Black Poverty and White Privilege
Black Americans are statistically three times as likely to live in poverty as white Americans, statistically more likely to end up in prison, and statistically less likely to graduate from high school and college. But this is hardly new; every long-term form of legally mandated racism in the history of the world has resulted in social stratification that outlived the original laws and motives that created it.
Isaac Newton's First Law of Motion applies: In society, as in physics, an object in motion tends to stay in motion. It is no longer necessary for the law to mandate segregation and oppression; after 480 years, it has taken on a life of its own. In order to fight this old tradition of social stratification, we must embrace and promote the contemporary civil rights agenda.
- Read more: Institutional Racism
Challenges to Affirmative Action
Affirmative action programs have been controversial since their inception, and they remain so. But most of what people find objectionable about affirmative action isn't central to the concept; the "no quotas" argument against affirmative action is still being used to challenge a series of initiatives that don't necessarily involve mandatory quotas.
- Read more: What is Affirmative Action?
Race and the Criminal Justice System
In his book Taking Liberties, Human Rights Watch co-founder and former ACLU executive director Aryeh Neier described the criminal justice system's treatment of low-income black Americans as the single greatest civil liberties concern in our country today. The United States currently imprisons over 2.2 million people--about one quarter of Earth's prison population. Approximately one million of these 2.2 million prisoners are African-American.
Low-income African Americans are targeted at every step of the criminal justice process. They are subject to racial profiling by officers, increasing the odds that they will be arrested; they are given inadequate counsel, increasing the odds that they will be convicted; having fewer assets to tie them to the community, they are more likely to be denied bond; and then they are sentenced more harshly by judges. Black defendants convicted of drug-related offenses, on average, serve 50 percent more time in prison than whites convicted of the same offenses. In America, justice isn't blind; it isn't even color-blind.