Our
system amounts to affirmative action for white people.
A New York Times obituary for Julian Bond, the
civil rights icon who passed away this August, described the late leader as a “persistent opponent of
the stubborn remnants of white supremacy.”
Remnants? Hardly.
Notwithstanding the hard-won gains of the 1960s, race relations
in 21st-century America are still characterized by white supremacy.
Half a century after employment discrimination was outlawed, for
example, the median household income of white Americans is over 70 percent greater than for black Americans. The causes
are complex, but whites are plainly advantaged.
One recent study revealed
that job applicants with first names that sound “white” get called for
interviews 50 percent more often than those with the same resume but names that
sound “black.”
Even white men convicted of felonies are more likely to get
called back than young black men with no criminal records.
When they do land the job, black applicants are routinely offered positions at lower salaries than comparably qualified whites.
Discrimination in lending, meanwhile — especially before the
housing crash — pushed black Americans into burdensome subprime mortgages even
when they qualified for better mortgages. That made them much more likely to
lose their homes in the Great Recession.
These factors help explain why the median net worth of white households is 13 times greater
than the median wealth of black households.
Our educational system is part of the problem. Since housing
discrimination disproportionately confines children of color to poorer
neighborhoods, they’re much more likely to attend underfunded schools. Even
within school districts, the whiter the school,the more experienced the teachers.
Given all these inequities, the prejudice African Americans face
in the criminal justice system is grimly predictable. Indeed, the mass
incarceration of black people plays a key role in maintaining the system
of white advantage.
For example, white and black people use and sell illegal drugs at about the same rates. Yet African
Americans are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana
possession — and 10 times more likely to go to state prison for drug
offenses.
Discriminatory practices play out through the entire criminal
justice enterprise.
Police stop black people with disproportionate frequency, and
these encounters aremuch more likely to be fatal than when whites are stopped
— even when the victim is unarmed. Black teens are shot dead by cops
at 21 times the rate of their white counterparts.
Even in mundane cases, prosecutors are more likely to let white suspects off with community
service instead of criminal charges than similarly situated blacks, and whites
get better plea bargains. Judges and juries sentence blacks more harshly when they have darker skin.
The result? A startling proportion of African Americans end up
with criminal records that effectively remove them from the competition for
good jobs. And a disturbing number end up dead.
If asked, most whites now reject the idea that African Americans
are inherently inferior. And they’re less likely to be caught uttering racist
epithets. But ending white supremacy will take a lot more than improving our
manners.
When “circumstances” eliminate non-white contenders for decent
employment, safe housing, and better schools, it’s easier for whites to
maintain their historic dominance. Even if we never asked anyone to
discriminate on our behalf, we whites are the silent beneficiaries.
It’s an unofficial form of affirmative action for white
people. No wonder Black Lives Matter activists and other people of color
are organizing to disrupt the established state of life in the United States.
If America is to “be America again,” as the black poet Langston
Hughes prayed, they’d better succeed. White supremacy has no business carrying
on for another century.
Mitchell
Zimmerman, a lawyer, worked with Julian Bond as a member of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. Distributed by OtherWords.org.