Asian Americans — some of them at least — have made tremendous progress in the United States. But the greatest thing that ever happened to them wasn't that they studied hard, or that they benefited from tiger moms or Confucian values. It's that other Americans started treating them with a little more respect.

Today, the 'model minority' concept both fascinates and upsets precisely because it offers an unambiguous yet inaccurate blueprint for solving the nation's most pressing issues. The obstacles Americans face in the global economy, our declining prospects for socioeconomic mobility and the uncertainty of parenting in difficult times — all are real challenges. But 'culture' cannot explain 'success' any more than it can serve as a panacea for the dilemmas of the new millennium.

As racial tensions mounted in this country during the '60s, the 'model minority' narrative was constructed by mainstream [...] media to de-legitimize claims of racism, particularly from African Americans. African Americans and Asian Americans have often been pitted against one another to deflect a fuller examination of systemic racism.

'Racism that Asian-Americans have experienced is not what black people have experienced,' Kim said. '[...] Asians have faced various forms of discrimination, but never the systematic dehumanization that black people have faced during slavery and continue to face today.' Asians have been barred from entering the U.S. and gaining citizenship and have been sent to incarceration camps, Kim pointed out, but all that is different than the segregation, police brutality and discrimination that African-Americans have endured.

Hilger recently used old census records to trace the fortunes of whites, blacks and Asians who were born in California during the early- to mid-20th century. He found that educational gains had little to do with how Asian Americans managed to close the wage gap with whites by the 1970s. Instead, his research suggests that society simply became less racist toward Asians.

Asians achieved extraordinary upward mobility relative to blacks and whites for every cohort born in California since 1920. This mobility stemmed primarily from gains in earnings conditional on education, rather than unusual educational mobility. Historical test score and prejudice data suggest low initial earnings for Asians, unlike blacks, reflected prejudice rather than skills. Post-war declines in discrimination interacting with previously uncompensated skills can account for Asians’ extraordinary upward mobility.

Since the relative labor force participation of Asians either remained constant or increased between 1960 and 1980, the rise in Asian relative earnings cannot be attributed to declining Asian labor force participation relative to whites. Asian/white differences in entrepreneurial and agricultural employment, English proficiency, foreign versus U.S.-born parentage, geographic concentration and enclave activity also fail to explain the 1960 wage gap and its subsequent narrowing. Subject to further work on Asian/white schooling quality, our findings suggest that antiAsian labor market discrimination was the predominate cause of the 1960 adjusted wage gap and that much of the subsequent rise in the relative earnings of U.S.-born Asian men was likely the result of a decline in anti-Asian labor market discrimination.

By the 1960s, the concept of strong, disciplined families became the basis of the new racial stereotype of Chinese Americans as 'model minorities': domestic exemplars, upwardly mobile and politically docile. In the midst of the black freedom movement of the 1960s, numerous politicians and academics and the mainstream media contrasted Chinese with African Americans. They found it expedient to invoke Chinese 'culture' to counter the demands of civil rights and black power activists for substantive change.

[...] income is one key area where aggregated figures are deceiving. More specifically, despite having the highest median income of any racial group, Asian Americans also have the largest income gap of any racial group. As of 2016, the top 10th percentile of Asian Americans earns 10.7 times as much as the bottom 10th percentile, compared with 9.8 for black earners and 7.8 for both Hispanic and white earners. Indeed, in New York City, Asians experience the highest poverty rates of any immigrant group. The fact that the richest 10th percentile of Asian Americans are earning more than that of any other racial group, however, is enough to render these disparities virtually invisible.

Washington Post

NBER

Los Angeles Times

Harvard Law

AAPIP

Asian Americans have been incredibly successful, so racism cannot be the cause of African Americans' strife.

Black people care just as much about racial disparities in policing as they do violence within their communities. And violence within their communities is too often tied to structural inequalities that racist policing perpetuates.

Ninety percent of black murder victims are killed by black assailants [...] White people kill one another, too. Eighty-three percent of white victims are killed by white assailants. See, the vast majority of violent crime is committed within — not between — racial groups. Crime is a matter of proximity and opportunity [...] So another term for 'black on black' crime is, crime.

