Racism in America
As Attorney General William Barr recently repeated to the press, “History is written by the victors.” Therein lies the source of a current ongoing and heated political debate over how American history should be taught in our nation’s public schools. Dating back to my childhood and beyond, American history as taught in the nation’s public schools has been a highly photo-shopped depiction of our nation exalting its white explorers, inventors, industrialists and political and military leaders. At the same time, it has obscured our nation’s nasty record of slavery and racism beginning more than 150 years before it was even founded. Perhaps even more pernicious, it has omitted the contributions of Black Americans perpetuating the impression that Blacks are inferior and have made few, if any, contributions to the success of our nation. This distorted and skewed portrayal of our heritage is a subject of no small importance as the Spanish philosopher George Santayana observed “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
The principal purpose of teaching history should not be to engender national pride but rather to educate our children as to the people, events, and ideas that have shaped our nation’s laws, institutions, and traditions so they can be improved by succeeding generations. Just as we maintain records of our nation’s economic progress in order to determine which efforts and policies tend to improve economic results, a more accurate recording of history will enable our succeeding generations to improve the very pillars upon which our nation is built. Although the fight to elucidate the hidden aspects of our nation's history is largely being waged by Black Americans, it is also of vital concern to Latinos and Asians as well as a host of other groups who have come to this country and who also have been victims of racism.
I confess that my decision to write about the emotionally charged subject of racism was made with significant trepidation. After all, as a white male, I have never knowingly been the victim of racism and have read few stories of those who have. Even though I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia in the 1940s and 50s, I learned little of the Black experience. Blacks and white lived in separate neighborhoods, attended separate schools and spent their leisure time in separate restaurants and movie theaters. Even in factories and public facilities, Blacks had separate dining rooms, separate restrooms, and separate water fountains. Blacks even occupied separate sections of Ponce de Leon ballpark where I used to go to watch the Atlanta Crackers (a “double A” baseball team) play; and Blacks were required to sit out of sight in the back of the buses I rode to visit Atlanta’s commercial center. Still it was obvious even to a son of the south that “separate but equal” was a cruel myth propagated by those who had more seeking to enshrine and perpetuate their advantages over their less fortunate countrymen. Despite my admitted lack of understanding of the Black experience, I am a student of both the law and economics and well understand how racism has come to shape our laws and social institutions and the impact that those laws and institutions have had and continue to have on our nation’s populace which is the focus of this article.
Racial discrimination in the United States, of course, didn’t end with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 or with the adoption of the 14th Amendment in 1866 or the 15th Amendment in 1870. Nor did it end with the passage of the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act almost 100 years later. To be sure, these milestone events did eliminate the nation’s more overt forms of official racism and the plight of Black Americans greatly improved following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education which began the process of integrating public school and other public facilities. Since then, owing to the heroic efforts of determined men and women like Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, John R. Lewis, Rosa Parks, Shirley Chisholm and many others, the residual manifestations of racism continued to be slowly eroded. Nevertheless, they can still be found in many aspects of American life.
The remaining bastions of racism currently reside in our laws, our criminal justice system and many of our private institutions and in our national consciousness. For example, it was only earlier this year that the National Football League, 59% of whose players are Black, changed its policy of compensating players for head injuries sustained in league games. Previously, Black athletes had been denied compensation for head injuries on the theory that their mental impairments were inherent and not sustained in league play. Sadly, racism also remains imbedded in the minds of large segments of our population who continue to exalt the careers of Confederate generals and to parade under the banners of white supremacy. We saw this erupt in 2017 when a large group of white men marched through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia and again on this past Fourth of July when 150 members of another white supremacist group, The Patriot Front, marched through the streets of downtown Philadelphia. In fact, the FBI has classified white supremacists as the current greatest domestic terrorism threat. Even more discouraging is the fact that racism is being actively kept alive by one of the nation’s principal political parties and its allies in the media.
