Posted on 04/20/2014 9:08:59 AM PDT by Altura Ct.
Even if racism were wiped out tomorrow, we'd still need to address pervasive racial wealth inequality. Here's why
Although the Civil Rights Act, the landmark legislation which just reached its 50th anniversary, made great strides in desegregating the economy, economic discrimination is still widespread, and anti-discrimination legislation alone can never rectify the economic damage inflicted upon blacks by slavery and our Jim Crow apartheid regime. The Civil Rights Act was a mild reform, all things considered, but one conservatives fought with vigor and one many conservatives are still bitter about to this day.
When the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, the primary purpose was to root out discrimination in public accommodations (like hotels and movie theaters) and in employment. The former purpose–eliminating public accommodations discrimination–has received renewed attention from conservatives lately who find it to be an infringement on the rights of racist business owners to be racist. GOP favorite Rand Paul expressed this view in 2010 and Cato’s Ilya Shapiro expressed it just a few months ago on MSNBC.
These aren’t new concerns, of course. One white Nashville resident interviewed at the time of passage said the same thing about the Civil Rights Act: “I also think that it is in violation to my civil rights if someone can say you must serve me.” Nonetheless, it is telling that the embarrassment attached to claiming it is the racists who are the real victims in all of this has sufficiently subsided within the mainstream conservative movement that even GOP leaders are willing to reinvigorate the claim. I suppose that’s par for the course for a movement that’s also pushed the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act and pursued an intentional campaign of voter suppression that disproportionately targets blacks and other people of color.
Despite the fevered conservative protests over the extensive reach of the the Civil Rights Act, it has not totally succeeded in its aims. Lunch counters and hotels no longer outright ban blacks from service, a relatively easy thing to root out. But academic studies show that employment decisions continue to be made upon race-based lines.
For instance, in one 2003 study, a team of researchers sent nearly 5000 resumes to over 1,300 employment ads posted in newspapers in Chicago and Boston. The resumes were totally fake and otherwise identical except that some had black-sounding names on them while others had white-sounding names on them. The researchers found that the applications with white-sounding names on them received call backs 50 percent more often than the applications with black-sounding names on them. As things usually go with racist discrimination, it can be hard to pin down a particular given instance as motivated by racism, but the aggregate numbers do not lie.
Clearly, more progress needs to be made on the anti-discrimination front, but anti-discrimination, even if it were entirely successful, would still never be enough to rectify the economic harms inflicted by centuries of slavery and racial apartheid.
One of the consequences of the racial caste system that characterized American society prior to 1960 is that black families were prevented from accumulating economic wealth. Because wealth is the kind of thing that is passed down generations and the kind of thing that grows and grows, this initial racist starting point has opened up a yawning racial wealth gap that simply cannot be closed without intentional policy aimed at doing so.
In 2010, the median black family held around $16,000 in wealth, while the median white family held around $130,000. And this is not just a function of the fact that whites have higher incomes than blacks. Even when you control for income–comparing white and black families in the same income range–white families are three times wealthier than black families. The racial wealth disparities hold up and down the income ladder.
As Thomas Piketty’s groundbreaking book “Capital in the 21st Century” has detailed: wealth has a tendency in a capitalist economy to concentrate into the hands of a few and travel down generations through gifts and inheritances. Even if racism were wiped out tomorrow and equal treatment became the norm, it would never cease being the case that the average white person has more wealth than the average black person. We could equalize everything else in society, and racial wealth inequality–plus all of the political power disparities that accompany such a thing–would continue into perpetuity.
Thus, those actually serious about righting the wrongs of enslavement and Jim Crow apartheid must support more drastic leveling efforts. Beefed up anti-discrimination, which is both necessary and good, will not be enough. Ideally, we could work towards reparations in the form of redistributing wealth along racial lines. With that an unlikely possibility though, we can at least think about ways to redistribute wealth more generally from those with wealth to those without it, something that would have a similar, albeit more attenuated, effect as reparations given who the wealthy and non-wealthy happen to be.
If Republicans supported the Civil Rights Act, then they are bad, because it's a bad law.