A recent YouGov survey of 1,000 Americans underscored what many black Americans have long argued — that police brutality and crime are not mutually exclusive concerns. While 64 percent of respondents believe intracommunal violence is a bigger problem for black Americans than racial justice in the criminal justice system, the results diverged when race factors in: 71 percent of white respondents share this belief, compared with 42 percent of black respondents. But the degree to which black Americans diverge is also important: Black respondents in the YouGov survey are concerned more with violence within the community, but only slightly more so [...] This suggests that black Americans may not prioritize the issues the same way, but it doesn't mean they discount either of them.

When black people commit crimes against black people, they face prosecution, but when police officers (or certain neighborhood watchmen) commit crimes against black people, they face getting off with little if any punishment.

A report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that most violence occurs between victims and offenders of the same race, regardless of race: 57 percent of the nearly 3.7 million reported violent crimes committed against white victims were perpetrated by white offenders; while of the 850,720 reported violent crimes committed against black victims, 63 percent were committed by black people. Nor is there an epidemic of black-on-black violence: the rate of both black-on-black and white-on-white nonfatal violence declined 79 percent between 1993 and 2015.

[...] the Bureau of Justice Statistics' arrest data analysis tool shows that less than 1 percent of blacks overall (about 2 percent of black men) commit a violent crime in any given year. This means, factoring in interracial violent offenses, 99 percent of black men do not commit black-on-black crime.

blm1

Annotation 2020-06-05 145008

Miami Herald

Vera

The Root

YouGov

Mapping Police Violence

Black people are responsible for more killings of black people than the police.

Slavery's long legal existence created the American caste system that endures today, one that maintains a false white superiority and black inferiority built on an unfair education system, unfair employment system and social institutions that support this notion while appropriating black language, music and fashion.

Affirmative action, however prudently employed, can never be anything more than a marginal instrument for addressing the nation's unfinished racial business. But the proponents of colorblind policy who bill their crusade against “preferences” as the Second Coming of the civil rights movement display a ludicrous sense of misplaced priorities. They make a totem of ignoring race, even as the social isolation of the urban black poor reveals how important “color” continues to be in American society.

Welfare, subsidized housing, affirmative action, and other previous efforts to address socio-economic problems of the black underclass have been too little and too late. They failed because society has failed to come to grips with the central problem--its own racism and discrimination. In some cases, social programs, though well-intentioned, actually increased black isolation and further degraded the black community. In addition, these programs benefitted other groups, not just blacks. By doing so, they failed to address the unique claims based on slavery that African-Americans have.

The indisputable fact is that the condition of millions of African-Americans today is directly related to centuries of both governmental and business policies that have worked in concert to ensure that they remained at the lowest strata of the society. Concomitantly, both this government and private business have shown no compunction whatsoever about enjoying the fruits of the labor of these individuals.

Slavery endures in a legal system that allows black voter suppression and housing restrictions and education policies that continue to make life harder for blacks than whites in America. Slavery endures in an injustice system that continues to jail more black men than white people for the same crimes.

American slavery [...] was a massive institution that shaped and defined the political economy of colonial America, and later, the United States [...] this institution left a profound legacy for the descendants of enslaved Africans, who even after emancipation were subject to almost a century of violence, disenfranchisement, and pervasive oppression, with social, economic, and cultural effects that persist to the present.

Despite the continued debate and legal wrangling over whether college affirmative action efforts are too aggressive, black and Hispanic freshmen were more underrepresented at the nation’s top schools in 2015 than they were in 1980 [...] many admissions officials say that affirmative action as it is traditionally understood — taking race into consideration when assessing applications — falls short as a diversity strategy, and that farther-reaching efforts are needed to recruit a student body that even comes close to reflecting the country’s demographics. Nationwide, 15 percent of 18-year-olds were black and 22 percent were Hispanic in 2015, according to federal data. At the elite colleges examined by The Times, 6 percent of noninternational freshmen were black and 13 percent were Hispanic.

Many conversations around the depletion of black wealth point towards false narratives about the work ethic of African Americans. This is a myth — studies show that college-educated black families have less wealth than high school-educated white families. And single-parent white families are twice as wealthy as two-parent black families. The Institute for Policy Studies concludes that these outcomes are not the result of individual behavior, but the result of black Americans having fewer resources to begin with — resources they've been denied for 400 years, ever since the first slaves were kidnapped from Africa and brought to America to provide free, strenuous, and valuable labor.

