that is not essential, but instead highly desired and associated with wealth. Examples of these goods include yachts, expensive jewelry, and anything else you don’t need, but you want.
As inequality rises, the wealth within the market begins to funnel into the hands of the few. Morally, this sounds bad, but it is also an efficiency issue. As the wealthy begin to use their wealth and consume products it is only natural that they buy luxury goods. I mean why wouldn’t they? When one has the choice to, why not get the boat that moves faster and looks nicer?
The issue with this increasing demand for luxury goods is that it doesn’t leave much wealth for normal goods. Because of this, normal good prices will increase and demand will decrease. Having a slight increase in the price of eggs may not affect someone making six figures a year, but when all these expensive normal goods begin to add up, one can not be so sure.
The counter intuitiveness of this really shows when this price of living increases because with an increased price of living causes an increased number of people in relative poverty. This then leads to a greater need for social welfare programs, lower demand for common goods, and an overall decrease in the market. By not taxing these luxury goods the demand for such products can have a spiral effect on the economy as a whole.
Another inefficiency derived from low taxation is that the wealthy can only spend so much of their money. Beginning my second reason for taxation, there are only so many cars, homes and whatever else they want until the rich have nothing else to buy. Therefore, the excess money they don’t spend either sits in a bank or the stock market, neither of which is any help to the economy.
*As a side note, I would like to mention that I have heard an argument in favor of investing in the stock market. That by investing in the stock market one can actually boost the economy, but from my experience, all you do as a trader is trade money between other investors. Which adds nothing to the market other than taking a hundred dollars from some eighteen-year-old thinking he can outwit the hedge fund managers and CEOs of the world.
Taking Jeff Bezos for example, he would have to spend twenty-eight million dollars every day to not get richer (DeCambre, 2018). Not alone in this wealth disparity, billions of dollars would need to be spent every day for the wealthy to not suck capital out of the markets. Hence why higher taxation on the upper class is crucial for redistributing money. And do not think this would be an outlandish first time in history to attempt to increase income tax on the wealth. As the graph above clearly shows, income tax percent on the rich peaked from the 1940s to the 1960s. It should also be noted that it was this time, 1940-1970, that the United States went through what we now call today as the Golden Age of Capitalism.
Rolling into my third and final point, this excess wealth does eventually find a purpose, which is called rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is defined as when people attempt to gain benefits through the government. This is mostly done through imposing or opposing a tariff on a product one produces, legalizing, or illegalizing, certain products, or funding campaigns with similar agendas of their own. These practices allow corporations artificial market control. This market power is then used to raise the barrier to entry and decrease competition. All of which will hurt the economy and, once again, begin a ruthless cycle of increased inequality due to an inefficient economy.
Thus, although deadweight cost due to taxation is detrimental, so is an economy that generates more inequality and inefficiencies. To see the efficiency of taxation, whether it be a consumer tax or increased progressive income tax, one needs to look at the greater economic and societal picture and then ask herself which one is really causing the inefficiency.
Next week I plan to discuss another major “inefficiency” that occurs with decreasing inequality. Along with a possible solution that would fix both the moral and market efficiency issue of economic inequality.
Work Cited
DeCambre, Mark. “Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Would Need to Spend $28 Million a Day to Avoid Getting Richer.” MarketWatch, 3 Aug. 2018, www.marketwatch.com/story/amazons-jeff-bezos-has-to-spend-28-million-a-day-just-to-keep-from-getting-richer-2018-08-01.
Now that I have spent the last few weeks discussing the existence and inequality associated with racism, I hope you, as the reader, have come to an understanding that racism is a current issue that must be addressed. And with this last post, I hope to do that very thing. I believe the way to end this hateful inequality is ironically through a similar means of how it continues to exist today… and no, I am not talking about color blindness.