If Republcians opposed the Civil Rights Act, then they are bad, because they are racist.
No.
Republicans wanted all people to be equal before the law. That is a worthy goal.
Republicans supported that.
Democrats opposed that.
We're the Good Guys.
Lets turn society into a racial slave tyrannocracy cuz Twinkie boy is outraged by The lack of Negro Investment Bankers!
Yay Genius Boy
The proof is in the pudding. As it stands now, as in reality, all this crap is anti-white. You can smell it and say it smells good but it is still a big pile of crap
We live in “interesting times” this is going to get much more interesting going forward. Pray for guidance.
In 2010, the median black family held around $16,000 in wealth, while the median white family held around $130,000. And this is not just a function of the fact that whites have higher incomes than blacks. Even when you control for income–comparing white and black families in the same income range–white families are three times wealthier than black families. The racial wealth disparities hold up and down the income ladder.
Did they control for single parent households? What is the wealth difference comparing black fatherless households with white fatherless households? How about black two-parent households vs. white two-parent households? But I have a feeling the answers to those questions would not follow Salon's party line that it is all the fault of white racism.
A second cause to investigate is the age of the households. You generally start piling up the household wealth in your fifties and early sixties. If the age of black households skews younger than whites, then you would expect less wealth because of that.
So the trillions of dollars that has been redistributed since the 1964 act is proof that unearned wealth is a sign of a righteous society
factors contributing to pervasive racial wealth inequality:
1. hip hop culture
2. 300 word vocabularies
3. inability to show up for work on time
4. entitlement attitude
5. arm long criminal record
I'm sure that the Obama Administration is all over this issue.
That only helps Obama and the racists.
Please get smarter about how politics works.
The “black-sounding” names communicate being raised by a mother on welfare. Being raised without a father we used to call being a bastard, until bastard became too harsh a characterization, and we shifted first to illegitimate and then to love-child and then to normal.
Many of these lib/lefty/socialists are in competition to display the most moral superiority as a form of one upmanship. Similar to a male peacock’s superior display of feathers enhances his mating abilities.
This dopey author obviously misses all the wealth redistribution going from whites to blacks and minorities via 0Kare, via various forms of welfare, via affirmative action preferences in education and the work place
BTW check out the lively comments at the source- Salon.com
If it were possible to redistribute wealth 100%, within less than a generation wealth would be accumulated by the same people who possess it now. The originality poor would revert to poverty. It is not unusual for an athlete to make over $100 million during his career and wind up flat broke. It is totally a matter of values. If you come into some money and the first thing you do is head for the nail salon and the dentist for that new gold tooth, you are not going to accumulate anything but stupidity. Asian merchants establish stores in the “food deserts” and by working 16 hours a day seven days a week become wealthy. I suspect that the author of this article could begin by redistributing his own wealth and still live comfortably. He will not because he is a fraud.
The real economic damage they're suffering from is the liberal Great Society programs which destroy the black family and discourage self-reliance.
George Orwell — ‘A humanitarian is always a hypocrite’
Orwell on the Hypocrisy of Humanitarians http://othermatters.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/readings-orwell-on-the-hypocrisy-of-humanitarians/
I am getting really tired of this BS being spewed by liberal twats. It will not end well.
Glaring limits of the Civil Rights Act: We need to redistribute wealth (Yep, he went there)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3144638/posts
Why don’t you just run and hide. I don’t give a crap what they say. You want to subject your children, family & community to all this ‘legal’ anti white BS? Just don’t expect others to lay down with you. I refuse to get on my knees all in the name of ‘civil rights’ .
We’ve already redistributed $17 trillion since the Great Society. I think we should stop the waste it has been. It’s ruined generations of blacks, destroying the family life that existed before and kept people engaged in useful lives. It is also ruining the nation.
If one wants to improve the situation two things must change. The first is to return to the moral structure black families had before the onset of LBJ’s Great Society. The second thing is to absolutely reject marxist democrat economic policies. Like America, the the real issue is moral not economic.
“DEMOCRAT” Jim Crow apartheid regime....fixed it.
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