[...] across the US counties, the current degree of educational inequality, along the racial dimension, can be traced to the intensity of slavery before the Civil War. In other words, those counties that in the past have been more heavily affected by slave labor show a higher degree of racial educational inequality in the present day. Moreover, the data uncover a persistent effect of slavery on the degree of per capita income inequality. On the contrary, the legacy of slavery has no explanatory power for the current level of income per capita. Finally, we show that the driver of income inequality is racial inequality, which is in turn linked to slavery through its impact on the racial gap in education.

USA Today

Slate

New York Times

Brookings

Black people aren't slaves anymore and even have the advantage of policies like Affirmative Action, so they have no excuse not to succeed.

[...] employers' general reluctance to discuss the criminal record of an applicant appears especially harmful for black ex-offenders. Overall, these results point to the importance of rapport-building for finding work, something that the stigmatizing characteristics of minority and criminal status make more difficult to achieve.

The seemingly symbiotic relationship between structural racism and inequality, especially in education, 'impedes [African Americans'] ability to be employed in gainful employment that provides a living wage or even decent wage,' says James, and it 'stifles hope for hope” for African Americans.'

'I think a lot of people are really attracted to stories about personal uplift or social mobility, but these are very exceptional cases,' he said. 'That's not the norm. Most people who are born into deprived circumstances do not really have the capacity or support to come out of those deprived circumstances.'

Our estimates reveal that there are small significant differences between black and non-Hispanic white males in time spent not working at work, and disappear entirely when imposing a lower bound of one minute for respondents who only report, perhaps falsely and/or in error, spending zero time at work not working. An implication of our findings is that black-white male differences in the fraction of the workday spent not working are either not large enough to partially explain the black-white wage gap, or simply do not exist at all.

White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of a better resume. For White names, a higher quality resume elicits 30 percent more callbacks whereas for African Americans, it elicits a far smaller increase [...] The amount of discrimination is uniform across occupations and industries. Federal contractors and employers who list 'Equal Opportunity Employer' in their ad discriminate as much as other employers. We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names. These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature of the labor market.

People of all races and socioeconomic levels are distasteful of laziness and disapprove of people who game the system. But stereotypical notions that take a broad brush to paint entire groups of people in a negative light simply don’t match reality. The fact that more than 90 percent of entitlement and other mandatory spending is directed toward the elderly, the seriously disabled, or poor working families debunks the myth about lazy beneficiaries. This is why calls for more work-requirement proposals simply don’t make sense.

One of the latest studies on the subject found that Medicaid has 'little if any' impact on employment or work hours. In research based in Canada and the U.S., the economist Ioana Marinescu at the University of Pennsylvania has found that even when basic-income programs do reduce working hours, adults don’t typically stay home to, say, play video games; instead, they often use the extra cash to go back to school or hold out for a more desirable job.

[...] a criminal record reduces the likelihood of a callback or job offer by nearly 50 percent (28 [for white applicants] vs. 15 percent [for black applicants]). Second, the negative effect of a criminal conviction is substantially larger for blacks than for whites [...] the magnitude of the criminal record penalty suffered by black applicants (60 percent) is roughly double the size of the penalty for whites with a record (30 percent). This interaction between race and criminal record is large and statistically significant, which indicates that the penalty of a criminal record is more disabling for black job seekers than whites [...] Employers, already reluctant to hire blacks, appear particularly wary of blacks with known criminal histories.

In fact, since 1979, the gaps between black and white workers have grown the most among workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher—the most educated workers. More school will certainly increase wages, but education alone is not enough to overcome the effects of racial discrimination in pay.

Annotation 2020-06-07 195450

American Progress

The Atlantic

NCBI

The Guardian

MSNBC

Black people's culture of laziness and violence explains why they aren't as successful as white people or other people of color.

'We’ve lost the faith in cops as have so many people. Why? Because quotas and the quest for data forces police officers to engage in conduct that they normally would not engage in. It’s a matter of survival, job survival on many levels, and it’s important for us to realize that we expose our brave men and women to increased liability by engaging in racial profiling or biased policing.'

Study after study after study has found that police are more likely to search black motorists after a traffic stop, even though those same studies found that white motorists are far more likely to be in possession of illicit drugs or weapons. This is true all over the country — in North Carolina, in St. Louis, in Vermont, in Nashville, in Milwaukee, in San Diego and in Boston.