Before
I continue forward, let me quickly explain my issue with the philosophy of
‘color blindness’. The idea of not seeing skin color first seems like the
silver bullet activists and social leaders have been looking for. By seeing
people for who they are, rather than the color of their skin, is in fact a
crucial step to a just and equal world (Williams, 2011). Yet, this philosophy alone
will not entirely cure the plague of racism.
As defined in one of my previous posts, racism is a system of advantage based on race. These current systems restrict people of color from the opportunities and advantages that white people endure every day. Therefore, whether one is consciously seeing people for the color of their skin or not, the systems are still acting in the fashion that they are desired to do. Hence why I believe racism can only be fixed with deliberate action.
Plus, to not see one’s skin is to not see part of who they are. Our identity is a reflexive mixing and mashing of what we experience and take from the world that we choose to or not to identify with. In other words, the infinite factors that lead us to be who we are today are all very important in understanding ourselves and the systems that work around us. Therefore, to not see color is to ignore a beautifully large part of what determines our own self-definition.
Now there are several
ways this deliberate action can be done. Starring examples include Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
Although different in their goals, both men strived to end the system of racial
inequality through social movements. And what I find inspiring about these
movements is that fail or success, they got people to talk about the issues
that currently exist.
These movements addressed the issues at hand which began to turn the tides of both explicit and implicit racism. Attempting to not reiterate myself too much from my previous post, implicit racism is a problem that can only change through deliberate action. Our subconscious only begins to change as our conscious minds begin to consider something it had not before. Those movements began to shape how people think in a positive way, but don’t get me wrong… it wasn’t enough.
As I have said time and time again, racism is very present and very pressing. I believe the answer to this issue is both radical and doable, and in many ways, some of us are already doing it. I believe we need to fight implicit bias with implicit bias… and I believe the we in my sentence is the most important part.
That means writing blog posts explaining racism at both a fundamental level and an activist upper level. That means more movies and shows where people of color are depicted in a carefully constructed way that does not feed into the easy to use stereotypes our brains subconsciously refer to. And on the radical side, I believe that means we need another social movement.
We need
these changes and movements, and I believe we need to address them to everyone.
Everyone should see films like the The Wire and BlacKkKlansman. Everyone should be up to date
with the current Black Lives Matter movement. And everyone needs
to know that this system is suppressing people of color every day.
This may be the outsider in me, for my skin color is seen as white, but I believe this is an issue that can only be resolved when everyone is on board. This information and knowledge of the systems we live within needs to be broadcasted for the country, and maybe even the world, to hear. The only way both forms of racism can be resolved is when everyone knows why and how the United States culture and systems continue to fuel racism every day.
And do not think for one second this fight is pointless. Racism is artificial, which means there is nothing concrete or natural about it. It was fabricated and constructed for the betterment of a group of people. Therefore, just as it was made, it can be destroyed.
When researching whether we can control our implicit bias, I found an experiment that thought to do that very thing. They had participants smile when viewing photographs of both white and black faces before they took their IAT. The results were significantly better after the participants did this simple task, which leads to some hope for our subconscious selves (Chiao, Devine, Lorig and Cacioppo.). In essence, this research shows that even the smallest change in our behavior can alter our minds in a significant way. Racism is an issue that will not be solved overnight, but maybe tonight you can change how you see the world. Maybe YOU can alter your subconscious to align more with the views you now believe at this very moment.
I hope that these posts brought
clarity and awareness to this issue. With these posts, I intended to further
the discussion of race in a way that allows all people to understand and
participate. But just because this series is over does not mean the discussion
is as well. Please talk and discuss these ideas. Whether it be with me over
email, your friends, or your family, it doesn’t matter… just continue the
discussion. This issue is far greater than any post I will ever write which is
why we need to expand this discussion to something bigger than this blog may
ever go.
The issue of racism has
not been conquered by any means, but I hope that you now at least see and
understand the war at hand. The first step to fixing a problem is admitting
there is one. I admit that racism is an issue. I admit that it is currently
ingrained in everything we do, see, and hear every day. I admit that I reap the
benefits of a system that I was born into every day.
