After Ferguson, Race Deserves More Attention, Not Less
MANY white Americans say they are fed up with the coverage of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. A plurality of whites in a recent Pew survey said that the issue of race is getting more attention than it deserves.
Bill
O’Reilly of Fox News reflected that weariness, saying: “All you hear is
grievance, grievance, grievance, money, money, money.”
Indeed, a 2011 study by scholars at Harvard and Tufts found that whites, on average, believed that anti-white racism was a bigger problem than anti-black racism.
Yes, you read that right!
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:
• 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 than South Africa did during apartheid. (Whites in America on average own almost 18 times as much as blacks; in South Africa in 1970, the ratio was about 15 times.)
• The black-white income gap is roughly 40 percent greater today than it was in 1967.
• A black boy born today in the United States has a life expectancy five years shorter than that of a white boy.
• Black students are significantly less likely to attend schools offering advanced math and science courses than white students. They are three times as likely to be suspended and expelled, setting them up for educational failure.
• 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, according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Nearly 70 percent of middle-aged black men who never graduated from high school have been imprisoned.
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.
Some
straight people have gradually changed their attitudes toward gays
after realizing that their friends — or children — were gay. Researchers have found
that male judges are more sympathetic to women’s rights when they have
daughters. Yet because of the de facto segregation of America, whites
are unlikely to have many black friends: A study from the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that in a network of 100 friends, a white person, on average, has one black friend.
That’s
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. “Thank God he didn’t run,” she said.
One
black friend tells me that he freaked out when his white fiancée
purchased an item in a store and promptly threw the receipt away. “What
are you doing?” 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.
Some
readers will protest that the stereotype is rooted in reality: Young
black men are disproportionately likely to be criminals.
That’s
true — and complicated. “There’s nothing more painful to me,” the Rev.
Jesse Jackson once said, “than to walk down the street and hear
footsteps and start thinking about robbery — then look around and see
somebody white and feel relieved.”
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 Nurse-Family Partnership; early education initiatives like Educare and Head Start; programs for troubled adolescents like Youth Villages; anti-gang and anti-crime initiatives like Becoming a Man; efforts to prevent teen pregnancies like the Carrera curriculum; job training like Career Academies; and job incentives like the earned-income tax credit.
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.
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.