While most white Americans have come to reject deliberate racial bigotry, it’s still being fueled by many of our nation’s politicians. We witnessed it last summer in the attempts by former President Trump to wrongly attribute the vandalism accompanying many of the protests over the murder of George Floyd to members of Antifa, a name given to individuals who oppose fascism. More recently, it was on view in the actions of many Congressional Representatives who were quick to blame the January 6th Capitol insurrection on the Black Lives Matter movement, claiming that they carried out that assault masquerading as Trump supporters. There was no truth to either of these claims which were made simply to misdirect the nation’s animosity toward those despised by members of their political base.
Ask the American public to what degree racism continues in this country and you will receive a wildly varying array of answers. That’s because Americans tend to look at the issue of racism from very different perspectives and through very different lenses. To most white Americans, racism consists of deliberate actions detrimental to minorities based on the perception that as members of a different race they are less worthy of U.S. citizenship, wealth or even respectful conduct. This would be typified in the actions of Dylan Roof in killing nine members of a Black congregation attending religious services in their Charleston, South Carolina church. While such horrific incidents are all too common, their overall impact is relatively small.
To Black Americans, however, racism is not limited to individual actions directed at people due to their race, but also includes actions, laws and institutions which operate to adversely affect them irrespective of the origins and motivation for such actions. A good example of this would be the construction of the nation’s Interstate Highway System which was routed through downtown Black sections of major cities. These actions were not taken directly out of racial bigotry, but rather because the selected paths of the highways were both underdeveloped and near commercial centers. The land for the highways could therefore be acquired for less money and with less disruption to commercial activity. Also figuring into the calculus was that the residents of these areas had little political clout and were powerless to slow the progress of the project. The detrimental impact on the residents of the affected communities was neither the intention nor the concern of those planning this undertaking but systemic racial inequities meant that Black communities bore the brunt of their pragmatic decisions. More recent examples of institutional racism can be found in efforts to privatize government functions which, while making them more cost-effective, also leaves those at the bottom of the income/wealth scale under-served.
I frequently hear conservatives assert that racism is largely a relic of the past and that we shouldn’t seek to connect it to the present. They also deny that the nation’s laws embody racial bias because they are directed to all segments of the population. Hearing these remarks always reminds me of Anatole France’s ironic aphorism that “The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor alike from sleeping under bridges, from begging in the streets, and from stealing loaves of bread.” The essence of this observation is that laws need not specifically direct their prohibitions or mandates to a given segment of society to be discriminatory. That discrimination in the U.S. arises from the fact that Black Americans emerged from slavery with no assets, little education and highly limited job opportunities. Even when I served in the U.S. Navy in the early 1960s, Black sailors were only permitted to serve in the ship’s kitchen and Black women were largely limited to housekeeping and janitorial jobs. As a result of these and other discriminatory policies, even today there is a wide chasm between the accumulated wealth of white and Black families. Whereas in 2019 (the most recent year for which I was able to find information) the accumulated median wealth of white families was $188,200; the corresponding amount for Black families was $24,100.
Among the biggest examples of this genre of racism can be found in the nation’s tax laws which are a treasure trove of subliminal racial discrimination. Most of the discriminatory facets of the Internal Revenue Code are based on the different ways that it taxes monies earned from investments and monies earned from labors, with a disproportionate segment of Black Americans being essentially limited to the latter. Those discriminatory features include the following:
· Capital gains are taxed at a flat rate of 21% compared to a maximum rate of 37% for earned income.
· Taxable income is recognized for salaries and wages when they are received, but taxes on capital gains only become payable when an investment property is actually liquidated which may not be for many years after the property was acquired.
· Income on capital gains will never be taxed if the property is held until the owner’s death as the owner’s heirs will receive that property free of accumulated taxes.
· Real estate owners can also avoid recognizing taxes on capital gains by reinvesting the proceeds from the sale of properties within six months in what is called a “like-property exchange.”
· Individuals who earn a living by managing the investments of others also enjoy a special tax advantage through what is referred to as a “carried interest” which allows a majority of the income they derive for their services to be taxed at the lower capital gains rate.