I admit these things to myself and everyone around me, but do not think for a second that by admitting I must also be ashamed. I am proud of who I am, and I am not ashamed to say that I am identified as a white male. It is this consciousness of my privilege and need to change that matters. Shame will not bring change, only action will. I hope you feel the need to take action – just as I do.
Ito, Tiffany A., Krystal W.
Chiao, Patricia G. Devine, Tyler S. Lorig and John T. Cacioppo. “The
Influence of Facial Feedback on Race Bias.” Psychological Science
17(3):256-261
Williams, Monnica. “Colorblind
Ideology Is a Form of Racism.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers,
2011,
www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culturally-speaking/201112/colorblind-ideology-is-form-racism.
Racism is a societal issue that plagues humanity’s ability to advance and develop in a healthy, equal way. This societal issue is arguably one that has not gotten better but has instead changed shape generation after generation. With this post, I hope to illustrate just how real white privilege is, even in 2019.
This topic may seem obvious to some readers. If so, feel free to click on the link provided. There I talk about what can be done to stop this systematic issue and how each and everyone one of us can make a difference.
First, I would like to explain a common white space view and its flaws. When defining this term, Elijah Anderson says, “A white space is a situation that reinforces a normative sensibility in settings in which black people are typically absent, not expected, or marginalized when present. This situation is explained to vary from neighborhoods to churches to any public setting, yet always have the overwhelming presence of white people.” This is essentially saying that a white space is when there is a clear majority of white people, so much that it creates expectations that black people are exempt from. When referring to this issue Victor M. Rios says, “The sheer majority of white citizens has created a self-perpetuating system of inequality for minorities of all types throughout the United States.”
The flaw with these white spaces is the misconception that arises with the absence of a solid black presence. I am not saying many of these white space individuals will deny racism, but I have instead found a common belief that misinterprets where the issue comes from. In these environments, there seems to exist the prominent belief that racial problems are strictly derived from economic issues. In other words, rather than seeing these two separate issues, people instead see them as one.
Using the same example from my first post, the average African-American appears less qualified in the job market when compared to their white counterparts. This is directly correlated with the worse education and minimal opportunities the average black American is provided. These are all objective facts, but what I misunderstood at the time was why this difference in education came to be. At first, I thought that’s just how things were because better education is directly connected with wealth, which the average black American has less of when compared to their white peers. Yet, after reading on the subject, I have discovered deliberate segregation between the quality of education young American’s receive, which I went into detail for my second post.
In the example above, the white space individuals would see the inequality of education as bad luck. When in reality, the inequality is through deliberate segregation fueled by racial motives. Therefore, rather than believing racism is actively happening throughout society, the common belief is that societal racism is a thing of the past and people of color simply need to economically catch up.
With this misconception defined and understood,
I believe the next question is to wonder just how big the United States white
space is. From my personal experience of growing up in Upstate New York,
I can attest it is prominent in a lot of small towns. Yet I would also
argue the issue is much bigger than just that.
I believe the simplest way to illustrate this idea is to point out the
fact that when a black American is asked their race, they will most likely say
African-American. Alternately, when a white American is asked, they will
most likely respond by saying that they are American. They will not say European-American, as they
probably are, but will instead respond strictly with American.
This ties to the idea of double consciousness, where people of color must identify as an American, but also as a person of color. They must acknowledge their multiple identities since different expectations exist with each identity. These multiple identities are destructive when there are negative stereotypes associated with them, and you can bet white spacing will make sure to do that.
Another way I can think to clearly show that the United States is a huge white space is simply by using statistics. Black Americans make 58% of what the average white American makes every year. How do you explain that? Is it simply bad luck or is there something else at play?