Chicago police officers used more force against black citizens, on average, than any other race—even though black citizens tended to exercise less resistance than whites. Under the same circumstances and faced with the same level of danger, cops tended to resolve the situation without firing their weapons much more often for white citizens than black citizens [...] The disparities were especially pronounced in the use of lethal force. According to the analysis of the police reports, black subjects were deemed to present a deadly threat to police officers slightly more often than whites. But when faced with a white subject deemed to present a deadly threat, officers used lethal force in just 28 percent of cases. Meanwhile, officers fired upon black subjects in 43 percent of similar situations.

The Plain View Project [...] examined the accounts of about 2,900 officers from eight departments across the country and an additional 600 retired officers from those same departments [...] compiled posts that represented troubling conduct in a database that is replete with racist imagery and memes, and in some cases long, vitriolic exchanges involving multiple officers [...] sought to compile posts, comments, and other public activity that could undermine public trust in the police and reinforce the views of critics, especially in minority communities, that the police are not there to protect them. Of the pages of officers whom the Plain View researchers could positively identify, about 1 in 5 of the current officers, and 2 in 5 of the retired officers, made public posts or comments that met that threshold — typically by displaying bias, applauding violence, scoffing at due process, or using dehumanizing language.

[...] while rates of drug use are similar across racial and ethnic groups, black people are arrested and sentenced on drug charges at much higher rates than white people. Bias by decision makers at all stages of the justice process disadvantages black people. Studies have found that they are more likely to be stopped by the police, detained pretrial, charged with more serious crimes, and sentenced more harshly than white people.

For the city of San Diego, the 2018 data showed that black people accounted for 19% of all stops by the San Diego police last year even though only 6% of the city’s population is black. Black people were 25% more likely to be searched, 8% more likely to be arrested without a warrant and 59% more likely to have force used against them during a stop [...] In San Francisco, SFPD now stops black people at rates over five times their representation in the city’s overall population, according to the 2018 data.

[...] in the context of a nation that had a War on Drugs, racial profiling was more of a problem for Blacks because police looked for drugs primarily among them, which caused a disproportionate number of Blacks to be arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and incarcerated [...] 'This leads to more African Americans in jails and prisons, a fact that only serves to reinforce the false perception that blacks are primarily responsible for the drug and overall crime problem in the country. [However] studies across the country began to show that African Americans were two or three times more likely to be pulled over and searched, yet no more likely to be engaged in any criminal activity than white Americans.'

While low-income and minority neighborhoods are often subject to heavy police patrol regardless of their development status, gentrification and aggressive policing are two sides of the same coin and tend to reinforce one another. 'The concern when there are misdemeanor offenses is that neighborhoods seem unsafe or disorderly and that decreases their attractiveness for gentrification,' Butler said. 'So in a number of cities, people have observed that enforcement of low-level offenses against black and brown people increases when neighborhoods are prime for gentrification.'

Buzzfeed News

CP Justice

Christian Post

Cops are harder on black people because black people commit more crimes.

Any 'analysis' of police killings will of course show that in absolute numbers, more white people are killed in police shootings than black people, because (non-Hispanic) whites comprise a roughly five times greater share of the U.S. population (62% vs. 13%). So any 'analysis' that is based on nothing more than absolute numbers and does not take demographics into account is inaccurate and misleading.

[Of the 812 fatalities] resulting from use of lethal force by on-duty [law enforcement... victims] were majority white (52%) but disproportionately black (32%) with a fatality rate 2.8 times higher among blacks than whites.

[...] the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 30 fatal shootings per million of the population as of June 2020.

Police killed 1,098 people in 2019 [...] Black people were 24% of those killed despite being only 13% of the population.

According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are black people. White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.

21872

AJPM

Statista

Snopes

Cops kill more white people than black people.

A riot may be temporary violence, quick and dirty, but it could become a revolution. And though slow and long-lasting, when it is fully mature, a revolution is irrefutable change.

Historians and experts argue that these types of riots aren't solely random acts of violence or people taking advantage of dire circumstances to steal and destroy property. They are, instead, a serious attempt at forcing change after years of neglect by politicians, media, and the general public. 'All of these politicians that get completely overwhelmed and outraged from this level of chaos in their cities during these upheavals seem surprised,' Heather Ann Thompson, a historian at the University of Michigan who's studied America's 1960s riots, previously told me. 'Yet … the origins of the upheaval are very much in their control.'

