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February 8 - March 23, 2022
The requirement that we register to vote at all before Election Day did not become common until after the Civil War, when black people had their first chance at the franchise.
Alabama demanded photo IDs from voters, such as a driver’s license, and within a year, it closed thirty-one driver’s license offices, including in eight out of ten of the most populous black counties.
White people are the most segregated people in America. That’s a different way to think about what has perennially been an issue cast with the opposite die: people of color are those who are segregated, because the white majority separates out the black minority, excludes the Chinese, forces Indigenous Americans onto reservations, expels the Latinos.
The typical white person lives in a neighborhood that is at least 75 percent white.
No governments in modern history save Apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany have segregated as well as the United States has, with precision and under the color of law. (And even then, both the Third Reich and the Afrikaner government looked to America’s laws to create their systems.)
Recent Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago research has found, with a granular level of detail down to the city block, that the refusal to lend to black families under the original 1930s redlining maps is responsible for as much as half of the current disparities between black and white homeownership and for the gaps between the housing values of black and white homes in those communities.
In 2016, three-quarters of white people reported that their social network was entirely white.
Higher black-white segregation is correlated with billions in “lost income, lost lives, and lost potential” in Chicago. The city’s segregation costs workers $4.4 billion in income, and the area’s gross domestic product $8 billion.
The environmental justice movement has long established that industry and government decision makers are more likely to direct pollutants, ranging from toxic waste dumps to heavy truck traffic, into neighborhoods where people of color, especially black people, live.
Nationwide, overwhelmingly white public school districts have $23 billion more in funding than overwhelmingly of-color districts, resulting in an average of $2,226 more funding per student.
according to the real estate data firm ATTOM Data, which looked at 4,435 zip codes and found that homes in zip codes that had at least one elementary school with higher-than-average test scores were 77 percent more expensive than houses in areas without.
Families who can afford a house near a “good” school, in turn, get set up for a windfall of unearned cash: a 2016 report found that homeowners in zip codes with “good” schools “have gained $51,000 more in home value since purchase than homeowners in zips without ‘good’ schools.”
white students who attend diverse K–12 schools achieve better learning outcomes and even higher test scores,
But their minds are also improved when it comes to critical thinking and problem solving. Exposure to multiple viewpoints leads to more flexible and creative thinking and greater ability to solve problems.
While still in elementary school, white children begin to learn the unspoken rules of our segregated society, and they will no longer say aloud to a researcher who asks them to distribute new toys that “these kids should get them because they’re white.” Instead, they’ll come up with an explanation: “These [white] kids should get the new toys because they work harder.”
McCright and Dunlap wrote, “Conservative white males are likely to favor protection of the current industrial capitalist order which has historically served them well.”
So, people who score high in social dominance orientation…tend to see the world as a competitive triangle, where it’s natural and inevitable that hierarchies exist. And so, society shouldn’t do anything to reduce [those hierarchies], because there’s probably something in these groups who have a lower position that has caused their lower position.”
“That comes back to your social dominance orientation, right?” I asked. “If you’re in a society where you’ve already let someone go without shelter, then what does it matter if they drown? If it’s okay for people to suffer, then it’s okay for people to suffer.
America hasn’t had a truth-and-reconciliation process like other wounded societies have. Instead, it’s up to individuals to decide what they need to do in order to be good people in a white supremacist society—and it’s not easy. In the absence of moral leadership, there are just too many competing stories.
If those prejudices about a person’s skin color are negative—as they overwhelmingly are among white people regarding darker skin—they alert your amygdala, the section of the brain responsible for anxiety and other emotions, to flood your body with adrenaline in a fight-or-flight response.
Color-blind racism is an ideology that “explains contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics…[W]hites rationalize minorities’ contemporary status as the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and blacks’ imputed cultural limitations.” Such explanations “exculpate [white people] from any responsibility for the status of people of color.”
As Bonilla-Silva puts it, if racism is no longer actively limiting the lives of people of color, then their failure to achieve parity with whites in wealth, education, employment, and other areas must mean there is something wrong with them, not with the social systems that somehow always benefit white people the most.
A person who avoids the realities of racism doesn’t build the crucial muscles for navigating cross-cultural tensions or recovering with grace from missteps.
Denial leaves people ill-prepared to function or thrive in a diverse society. It makes people less effective at collaborating with colleagues, coaching kids’ sports teams, advocating for their neighborhoods, even chatting with acquaintances at social events.
In a 2019 public opinion survey, majorities of both black and white people said that being black makes it more difficult to get ahead in America. Yet only 56 percent of white respondents believed the corollary: that being white helps you get ahead.
Morally defending your position in a racially unequal society requires the fierce protection of your self-image as a person who earns everything you receive.
Black people constituted 28 percent of those killed, more than twice our presence in the population. Although 1.3 times more likely than white people to be unarmed, black people were three times more likely to be killed by police.
Among those in the United States arrested for criminal activity, the vast majority, 69 percent, is white. Yet white people constitute only about 28 percent of the people who appear on crime reports on TV news, while black people are dramatically overrepresented.
Yes, violent crime rates are higher in disinvested neighborhoods of color than in well-resourced white enclaves, but once you control for poverty, the difference disappears.
People often talk about putting a new racial lens on your work, but I found it was more like taking off blinders to see what we’d been conditioned not to see.
With targeted universalism, you set a universal policy goal and then develop strategies to achieve the goal that take into account the varied situations of the groups involved.
The maps have already been drawn, through racist redlining, so instead of ignoring them and the damage they wrought, we can target down payment assistance to longtime redlined residents, as Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren proposed in the 2020 presidential primary.
Still, having little to no intergenerational wealth and facing massive systemic barriers, descendants of a stolen people have given America the touch-tone telephone, the carbon filament in the lightbulb, the gas mask, the modern traffic light, blood banks, the gas furnace, open-heart surgery, and the mathematics to enable the moon landing. Just imagine the possibilities if—in addition to rebuilding the pathways for all aspirants to the American Dream—we gave millions more black Americans the life-changing freedom that a modest amount of wealth affords.
“One was a community racial history…this historical analysis of policy and place, of race, and the people from Indigenous times to present. And second was this community visioning process…this way of convening [a] multiracial, multifaceted group of people together, to come up with a shared community vision of how do we end this hierarchy of human value?”