The statistics continue when looking at the chart to the right. With black and Hispanic groups only taking up 28% of the United States population, it is a mystery to how they take up 56% of the prison population. This is a catastrophic number. This roughly implies that a black American citizen is six times more likely to serve time in prison than his or her white counterpart.
All these issues are real, few will deny that, but they do not necessarily prove that racism is an issue separate from economic inequality. One could continue to say that all these problems are simply due to the aftermath of slavery. Yet, I find that mindset to be incorrect for two main reason. One, because of implicit racism (I encourage you to click on the hyperlink. There I go into detail about the effects of and how implicit bias works). And the second is because of the laws and actions that individuals have done deliberately against people of color.
One example of this was accidentally found by Michelle Alexander when analyzing data on Reagan’s War on Drugs. She was surprised to find that the use of illegal drugs was declining before the “war” was declared. Not only that, but once the “war” was declared, a steady increase in illegal drug use proceeded with each year that followed. To top off these surprises, she found that the media was very successful at covering stories and headlines ringing keywords like, ‘crack whores’ and ‘crack dealers. And “coincidentally” everyone who made these notorious headlines were people of color (Alexander, 2012).
Now one could attempt to state that regardless of all these claims the fact still remains that the dealers and criminals of the 1970s were mostly all people of color… but that too is a skewed perception of reality. Another researcher, by the name of Richard Delgado, found that the amount of capital stolen or destroyed through crime was less severe from the average black offender, compared to the average white offender (Delgado, 1995). In other words, the average black criminal stole or destroyed less than the average white criminal. So, all of the breaking news headlines of ‘crack whores’ were in fact targeted and limited into showing part of the crime happening thought out the country. And don’t forget that crime began to uptick once the “war” against it was declared.
Racism is not just a passive afterglow of slavery as many people think. It is an active issue within a system that encourages and reinforces it. With these distinctions in identities, it is obvious that people of color are in many ways living a different life than their white counterparts. They are living a life of less income, with a higher probability of being criminalized, and implicit bias that even they themselves cannot escape from.
Therefore, Don’t think for one more second this is something that will simply fade away. Actions and policies like the War on Drugs, redlining, stop-and-frisk, the New Deal, and so much more, are all continuing this cycle of inequality. The white space of America is a place with very minimal pockets of true equality. Let us ban together and acknowledge that this issue is actively happening, and therefore requires active action to improve.
Alexander, Michelle. “Introduction.” The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age ofColorblindness (2012): 1-19.
Delgado, Richard. “Rodrigo’s Eight Chronicle. Black Crime, White Fears – On the Social Construction of Threat.” Rodrigo Chronicles (1995): 164-189.
Gramlich, John. “Gap between Number of Blacks, Whites in Prison
Narrows.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 12 Jan. 2018,
www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/12/shrinking-gap-between-number-of-blacks-and-whites-in-prison/.
Victor M. Rios (2015) Decolonizing the White Space in Urban
Ethnography City and Community Pages (258-261)
Jimmy ‘the Greek’ Snyder was a CBS sports commentator for twelve years. Knowing the ins and outs of the NBA, Snyder was as good of a commentator as any. Regardless of his experience and on the job knowledge, one day Snyder was asked why there was such a high number of black athletes in the NBA. Ignorantly, he explained what Heidi Lujan and Stephen DiCarlo call, the “slavery hypertension hypothesis” (Lujan and DiCarlo, 2018).
Snyder explained that black people have been naturally selected through the years of slavery to have physically superior bodies. This, he explained, is why the NBA is eighty percent black. Personally, I find his answer to be very similar to Thomas Jefferson’s when establishing what race was best for what job. The only difference is that Snyder is saying this after three hundred years of “modernization” and “growth”.
Lujan and DiCarlo, both being researchers on
this topic, explain that his hypothesis’ credibility is far too weak to be
broadcasted for the world to hear. They explain plenty of other theories
with far more support, but far less recognition.