Whereas riots are often galvanizing community events with the potential to unleash concerted political energy in dynamic and unpredictable directions, the stale politics of respectability only leads to further marginalization and dislocation. Now, it's possible to disagree with the utility of insurrection. But these communities' responses to subjugation must be discussed in political terms and not simply dismissed out of hand. We live in a context of white supremacy and neoliberal capitalism, where race-neutral policies are being used to maintain class exploitation and racial hierarchy, and any overt attempts to address racism are being dismantled or disregarded. These policies only intensify the economic dislocation and poverty experienced by those at the margins. What both the local news interviewees and the crowd at the scene of Brown’s death seemed to understand was that they needed to disrupt the interplay between racial subjugation and capitalism. They felt that a march or some other acceptable form of benign indignation would not address their political needs — and they weren’t wrong.

Many people are asking if violence is a valid means of producing social change. The hard and historical answer is yes. Riots have a way of magnifying not merely the flaws in the system, but also the strength of those in power. The American Revolution was won with violence. The French Revolution was won with violence. The Haitian Revolution was won with violence. The Civil War was won with violence. A revolution in today’s terms would mean that these nationwide rebellions lead to black people being able to access and exercise the fullness of their freedom and humanity.

A clever analysis [...] by economists from Harvard University and Stockholm University finds that protests do in fact have a major influence on politics, just not in the way you might think. Their research shows that protest does not work because big crowds send a signal to policy-makers—rather, it’s because protests get people politically activated.

Drawing on historical evidence, statistical data, and detailed interviews about protest activity since the 1960s, Daniel Gillion shows that electoral districts with protest activity are more likely to see increased voter turnout at the polls. Surprisingly, protest activities are also moneymaking endeavors for electoral politics, as voters donate more to political candidates who share the ideological leanings of activists. Finally, protests are a signal of political problems, encouraging experienced political challengers to run for office and hurting incumbents' chances of winning reelection.

The bloodless revolution that swept through the Middle East during the 2011 Arab Spring was triggered and sustained by young people and university students willing to march and raise their voices in unison, while using social media to advance their concerns and aims.

The 1960s unrest [...] led to the Kerner Commission, which reviewed the cause of the uprisings and pushed reforms in local police departments. The changes to police ended up taking various forms: more active hiring of minority police officers, civilian review boards of cases in which police use force, and residency requirements that force officers to live in the communities they police [...] Similarly, in Los Angeles, the 1992 riots led the Los Angeles Police Department to implement reforms that put more emphasis on community policing and diversity. The reforms appear to have worked, to some extent: Surveys from the Los Angeles Times found approval of the LAPD rose from 40 percent in 1991 to 77 percent in 2009 — although approval among Hispanic and black residents was lower, at 76 percent and 68 percent respectively.

Throughout the civil rights era, massive non-violent civil disobedience campaigns were matched with massive riots. The most famous of these was the Watts rebellion of 1965 but they occurred in dozens of cities across the country. To argue that the movement achieved what it did in spite of rather than as a result of the mixture of not-non-violent and non-violent action is spurious at best. And, lest we forget, Martin Luther King Jr., the man who embodied the respectable non-violent voice that the white power structure claims they would listen to today, was murdered by that same white power structure anyway.

[...] the event now referred to as the Stonewall riots or uprising has become a powerful symbol of gay liberation. The incident catalyzed protests across the country about how the police treated the LGBTQ community and marked a turning point in the gay rights movement in the United States.

Quartz

The Loud Minority

National Geographic

The New Inquiry

Stanford News

Jacobin

Protests accomplish nothing, especially if rioting and looting are involved.

To deliver up bodies destined for profitable punishment, the political economy of prisons relies on racialized assumptions of criminality – such as images of black welfare mothers reproducing criminal children – and on racist practices in arrest, conviction, and sentencing patterns. Colored bodies constitute the main human raw material in this vast experiment to disappear the major social problems of our time. Once the aura of magic is stripped away from the imprisonment solution, what is revealed is racism, class bias, and the parasitic seduction of capitalist profit.

[...] structural racism continues to disproportionately segregate communities of color from access to opportunity and upward mobility by making it more difficult for people of color to secure quality education, jobs, housing, healthcare, and equal treatment in the criminal justice system.

Through an overt practice of denying mortgages based upon race and ethnicity, the FHA played a significant role in the legalization and institutionalization of racism and segregation [...] The FHA also explicitly practiced a policy of 'redlining' when determining which neighborhoods to approve mortgages in. Redlining is the practice of denying or limiting financial services to certain neighborhoods based on racial or ethnic composition without regard to the residents' qualifications or creditworthiness.

