The state of race relations in the USA

Even as a black man is a serious contender for the Presidency, most black Americans are living in shitty conditions. That's the message that ECThompson sends in Worst Places to be Black at Mirror on America. Thompson focuses on racial disparities in prisons, and seems to attribute this to ongoing racism. While I can't fault him for holding that opinion, I think that the racial divide in America has much more to do with economic/social inertia arising from a history of racism in America.

A good starting point in this discussion is John's review of Tim Hartford's treatment of "statistical discrimination" and "rational racism" in Logic of Life. This discriminatory dynamic is based on the premise that a superficial trait like skin color can used as an indicator of a more important trait, such as social class (and everything that goes along with that).

One thing that has recently struck me as a layman economist is how America changed in the 1970s, both in terms of race relations and economics. In the "New Deal" era (1930's-1960's) white Americans were living in exceptional prosperity. A white man with a high-school education could get a well paying job in a factory, and those who wanted to pursue higher education could get extensive government support. As reviewed by Kevin Carson, while the New Deal policies were not overtly racist, they were applied to a country with racist infrastructure, which prevented blacks from benefiting from these policies.

Blacks were excluded from the high paying labor jobs, while also being excluded from the schools. This established a deep poverty within the black community, and a distrust of education. The state school system was viewed as a extension of an oppressive system (at best), and sometimes as a tool of oppression itself (see the lyrics to "take the power back" by Rage Against the Machine).

By the 1970's, most Americans decided that they were no longer interested in repressing blacks. Unfortunately, this is the very moment when high-paying factory jobs disappeared from America. Black Americans were left impoverished with few opportunities to climb up. Liberals enacted affirmative action programs to try to rectify this situation, but these policies were "unnatural" in a society that viewed itself as a meritocracy, and they were always politically fragile.

So now we've got what Charles Murray has described as a permanent (black) underclass, with a disdain for education in a society where that is the main path to economic success.

The impact of slavery and an additional hundred years or so of government oppression isn't something that fades away overnight. It's very frustrating to see people point to the existence of racism in modern America by focusing on some statistics, such as the rate of homeownership in the African American community, that could be explained by wealth and economic class.

I'm interesting in discussions of race relations in the context of Donna Edwards' primary victory and a rise of a Blackroots. See this article in The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=285221

If we count 1964 (the Civil Rights Act) as the end of the institutionalized/ideological racism in America, then we've only had 43 years in this "post-racist" America--and that doesn't even consider the time that it took (is taking) for racism to fade from American society. There has basically been one generation of adults who have lived in this post-racist society, and the second generation is just coming of age.

I think it's pretty clear that this is not enough time to build a healthy relationship between America's black and white communities. We'll definitely have to wait until the "racist" generations have passed away. It will take a lot longer that that if the powerful groups in our society ignore their responsibility for this dysfunctional relationship and just blame the historically repressed groups for all of their problems.

As applied to African-Americans, was actually coined by African-American academic William Julius Wilson, even before he wrote this book. Charles Murray aside, it has been a controversial term ever since.

Is it controversial because it is insulting or inaccurate? It does give the sense that we're talking about "them", but I don't know how else to deal with the fact that we live in a segregated society.

All I wanted to convey by the term is that there is a community of people with no access to the power structures of our society.

I myself have no problem with the term. To my mind, it is accurate, even if insulting and pejorative.

Racism will never be entirely eradicated, because we are tribal creatures. Some aspects of white culture disgust blacks and vice versa. (I work w/ a black woman who was a bit nervous about Caucasian moi meeting her sister, whom my co-worker says doesn't care much for whites.)

But back to the word "underclass," as a (literally) academic matter it originated with a prominent black sociologists, and some of his colleagues were greatly annoyed with him for it.

I was always told that the underclass specifically referred to the group of people who were so destitute and locked out of power that they didn't even vote. Since income is correlated with voting, there's got to be an income level that is a tipping point. Below that, you're more likely to not vote than vote, and those income levels represent the underclass. That's how it's been explained to me, at least.