One of these alternative theories points out the fact that the average black family makes sixty percent of the average white family. Therefore, they have limited access to certain sports such as swimming and hockey. Sports like these require much more organization and funding than sports like basketball. So, rather than black people being biological hybrids, the assumption is that black people growing up are only left with few sports to fight over (Lujan and DiCarlo, 2018).
Another theory, which goes highly unrecognized, is the criminalization of the African American identity. This identity issue is brought up with terms like double consciousness and intersectionality. Starting at a young age, there are societal pressures put on black students that to do well in school one must be “white”. These black students are then left with the decision to give up their identity and attempt to pursue a “white” career in an unsuitable environment or believe in their identity and attempt to find a career that allows them to be who they are (Ferguson, 2000).
Picking between a rock and a hard place, many students take the latter. By taking the latter these individuals are left to look at their role models. And can you think of who they may be? What type of professions allow individuals to remain “black” and still make a good living? Well, a large portion are NBA players, because as said before, eighty percent rule the courts.
Not to mention that natural selection and evolution doesn’t occur within a few generations. The effects are significantly minimal even after ten, twenty, full generations of mammals. So even if these alternatives weren’t available, the main explanation is highly questionable on its own.
At least for me, I was left to wonder why these
logical explanations of the NBA are left in the background and are instead
commonly trumped by the idea that slavery somehow helped people of color (Lujan
and DiCarlo, 2018).
To explain this phenomenon, one must consider our Implicit Bias. This bias has allowed for certain norms and hypotheses to flourish when in reality they are ignorant and most likely incorrect. It shapes how we see the world, which in a way creates the world. It is this shaping that causes employment inequality issues, our tendency to justify white actions, and belief in easy fallacies rather than the blunt truth.
Implicit racism is a huge underlying issue that is going unnoticed because whether many people know it or not, they are encouraging and supporting it. The NBA is simply one example of the US societal issue on race. Rather than pretending slavery was good in some ways, we need to accept the hard truth. It wasn’t. It didn’t genetically alter African Americans through natural selection. And it wasn’t a necessity for societal growth. It was simply wrong and to this day people pay for that wrongdoing. So, the least we can do is acknowledge it. Because the first step to fixing a problem is admitting it exists.
Alemán, Rosa. “What Is Intersectionality, and What Does It Have to
Do with Me?” YW Boston, 24 Apr. 2018,
www.ywboston.org/2017/03/what-is-intersectionality-and-what-does-it-have-to-do-with-me/
Dicarlo, Stephen E, and Heidi L Lujan. “The ‘African Gene’ Theory:
It Is Time to Stop Teaching and Promoting the Slavery Hypertension Hypothesis.”
American Physiological Society Journal | Home, 2018,
www.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/advan.00070.2018
Ferguson, Ann. Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black
Masculinity (2000): 578-587
Kristin. “Understanding W.E.B. Du Bois’ Concept of Double
Consciousness.” Kristin Does Theory, 2012,
kristindoestheory.umwblogs.org/understanding-w-e-b-du-bois-concept-of-double-consciousness/
The recently released movie, BlacKkKlansman, captures Ron Stallworth’s work in the late 1970s as an undercover cop in his Ku Klux Klan investigation. As an African-American police officer, he infiltrates the Klan’s ranks by impersonating as a racist white man. Having a white detective take his place for face to face encounters, he eventually receives his certificate of membership and successfully cons a KKK grand wizard (Taylor, 2014). **Haha, I love it.**
Stallworth’s story proves the ignorance and irrationality of this organization. Stallworth’s success caused a decline in support of the Klan and the publication of a black empowering book and movie. Deliberate actions like these are arguably the only way to end both explicit and implicit racism.
In an effort to define the different forms of racism, many neuroscientists have begun to divide racism into either explicit or implicit racism. Explicit racism is a term used when describing acts of racism such as the organization of hate groups, like the KKK, using racial slurs, or consciously supporting racism (Quianna, 2018). It is the conscious decision that some individuals make to support their belief of oppressing a group of people depending on the color of their skin.
