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African American Princeton professor Eddie S. Glaude Jr. calls “the value gap” in his book Democracy in Black: race relations in the US are built upon a chronic undervaluation of black bodies in comparison to white ones, and this disparity in value undermines all the civil-rights progress that was made in the last century.
“If you constantly tell a child it’s good-for-nothing, lazy, thieving, and ugly. If you hit that child and treat it without respect its whole life. What kind of person will it become? What do you think that child will do? We are that child. Four hundred years of abuse, pain, and murder have made us what we are today. Beautiful, terrible, dysfunctional, and strong.”
Invisible Man—Ralph Ellison’s
The United States has about 5 percent of the world’s population but almost 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Resignation and nihilism are an epidemic among young black people. Life is lived and extinguished daily under the mark of violence and drugs, in the relentless pursuit of money and the battle to survive. Of the nearly 2.2 million prisoners in the US, almost 40 percent are black. Nowhere is structural racism more evident than in the US prison system. Black people are five times more likely to end up behind bars than white people are.
It’s easier to dehumanize people if you never sit in the same room or take a meal under the same roof with them.
I am just as far removed from the suffering that hides in the creation of my iPhone, my shirts, my plastic bowls from IKEA, the wine and espresso I drink, and the chocolate and bananas I eat. Is my ignorance and guilt as great, my blinders as thick, as those of people in the past? Did they even know what lay behind the dearly acquired bowl of sugar on their table or the cotton of their tablecloths?