· Those who make their living by working for others have their taxes withheld from their pay checks (often at a rate higher than they are ultimately required to pay) whereas the tax system allows wealthy individuals to pay their taxes on what is essentially an honor system because the chances that their tax declarations will be audited are no more than 12% even for individuals with annual earnings in excess of $1 million.
These features of the Internal Revenue Code prompted late Leona Helmsley (the wife of real estate magnate, Harry Helmsley) to proclaim, “We don’t pay taxes, only little people pay taxes.” This observation was recently underscored when Politico published tax data pertaining to the nation’s wealthiest individuals.
Although the economy of United States dwarfs those of all other developed nations, the U.S., unlike virtually every other developed nation, does not provide universal healthcare or a comprehensive social safety net for its citizens. This clearly places American wage earners at a disadvantage when compared to their counterparts in other developed countries. In lieu of a national health system, the United States has an essentially private healthcare system in which each individual is responsible for providing for his or her own well-being. Under this system Americans expend on a per capita basis more than three times what other developed nations expend to provide healthcare for their citizens. More distressing is that our private healthcare system achieves results that are inferior to those achieved by most other developed nations (see, “Fear of Socialism”).
While there are many reasons to explain this apparent anomaly, racism is the one that often goes overlooked by white Americans. America differs from most of the world’s other developed nations in that it has a multi-racial population in contrast to the populations of European and East Asian nations whose populations are very homogenous. For over 175 years after its formation, the United States didn’t even recognize Black Americans as citizens. Even after that changed, Congressional representatives from the former slave states were unwilling to recognize the newly created Black citizens as equals and for the next 70 years opposed all government welfare and healthcare programs that would utilize their tax dollars to benefit Blacks. It took the Great Depression and the relentless efforts of Franklin Roosevelt to even begin to change this anti-Black bias. Even so, for the same reason, many of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs were passed with exclusions for coverage for Black Americans. That same anti-Black bias is still at work today as “conservative” politicians continually seek to erode the nation’s healthcare and welfare programs.
Also a bastion of institutional racism is our nation’s criminal justice system which has been created and managed to the distinct disadvantage of Black Americans. Some of the bias is built into the legal framework. For example, the laws of many states preclude convicted felons from voting. In states which seek to limit voting by Black Americans this has created an incentive for legislatures to categorize seemingly minor offenses as felonies. It also provides an incentive for law enforcement personnel in those states to concentrate their enforcement efforts in Black communities. Racial bias can also be seen in the nation’s drug laws making illegal the possession or sale of marijuana and crack cocaine, drugs frequently consumed by Blacks, while not criminalizing the possession of mind-altering drugs primarily preferred by white Americans.
Most of the racial bias found in the nation’s criminal justice systems is in the enforcement of the laws where Black Americans tend to be disproportionately targeted. For example:
· Black Americans are five times more likely to be incarcerated than whites who have committed the same crime.
· Black Americans are more than two times more likely than whites to have their cars searched by police.
· Black Americans are over two times more likely than whites to be arrested for drug use.
· Black Americans are more likely than whites to be jailed while awaiting trial.
· Black Americans are 50% more likely than whites to be offered plea deals that include prison time.
· Black Americans tend to be given longer sentences than whites for the same offense.
· Black Americans are more likely to have their probation revoked.
Particularly disturbing is the frequency with which Black Americans are killed while in the custody of law enforcement personnel. Between 2013 and 2016 there were 343 Black Americans on record of having died while in police custody. Part of the difficulty in determining the extent of this problem is that state and local governments don’t publish statistics covering such deaths. Following the 2014 murder of Michael Brown at the hands of the Ferguson, Missouri Police Department, the U.S. Congress passed the Death in Custody Reporting Act. However, despite pleas from Congress the Department of Justice under the Trump administration declined to enforce the Act leaving the extent of the problem still unknown.
