Although racism and discrimination are treated as things of the past, racism is alive and well. It assumes a character different from South African apartheid or Jim Crow laws. Today’s racism is the great American blame campaign.
Blame welfare cheats (read: poor black mothers) for taxes, and blame immigrants for job loss. More generally the tendency is to blame the unemployed for unemployment, the uneducated for being uneducated, the homeless for not having a home … in short, blaming the victims. Furthermore, each of these sectors is disproportionately represented among blacks and Latinos.
Locally, 5.7 percent of Wisconsin is African-American and 3.6 percent Latino, yet blacks make up 2.3 percent of UW-Madison and Latinos 2.5 percent. National statistics show that African-Americans lag behind whites in every category. At its all-time low in 1999, unemployment for African-Americans was still double that of whites, and median income for blacks was $31,778 and $51,244 for whites. Blacks make up 50 percent of inmates and just 13 percent of the total population. We can explain the overrepresentation of minorities in prison, poverty, etc., in one of two ways. Either it’s their own fault, or we live in a racist society.
With rich white men like Rush Limbaugh or Tommy Thompson trumpeting ‘personal responsibility’ as the key to end the poverty and incarceration of blacks, it’s easy (and accurate) to dismiss their advice for what it is: racist victim-blaming. But when Bill Cosby did it, does it any less take the blame off a society that persistently discriminates against African-Americans?
Cosby, from his privileged position among the richest Americans, had the gall to lecture poor blacks: “With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all of that crap, and all of them are in jail … I can’t even talk the way these people talk, ‘Why you ain’t,’ ‘Where you is’ … You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth … The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.”
These attacks shift the blame off a racist system onto the victims of that system.
To counter the victim blaming, consider some employment statistics and the effects of our criminal justice system. At the end of the 1990s boom, those most affected by the economy’s downturn were black. As the New York Times reported in July last year, “Unemployment among blacks is rising at a faster pace than in any similar period since the mid-1970s.”
At the beginning of the ’90s the story was the same. Three large corporations’ layoffs are symptoms of a broader problem. The black workforce was 18 percent at Coca-Cola, 16 percent at Sears and 16 percent at J.P. Morgan. Yet blacks made up 42 percent, 54 percent and 30 percent, respectively, of those laid off by these three employers when the recession hit.
A study at the University of Chicago showed that job applicants with “black sounding” names — such as Tyrone or Tamika — are twice as likely not to hear back as applicants with “white sounding” names. In addition, young blacks are 48 times more likely than whites to be sent to prison on drug charges, despite similar rates of use. This is the racist discrimination that our society propagates, and all the personal responsibility in the world will not fix it.
Beyond these examples of blatant discrimination, blacks continue to face the effects of slavery and Jim Crow segregation years after their abolition. While ideologues of the right dismiss this claim with the weakest substantiation, the evidence is stacked against them.
Just as wealth and political influence are carried through generations (due to social, not genetic, inheritance), so is the lack thereof. The proof is in the crumbling, understaffed schools of the inner city, the lack of free public childcare for poor single mothers, and the increasing cost of higher education (which reminds me: thanks, Board of Regents!).
Our government needs to take positive active steps (affirmative action, if you will) to undo the self-propagating effects of the current racism in society. (Re)winning such demands is going to take making such demands. As the anniversary of Rosa Parks’ arrest comes Dec. 2, we are reminded of the strategies that work to win equality.
Our campus under-educates Wisconsin’s African-Americans, and local bars prohibit do-rags, sideways hats and athletic jerseys (read: black people).
We should celebrate Rosa Parks’ anniversary with some direct action of our own (I’m accepting suggestions). Frederick Douglass, after all, never said, “Power concedes nothing without a please and thank you”… but rather “without a demand!”
Chris Dols ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in civil engineering and a member of the International Socialist Organization.
