"Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others."
I actually take it a step further; I don't think that this story should be understood to mean "X% of Americans are racist." I think it
should be taken to mean that a majority of Americans hold prejudiced beliefs when it comes to race and that this can be used to explain other things - our tolerance for
these facts:
"Recent data shows, though, that much of black progress is a myth. In many respects, African-Americans are doing no better than they were when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and uprisings swept inner cities across America. Nearly a quarter of African-Americans live below the poverty line today, approximately the same percentage as in 1968. The black child poverty rate is actually higher now than it was then. Unemployment rates in black communities rival those in Third World countries. And that's with affirmative action!
When we pull back the curtain and take a look at what our "colorblind" society creates without affirmative action, we see a familiar social, political, and economic structure--the structure of racial caste. The entrance into this new caste system can be found at the prison gate."
[...]
Perhaps greater lies have been told in the past century, but they can be counted on one hand. Racial caste is alive and well in America.
Most people don't like it when I say this. It makes them angry. In the "era of colorblindness" there's a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have "moved beyond" race. Here are a few facts that run counter to that triumphant racial narrative:
• There are more African-Americans under correctional control today--in prison or jail, on probation or parole--than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
• As of 2004, more African-American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
• A black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The recent disintegration of the African-American family is due in large part to the mass imprisonment of black fathers.
• If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African-American men in some urban areas have been labeled felons for life. (In the Chicago area, the figure is nearly 80 percent.) These men are part of a growing undercaste--not class, caste--permanently relegated, by law, to a second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits, much as their grandparents and great-grandparents were during the Jim Crow era.
Black men are no more likely than white men to be involved in either the dealing or using of drugs, and yet they face the brunt of the damage of the War on Drugs. Does anyone really believe that this would be tolerated if they were white? If this is entirely about, say, socioeconomic class and race is just a red herring, why are poor whites not facing the same injustices that poor blacks face? Why do we have legal rules that structure our criminal justice system so that at every step exacerbate the problems of personal prejudice and institutional racism and guarantee that our criminal justice system is overwhelmingly filled with black and brown men? Why do we enforce our drug laws almost exclusively amongst black and brown men while knowing full well that white men are the majority of offenders?
Perhaps
more to the point:
Economist Glenn Loury made this observation in his book The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. He noted that it is nearly impossible to imagine anything remotely similar to mass incarceration happening to young white men. Can we envision a system that would enforce drug laws almost exclusively among young white men and ignore drug crime among young black men? Can we imagine large majorities of young white men being rounded up for minor drug offenses, placed under the control of the criminal justice system, labeled felons, and then subjected to a lifetime of discrimination, scorn, and exclusion. Can we imagine this happening while most black men landed decent jobs or trotted off to college? No, we cannot. If such a thing occurred, "it would occasion a most profound reflection about what had gone wrong, not with THEM but with US." It would never be dismissed with the thought that white men were simply reaping what they had sown. The criminalization of white men would disturb us to the core. So the critical questions are: "What disturbs us? What is dissonant? What seems anomalous? What is contrary to expectation? Or more to the point: Whom do we care about?
If you follow the above link, you can find the paragraph quoted on page 200. It is followed by an examination of how the problem with drunk driving was handled in the 1980s the discrepancies between that actual public health crisis and the largely manufactured crisis of a drug epidemic are telling.