On the other hand, we have implicit racism. This is the unconscious bias we have when making judgments about people of a certain race and ethnicity. This is shown when someone dismisses job and college applications, expresses microaggression, or subconsciously supports racism (Quianna, 2018). This bias develops from everything we experience throughout our lives. From the books we read, movies we watch, and the people we meet, they are all factors that develop our implicit racism (Gladwell, 2005). It is this form of racism that can only end through deliberate action and conscious thought.
These two forms of racism play a huge role in America’s history and how we live our current day to day lives. Yet, as already alluded to, explicit racism is arguably dying. For instance, in the 1920s the KKK was at the peak of their strength in America. They had fifteen percent of the eligible population in their cult, which reached as high as four million members (Moore, 2018). Now the KKK is at a mere 3,000 members (Trimble, 2017). Therefore, at first glance, it would appear racism has been on the decline for quite some time; however, this does not address the other side of the coin.
On the other front, the fight against implicit racism has remained at a standstill. Scientists are aware of this due to implicit-association tests (IAT). IAT measures the association between concepts by pairing two together and timing how fast someone can categorize them. The assumption with this test is if one can categorize two words together quicker than another two then our subconscious brains believe they have something in common.
The IAT for racism tests how well we associate people of color with the word “bad” and Caucasian faces with the word “good”. Through Project Implicit, I found that sixty-eight percent of participants have some amount of preference over white people compared to black people (Greenwald, 2011). To make matters worse, Malcolm Gladwell conducted an IAT only on African-American participants. Shockingly, he found that about half of the participants have a stronger association with whites than they do with blacks (Gladwell, 2015). In large, these results showed us just how inescapable implicit racism is in all Americans today.
If explicit racism really is as weak as it first appears, then how is implicit racism still so evident in our mindsets? How could so many of us advocate for equality when our subconscious is stuck in the 1920s? In short, this is because today’s society was built by white people, and therefore is structured for white people. As previously said, implicit racism is developed through everything we experience. Those experiences all build on themselves because with subconscious thought comes subconscious action. One may not even notice the speed he or she dismisses a job application because the first name is stereotyped as a “black name” (Ziegert and Hanges). Or even question the whitewashing of America’s history books.
Implicit racism is a problem that we can only change through deliberate action. Through conscious action that goes against our unquestioned, subconscious thoughts. One that fights this “natural process” of white people on top and black people on the bottom.
Ron Stallworth’s police work was not just extraordinary because it helped weaken explicit racism, but it also did the same for implicit racism. His publication of black empowerment has now been published for the world to read and watch, which is one step in the right direction for our subconscious minds to remember.
Please feel free to read the next post as I discuss a specific example of how our subconscious minds affect our world in unexpected ways.
Quianna, Canada.
“Implicit vs Explicit Racism.” The Responsible Consumer, 15 Sept. 2018,
theresponsibleconsumer.wordpress.com/implicit-vs-explicit-racism/
Taylor, Matt. “The Black
Undercover Cop Who Infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado.” Vice,
Vice, 30 May 2014,
www.vice.com/en_us/article/wd4gym/we-talked-to-the-black-undercover-cop-who-infiltrated-the-kkk-in-colorado.
Trimble, Megan. “These
States Still Had Active KKK Groups in 2017.” U.S. News & World Report,
U.S. News & World Report, 2017,
www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2017-08-14/the-kkk-is-still-based-in-22-states-in-the-us-in-2017.
Ziegert,
Jonathan C. and Paul J. Hanges. “Employment Discrimination: The Role of
Implicit Attitudes, Motivation, and a Climate for Racial Bias.” Journal
of Applied Psychology 90(3):553-562
In 1619 a Dutch ship arrived on the shores of the British colony known as Jamestown, Virginia. Aboard were nineteen African slaves. Those nineteen individuals, taken against their will, were the first to suffer from a four hundred year long, and counting, human-made catastrophe. It was then that American slavery began, which quickly evolved to the societal racism we see today. Today’s post is written to show that bad luck had nothing to do with that ship arriving on the Virginian shore.
