{"id":16419,"date":"2014-10-16T05:50:35","date_gmt":"2014-10-16T03:50:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=16419"},"modified":"2014-10-16T05:50:35","modified_gmt":"2014-10-16T03:50:35","slug":"black-white-racial-gap-in-usa-now-bigger-than-in-1970-south-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=16419","title":{"rendered":"Black-white racial gap in USA now bigger than in 1970 South Africa"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"story-continues-1\" class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"225\" data-total-count=\"225\">Many white Americans say they are fed up with the coverage of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.people-press.org\/2014\/08\/18\/stark-racial-divisions-in-reactions-to-ferguson-police-shooting\/\">A plurality of whites in a recent Pew survey said<\/a> that the issue of race is getting more attention than it deserves.<\/p>\n<p class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"137\" data-total-count=\"362\">Bill O\u2019Reilly of Fox News reflected that weariness, saying: \u201cAll you hear is grievance, grievance, grievance, money, money, money.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"161\" data-total-count=\"523\">Indeed, <a title=\"A pdf\" href=\"http:\/\/ase.tufts.edu\/psychology\/sommerslab\/documents\/raceinternortonsommers2011.pdf\">a 2011 study by scholars at Harvard and Tufts found<\/a> that whites, on average, believed that anti-white racism was a bigger problem than anti-black racism.<\/p>\n<p class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"25\" data-total-count=\"548\">Yes, you read that right!<\/p>\n<p class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"129\" data-total-count=\"677\">So let me push back at what I see as smug white delusion. Here are a few reasons race relations deserve more attention, not less:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li id=\"story-continues-2\" class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"433\" data-total-count=\"1110\">The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data. The gap has worsened in the last decade, and the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race t<a href=\"http:\/\/jonjeter.wordpress.com\/2013\/10\/24\/worse-than-apartheid-black-in-obamas-america-3\/\">han South Africa did during apartheid<\/a>. (Whites in America on average own almost 18 times as much as blacks; in South Africa in 1970, the ratio was about 15 times.)<\/li>\n<li class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"88\" data-total-count=\"1198\">The black-white income gap is roughly 40 percent greater today than it was in 1967.<\/li>\n<li class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"115\" data-total-count=\"1313\">A black boy born today in the United States has a life expectancy five years shorter than that of a white boy.<\/li>\n<li class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"233\" data-total-count=\"1546\">Black students are significantly <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ed.gov\/news\/press-releases\/expansive-survey-americas-public-schools-reveals-troubling-racial-disparities\">less likely to attend schools offering advanced math and science courses<\/a> than white students. They are three times as likely <a title=\"A pdf\" href=\"http:\/\/ocrdata.ed.gov\/Downloads\/CRDC-School-Discipline-Snapshot.pdf\">to be suspended and expelled<\/a>, setting them up for educational failure.<\/li>\n<li class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"345\" data-total-count=\"1891\">Because of the catastrophic experiment in mass incarceration, black men in their 20s without a high school diploma are more likely to be incarcerated today than employed, <a title=\"A pdf\" href=\"http:\/\/www.nber.org\/papers\/w20283.pdf\">according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research<\/a>. Nearly 70 percent of middle-aged black men who never graduated from high school <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/research\/reports\/2014\/05\/10-crime-facts\">have been imprisoned<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"172\" data-total-count=\"2063\">All these constitute not a black problem or a white problem, but an American problem. When so much talent is underemployed and overincarcerated, the entire country suffers.<\/p>\n<p id=\"story-continues-3\" class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"488\" data-total-count=\"2551\">Some straight people have gradually changed their attitudes toward gays after realizing that their friends \u2014 or children \u2014 were gay. <a href=\"http:\/\/scholar.harvard.edu\/msen\/publications\/identifying-judicial-empathy-does-having-daughters-cause-judges-rule-womens-issues\">Researchers have found<\/a> that male judges are more sympathetic to women\u2019s rights when they have daughters. Yet because of the de facto segregation of America, whites are unlikely to have many black friends: <a href=\"http:\/\/publicreligion.org\/research\/2014\/08\/analysis-social-network\/\">A study from the Public Religion Research Institute suggests<\/a> that in a network of 100 friends, a white person, on average, has one black friend.<\/p>\n<p id=\"story-continues-4\" class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"340\" data-total-count=\"2891\">That\u2019s unfortunate, because friends open our eyes. I was shaken after a well-known black woman told me about looking out her front window and seeing that police officers had her teenage son down on the ground after he had stepped out of their upscale house because they thought he was a prowler. \u201cThank God he didn\u2019t run,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"324\" data-total-count=\"3215\">One black friend tells me that he freaked out when his white fianc\u00e9e purchased an item in a store and promptly threw the receipt away. \u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d he protested to her. He is a highly successful and well-educated professional but would never dream of tossing a receipt for fear of being accused of shoplifting.<\/p>\n<p id=\"story-continues-5\" class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"130\" data-total-count=\"3345\">Some readers will protest that the stereotype is rooted in reality: Young black men are disproportionately likely to be criminals.<\/p>\n<p class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"262\" data-total-count=\"3607\">That\u2019s true \u2014 and complicated. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing more painful to me,\u201d the Rev. Jesse Jackson once said, \u201cthan to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery \u2014 then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"622\" data-total-count=\"4229\">All this should be part of the national conversation on race, as well, and prompt a drive to help young black men end up in jobs and stable families rather than in crime or jail. We have policies with a robust record of creating opportunity: home visitation programs like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nursefamilypartnership.org\/\">Nurse-Family Partnership<\/a>; early education initiatives like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.educareschools.org\/home\/index.php\">Educare<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.acf.hhs.gov\/programs\/ohs\">Head Start<\/a>; programs for troubled adolescents like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youthvillages.org\/\">Youth Villages<\/a>; anti-gang and anti-crime initiatives like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youth-guidance.org\/our-programs\/b-a-m-becoming-a-man\/\">Becoming a Man<\/a>; efforts to prevent teen pregnancies like <a href=\"http:\/\/stopteenpregnancy.childrensaidsociety.org\/\">the Carrera curriculum<\/a>; job training <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mdrc.org\/project\/career-academies-exploring-college-and-career-options-ecco#featured_content\">like Career Academies<\/a>; and job incentives like the earned-income tax credit.<\/p>\n<p class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"184\" data-total-count=\"4413\">The best escalator to opportunity may be education, but that escalator is broken for black boys growing up in neighborhoods with broken schools. We fail those boys before they fail us.<\/p>\n<p class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"362\" data-total-count=\"4775\">So a starting point is for those of us in white America to wipe away any self-satisfaction about racial progress. Yes, the progress is real, but so are the challenges. The gaps demand a wrenching, soul-searching excavation of our national soul, and the first step is to acknowledge that the central race challenge in America today is not the suffering of whites.<\/p>\n<p class=\"story-body-text story-content\" data-para-count=\"362\" data-total-count=\"4775\">&#8211; Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whites, on average, believe that anti-white racism is a bigger problem than anti-black racism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[492],"tags":[10288,10289,10290,65,745],"class_list":["post-16419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-black-white-gap","tag-educare","tag-head-start","tag-race","tag-usa"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16419"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16420,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16419\/revisions\/16420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}