Although the most blatant forms of housing discrimination (refusing to meet with a minority homeseeker or provide information about any available units) have declined since the first national paired-testing study in 1977, the forms of discrimination that persist (providing information about fewer units) raise the costs of housing search for minorities and restrict their housing options.

Disparities in homeownership are a major driver of the racial wealth gap, according to a recent study from Brandeis University. According to the authors of the report, 'redlining [a form of discrimination in banking or insurance practices], discriminatory mortgage-lending practices, lack of access to credit, and lower incomes have blocked the homeownership path for African-Americans while creating and reinforcing communities segregated by race.'

In 2008, [...] black men earned only 71% of what white men earned [..] even after taking educational attainment into account, black men are overrepresented in low-wage jobs and underrepresented in high-wage jobs. Neither hard skills, soft skills, nor black men’s occupational interests provide convincing explanations for black male sorting into low-wage occupations. The most plausible explanation we find is that labor market discrimination excludes many black men from high- wage jobs. Therefore, effectively combating employment discrimination will contribute significantly to closing the racial earnings gap and improving the socioeconomic position of black families and black communities.

[...] distribution of just 5 grams of crack carries a minimum 5-year federal prison sentence, while for powder cocaine, distribution of 500 grams – 100 times the amount of crack cocaine – carries the same sentence [...] the current 100:1 drug quantity ratio promotes unwarranted disparities based on race. Because of its relative low cost, crack cocaine is more accessible for poor Americans, many of whom areAfrican Americans. Conversely, powder cocaine is much more expensive and tends to be used by more affluent white Americans. Nationwide statistics compiled by the Sentencing Commission reveal that African Americans are more likely to be convicted of crack cocaine offenses,while whites are more likely to be convicted of powder cocaine offenses. Thus, the sentencing disparities punishing crack cocaine offenses more harshly than powder cocaine offenses unjustly and disproportionately penalize African American defendants for drug trafficking comparable tothat of white defendants. Compounding the problem is the fact that whites are disproportionately less likely to be prosecuted for drug offenses in the first place; when prosecuted, are more likely to be acquitted; and even if convicted, are much less likely to be sent to prison.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2011 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) found 23 percent of all high school students report using marijuana in the past 30 days, including 25 percent of black students and 22 percent of white students. Thirty-two percent of high school students reported that they were offered, sold, or given an illegal drug by someone on school property in the past 12 months, including 33 percent for black and white students alike [...] At the beginning of the 1980s, black and white youth were arrested at roughly equivalent rates, approximately one in 300. The War on Drugs changed that. Through the 1980s, the arrest rate for black youth increased more than 350 percent even as the arrest rate for white juveniles declined. By 1991, a black juvenile was 579 percent more likely to be arrested for a drug offense than a white teenager.

In the U.S. criminal justice system, for example, thousands of children are sent to adult correctional facilities every year [...] Relative to peers sent to juvenile facilities, children who are sentenced as adults are twice as likely to be assaulted by a correctional officer, five times as likely to be sexually assaulted, and eight times as likely to commit suicide [...] These outcomes are particularly worrisome for Black children, who are 18 times more likely than White children to be sentenced as adults and who represent 58% of children sentenced to adult facilities [...]

Black male offenders received sentences on average 19.1 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders [...] Black male offenders received sentences on average 20.4 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders, accounting for violence in an offender’s past in fiscal year 2016, the only year for which such data is available. This figure is almost the same as the 20.7 percent difference without accounting for past violence.

Black home buyers—even after controlling for factors like creditworthiness—were still more likely than white home buyers to be steered toward subprime loans. Decades of racist housing policies by the American government, along with decades of racist housing practices by American businesses, had conspired to concentrate African Americans in the same neighborhoods [...] In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to The New York Times, affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as 'mud people' and to their subprime products as 'ghetto loans.'

In 2015, 27.4% of black applicants and 19.2% of Hispanic applicants were denied mortgages, compared with about 11% of white and Asian applicants, according to our analysis of data gathered under the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. In fact, throughout the boom, bust and recovery phases of the housing cycle, blacks have been denied home loans at higher rates than most other racial groups (the exception being Native Americans, and even then only in the last few years), and Hispanics have been denied at higher rates than non-Hispanics.