David Olusoga (2015) states, “Ideas of Africans as inferior, backwards, and barbaric can be traced back to those justifying slavery in the 18th century. And the stereotypes still cast a shadow over the continent”. Olusoga continues his point when referring to the 18th-century slave owner, Edward Long. Long is notorious for writing the book History of Jamaica, which was the most damaging published text for racial ideas to ever exist. With his lack of scientific training and extreme eurocentrism, Long wrote a very influential book on why and how Africans are inferior and possibly not even human. Regardless of lacking any scientific evidence to back his claim, his book was widely accepted and published throughout Europe.
To make matters worse, Long was not alone. Books, novels, articles, you name it, were being published all throughout the world with the commonality of spreading this awful opinion as truth. And it wasn’t just the “bad guys”. Thomas Jefferson is a shining example of one of our founding fathers with misguided intentions. In Jefferson’s analysis of people of color, he finds that they are biologically conditioned for manual labor since they lack the intelligence and beauty of white people. He follows by stating how they are also “tolerant of heat” and are simply better designed to work a physically demanding job with little thinking involved (Fields, 1990). His thoughts were then shared with the world to help create a country. A country built to favor white people and provide their “biologically deserved” jobs. When black people were left to work jobs where their “tolerance to heat” came in handy.
As already stated by
Olusoga, these forms of influence were published for one reason and one reason
only, to justify slavery and colonialism. With the turn of the 15th
century, the dominant European powers learned about the millions of people and
acres of land that could be theirs, all they had to do was grab it. Being
technologically superior, there was little to nothing Africans and Native
Americans could do to stop these European invaders. Even countries as small as Belgium were able
to colonize all the Congo and strip it of its land and people. Therefore, the
issue of colonizing land and people was not external, but instead internal.
The European leaders needed to find a way that their citizens would be on board for the slaughter and enslavement of millions of people. They needed a justification for their actions, one that was more than simple greed and the desire for power. They needed to be seen as leaders doing it both for themselves, but also for the people they were colonizing. And that is exactly what they did.
Before long, writers
like Long and Jefferson began to dominate the public consciousness. It
created the idea that non-Europeans were inferior to the human race. And it was their duty, as Europeans, to
conquer these people and teach them their ways.
This technique has
proven to work century after century. King Leopold II ruled Belgium and committed the single largest
genocide known to mankind. His army killed up to ten million Congolese and enslaved the
rest. In justifying his actions, he stated that Belgium was of a superior
race who deserved land and wealth from the inferior Congolese.
Sound familiar? Hitler gave quite a similar speech. In justifying the slaughter of nine million people, Hitler explained that Germany was a superior race, who deserved to rule to world. We can also look at Manifest Destiny. The United States deserved the land it took over and that it was their given right. As a last example, we see this with mass incarceration today, especially in the United States. These prisoners broke the law and therefore deserve to be imprisoned.
In all these examples, nobody thinks to question the people who decide what is or is not deserved. My question is why do 360,000 people right now deserve to give up time in their life for stealing things of financial value, rather than simply paying it back plus some? Another question I have is why did seven million people deserve to be arrested from 2001 to 2010 for marijuana when eleven states currently have the drug legalized? I believe that sometimes we need to question whether people really deserve the things that happen to them.
There is nothing natural about racism. It was socially constructed to justify the barbaric and inhumane actions of the European leaders during the age of colonialism. And unfortunately, the has been working since the moment those nineteen human beings began their lifetime work in Jamestown. We need to look past this thousand-year-old method and try to see the world in a new way. One that is interpreted by how you think, not how society wants you to think. The next post will touch on implicit bias in order to see just how deeply rooted this construct is within us all.
