because we destroyed ourselves
November 2nd, 2010Due to the incredibly high concentration of blacks in the American prison population, the hope-numbing impact of being held in prison and then being hard-pressed to find employment afterward enforces “the stigma of race [that] remains the unmeltable condition of the black social and economic situation.”19
Racism is generally understood in America to have fallen to an all-time low. But this is an illusion, created because our prisons and the hundreds of thousands of black men inside of them are built at sites unseen.
A “subtler and more covert” racism has been enabled as prison populations artificially bend racially specific underemployment rates as “mass incarceration makes it easier for the majority culture to continue to ignore the urban ghettos that live on beneath official rhetoric.”20
The Civil Rights movement was marked by dozens and dozens of indelible images of racism that were carried in the media each day – black children being marched past an angry white mob into a newly segregated school, police dogs being sicced on peaceful black protesters, burnt-out remains of bombed black churches, one black man behind a pulpit preaching of Christian love and patience and another black man punctuating with his fist the need for angry black action, crowds full of college students both black and white being sprayed at times by firehoses and other times by bullets.
We’ve all seen the living, breathing, killing reality of racism in the 1970s. None of us now are able to see its existence now, because racism no longer lives on the front pages of our newspapers and during our evening news – instead it’s been suffocated inside poured concrete walls which rise and fall in invisible existence, locked safely out of sight.
Even the very idea of what it means to be poor is color-coded, as while 1 in 3 blacks live in poverty, less than 1 in 10 whites do. And yet the very definition of poverty itself now varies to the point of absurdity, since “poverty level whites control nearly as many mean net financial assets as the highest-earning blacks, $26,683 to $28,310. For those surviving at or below the poverty level, this indicates quite clearly that poverty means one thing for whites and another for blacks.”30
The impact of these facts have echoed across generations, as nearly three-quarters of all black children grow up in homes with no net financial assets. That’s nearly double the rate of white kids. And nine in ten black kids grow up in homes without enough monetary reserves to last more than three months at the poverty line if their income were to drop, roughly four times the white ratio.31
Eminem seemed to have no sense of the irony that was invoked as his self-consciously white autobiographical film, 8 Mile, highlighted the hopeless plight of Detroit’s urban black community that’s existed for generations. The 8 Mile district was created in 1941, when a six-foot wall was built around a black enclave that was deemed unfit to accept loans from the Federal Housing Administration. This was “part of a system that divided the whole city, in theory by credit-rating, in practice by colour.” And so the segregation that emerged in Detroit “was not accidental, but a direct consequence of government policy.”32
This policy of segregated mortgages became known as “red-lining,” and by the 1950s one in five black borrowers was paying interest at over 8%, while it was about impossible to find a white family paying more than 7%.33
And yet this economic line extends far past that generation. The fact that blacks are foreclosing at a much higher rate than whites in the current crisis was predestined by the conditions of the loans they received, as banks turn down equally-qualified blacks much more often than whites, and forced blacks to pay higher interest on their loans. Housing values are indelibly color-coded, as the average value of a white house appreciates much quicker than a black house. All of this is snowballing into a collective institutional bias that cost black families at least $82 billion even before this current crisis began.34
Category: Uncategorized 9 comments »
November 2nd, 2010 at 11:44 am
Please post references to what the books you’re helping to sell actually refer to. I’m sure those books on amazon are good, but I’m more interested in talking to other people about some of the incredible things you’re saying and I’d like to actually be able to back up my story.
November 2nd, 2010 at 12:18 pm
EXCELLENT article!
Amerikkka…fine tuning racism.
Republicans (i.e. conservatives) are not solely to blame either. Democrats, including California Democrats as well as President Obama (shame on you BO!) continue to perpetuate the problem.
Ask yourself, would George W. Bush have been elected President if he had been exposed as a cocaine user that he was? Would Clinton or Obama have been elected if they had been busted smoking grass? Likely not! They’re lives would have taken a definite turn for the worse.
What’s more, a person convicted of drug possession in the USA is currently ineligible for federal student loans while a paroled murderer or rapist is still eligible.
SICK! SICK! SICK SOCIETY!
March 16th, 2011 at 4:16 pm
Yeah, I would really love to see the studies and sources of the statistics you are referencing from the books. Referencing the entire books isn’t very helpful. This was an amazing article, and I would just love to read the studies myself.
March 18th, 2011 at 11:29 am
If the majority of blacks commit a certain type of crime, you must legalize it or its a racist law! Everything that blacks want to do, however immoral, should be accepted. And that’s regardless if they they want to smoke crack or cut your throat. According to this author, criminal blacks are angels, and the ones making laws to protect society are evil.
March 18th, 2011 at 1:43 pm
good article, but when you say “a third more likely”, do you mean 3 times as likely or 1/3 more likely (which would actually be less likely)?
TtD: 133% more likely, sorry the phrasing was unclear.
March 18th, 2011 at 5:43 pm
Dude, keep on kicking ass. Your writing has gotten even better from the ol’ RMMB days.
March 18th, 2011 at 8:16 pm
Hi,
I’m not racist. I’m white. I have black friends.
I would like to see some of the data you used. I think the top 1% of the income group really throws off the average data. I’m assuming a large portion of the wealthiest people are white.
It would be nice to know how things stack up when the wealthiest 5% are removed from the numbers. I think the whites would have 2x the wealth of blacks.
Still bad, but not as bad as 10x. I just find that hard to believe.
March 24th, 2011 at 4:10 pm
Maybe blacks just get caught more? They fall asleep in the get away car.
March 25th, 2011 at 9:46 pm
Superb job. I’m a little surprised at the questioning of the statistics, they’re pretty easy to verify via our good friend Google. Keep up the great work.