Annotation 2020-06-08 194813

Boston Fair Housing

US HUD

ACLU

Sentencing Project

USSC

Pew Research

ColorLines

Urban

Racism is just a mindset, not a systemic tool of oppression.

White people become more likely to move through the world with an expectation that their needs be readily met. People of color move through the world knowing their needs are on the margins. Recognizing this means recognizing where gaps exist [...] Just as people of color did nothing to deserve this unequal treatment, white people did not 'earn' disproportionate access to compassion and fairness. They receive it as the byproduct of systemic racism and bias.

White privilege is the pervasive, structural, and generally invisible assumption that white people define a norm and Black people are 'other,' dangerous, and inferior. Peggy McIntosh observes that privilege can 'take both active forms, which we can see, and embedded forms, which as a member of the dominant group one is taught not to see.'

We must ask how we participate in not seeing the experiences of people of color that are so very different from white people's. We should question our resoluteness to identify class rather than race as the primary determinant of opportunity and experience, particularly when there is so much evidence to the contrary. In short, white people can continue to use unearned privilege to remain ignorant, or we can determine to put aside our opacities in order to see clearly and live differently. As Harvey Cox said in The Secular City, 'Not to decide is to decide.'

White privilege is not the suggestion that white people have never struggled [... and] is not the assumption that everything a white person has accomplished is unearned; most white people who have reached a high level of success worked extremely hard to get there. Instead, white privilege should be viewed as a built-in advantage, separate from one’s level of income or effort.

[...] claiming more life hardships can serve to help deny the presence of white privilege in one’s personal life, despite life hardships not being relevant to white privilege as a general construct [...] It is plausible from this perspective that increased claims of hardship, and the absence of personal privilege could serve as a self-affirmation mechanism that an individual is an exception to the privileged majority [...] as well as serving to maintain the material benefits that are concomitant with racial privilege.

[Black youths] can expect to be treated as young criminals by their teachers, given harsher sentences (longer suspensions, quicker expulsions, etc., both of which remove them from school and expose them to the gang element in their neighborhood). They can expect to be arrested, charged, convicted, and imprisoned for offenses that a large percentage of whites consider part of “being a teenager” or a college student. They can expect stiffer charges, higher conviction rates, and longer sentences.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal system black offenders receive sentences that are 10% longer than white offenders for the same crimes.  Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project reports African Americans are 21% more likely to receive mandatory minimum sentences than white defendants and 20% more like to be sentenced to prison than white drug defendants.

Most white people can tell wonderful, funny, imaginative stories about how we danced out of a legitimate traffic tickets. That is white privilege. A growing scholarly and academic literature documents the phenomena of DWB, or driving while black. These studies suggest that when Blacks -- especially men and young people -- get behind the wheel, they can expect to be stopped, even if they obey the lights and the speed limits. A recent decision by a federal district court in Massachusetts recognized the reality of DWB.

Advocate BLM

Providing objectivity in the fight for Black Lives Matter.

Asian Americans have been incredibly successful, so racism cannot be the cause of African Americans' strife.

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Black people aren't slaves anymore and even have the advantage of policies like Affirmative Action, so they have no excuse not to succeed.

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Cops are harder on black people because black people commit more crimes.

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Protests accomplish nothing, especially if rioting and looting are involved.

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White privilege doesn't exist.

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Black people are responsible for more killings of black people than the police.

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Black people's culture of laziness and violence explains why they aren't as successful as white people or other people of color.

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Cops kill more white people than black people.

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Racism is just a mindset, not a systemic tool of oppression.

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Advocate .css-ss5z4k{font-weight:900;-webkit-text-fill-color:#212121;-webkit-text-stroke-width:1px;-webkit-text-stroke-color:#f5f5f5;}BLM

Providing objectivity in the fight for Black Lives Matter.

Asian Americans have been incredibly successful, so racism cannot be the cause of African Americans' strife.

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Black people aren't slaves anymore and even have the advantage of policies like Affirmative Action, so they have no excuse not to succeed.

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Cops are harder on black people because black people commit more crimes.

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Protests accomplish nothing, especially if rioting and looting are involved.

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White privilege doesn't exist.

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Black people are responsible for more killings of black people than the police.

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Black people's culture of laziness and violence explains why they aren't as successful as white people or other people of color.

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Cops kill more white people than black people.

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Racism is just a mindset, not a systemic tool of oppression.

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Advocate BLM