Editors, History.com. “Slavery in America.” History.com,
A&E Television Networks, 12 Nov. 2009,
www.history.com/topics/black-history/slavery.
Fields, Barbara. “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America.” New Left Review (1990): 95-118.
Jefferson, Thomas. “The Difference is Fixed in
Nature.” Notes on Virginia (1785): 95-103.
Sawyer, Wendy, and Peter Wagner. “Mass Incarceration: The
Whole Pie 2019.” Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019 | Prison Policy
Initiative, 2019, www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html.
Olusoga, David. “The Roots of European Racism
Lie in the Slave Trade, Colonialism – and Edward Long | David Olusoga.” The
Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 8 Sept. 2015,
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/08/european-racism-africa-slavery.
Racism is a system of advantage based on race. This definition of racism was first coined by Daniels Tatum. With this definition, she creates a clear distinction between prejudice and racism. Prejudice, being an individual act, is a preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience. While racism is more of a systemic structure that individuals have little to no dictation over (Tatum, 1997).
What I find interesting about this distinction is the conclusion she is able to draw from it. She states that all white people, living in the United States, are racist, while all people of color can not be racist. She is not saying that all white Americans have a prejudice towards people of color. Instead, she is explaining that all white Americans benefit from this systematic advantage, and therefore must be racist. There is literally nothing a white American can do to not reek the benefits of their skin color.
Before I continue, I would like to encourage you to read one of my posts that explains the benefits that all white Americans have over people of color. I can say from personal experience that growing up in a white space can cloud one’s judgment. Thus creating an illusion of racism as a mere side effect from the years of slavery. Which buys into the narrative that people of color are only economically disadvantaged and unfortunately snowball into creating a number of other societal problems. When instead racism and economic inequality are entirely different issues. If this is your stance on the matter, please feel free to click on the link provided.
Daniels Tatum’s statement is initially very hard to hear. At least for me, it was instantly rejected before any rational thought. I believe this is because being called a “racist” is one of the single worst words to be called in modern society. Due to “new racism”, there exists the illusion that racism is mostly a thing of the past, and anyone called it is a direct attack on being a modern, moral creature.
As a clarification, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva defines “new racism” as the form of racism that has existed since the late 1960s. He explains that this new wave creates the idea that racism is largely a thing of the past, rather than a huge current issue (Bonilla-Silva, 2015). It is the belief that racism has, in large, been defeated and that we now mostly live as an enlightened society. The graph to the right shows an example of such. I was astonished to find that segregation is as much of an issue as it was fifty years ago. Somewhere along the battle over civil rights, society decided the issue was resolved and moved on. Yet it only took a few decades for the issue to resurface once again. It has resurfaced, but this time people believe there is nothing to fight over.
Racism is still a huge problem. It is one that incarcerates hundreds of thousands of Americans, creates a huge inequality in pay, and harms millions of people every year. Racism, new racism, is very real and it is something that we are all bound to. Being a system of advantage or disadvantage, it is not enough to simply be “blind” from skin color. To truly combat racism, and to truly not be racist, we need to step up and take action.
Next week I will go into detail about how race associated with color is nothing more than a construct and how that construct has been used to divide our understanding of who gets and does what. Racism is arguably not what it once was, but I hope by the end of this session of posts you understand the issue is still significant enough to fight for.
Chang, Alvin. “The Data Proves That School Segregation Is Getting
Worse.” Vox.com, Vox Media, 5 Mar. 2018,
www.vox.com/2018/3/5/17080218/school-segregation-getting-worse-data.
Daniel Tatum (1997) Defining Racism:”Can We Talk?” Pages
100-107
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2015) The Structure of Racism in
Color-Blind, “Post Racial” Pages 1-20
Victor M. Rios (2015) Decolonizing the White Space in Urban
Ethnography City and Community Pages (258-261)