It’s not just that Black Americans are far more likely than whites to die while in the custody of law enforcement officials, the odds are equally bad when it comes to the use lethal force by police in their efforts to apprehend Black criminal suspects. While this might be explained by simple racial animosity, it can just as easily be explained by policemen, out of a perceived heightened fear for their own safety, approaching Black suspects with their weapons drawn.
Black Americans are also hampered by limited opportunities to obtain a good education, a high-paying job and financing to start or expand a business. While these problems are not necessarily the product of laws or regulations, they are the result of long-held beliefs that Black Americans are inherently inferior and less likely to be successful. All of the above circumstances have led many Black Americans to assert that America is still plagued by systemic racism which will never be extinguished until we stop teaching a highly sanitized account of American history.
Beginning in the 1960s colleges around the country began offering programs in “Black Studies.” The courses included in these programs held little attraction for white students and largely served to introduce Black college students to the roles that Black Americans had played in our nation’s history. These were strictly college-level courses that were not offered in elementary or high schools and did little to make white Americans aware of the achievements of notable Black historical figures or about the roles of Black Americans throughout our nation’s history. Thus, it’s easy to understand why many white Americans tend to view Blacks as being less intelligent and less productive.
Shortly thereafter, some universities began graduate-level programs under the name “Critical Race Theory” (or “CRT”) to explore the structural biases in our society impeding the advancement of Black Americans. These were academic research programs (conducted at several of the nation’s leading universities) and were well beyond the capabilities of high school students. Research undertaken in the name of CRT served to identify and analyze some of the institutional roadblocks discussed above impeding the career paths of Black Americans.
Even so, both Black Studies Programs as well as the CRT have done little in themselves to overcome four hundred years of racial prejudice harbored within large segments of American society. That would require an education program directed at white Americans. President Obama tried to move the nation in that direction when he proposed that Harriet Tubman replace Andrew Jackson on America’s $20 bill. Like so many of President Obama’s initiatives, this one was quickly cast aside by President Trump. Other efforts designed to bring Black history to the attention of white Americans include the recent adoption of Juneteenth as a federal holiday and publicity regarding the Tulsa massacre in 1921 in which more than 300 Black Americans were killed when their entire community was attacked and burned by a white mob. Not only were most Americans unaware of this horrific event, they remain oblivious to the fact that between 1862 and 1922 similar attacks against Black communities took place in two dozen other U.S. cities.
While the Republican Party for the past 60 years has tried to seek the support of voters harboring animosity toward their Black countrymen, it was not until Donald Trump became the nation’s 45th President that appeals to white supremacists were brought into the open. During his term in office President Trump went out of his way to praise the actions of Confederate heroes and to denigrate Black Americans, particularly Black journalists and Black member of Congress. Now that the Republican Party has lost control of the White House as well as both houses of the Congress, it would seem appropriate for it to try to sell to the American people its vision of how the nation can be improved. The problem is that Republicans appear to have no such vision. They have therefore sought to keep their supporters energized by appealing to their hatreds and fears, including their racial prejudices.
The Washington Post recently reported that since the beginning of this year Fox News has made over 2,000 references to CRT even though until recently it was little known even among Black Americans. Most of those references raised the specter that liberal Democrats want to introduce CRT into the curriculums of America’s public schools which Republicans claim would result in the nation’s school children growing up to hate our country and to be ashamed of their skin color. This raises the question of why Fox News and many Republican politicians have latched onto CRT, advocating that it be banned from public schools when it has never been taught in public schools and no one has even suggested that it should be. Even more troubling is that rallies have been held and laws have been introduced in 20 states (and enacted in five states—Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Iowa and Idaho) to prohibit CRT from being added to public school curriculums. All of this is being done in the name pf preventing children from being made to feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress.”
The answer seems to be that CRT has a vague and ominous sounding name which lends itself to demagoguery. Those hearing it will be prompted to think what makes Blacks a “critical race” in American history. Even today, Blacks only represent a little over 13% of our nation’s population. Also included in CRT’s name is the word “theory” which makes it appear that CRT does not seek to present facts but only a point of view shared by those who espouse it. Thus, focusing on the name “Critical Race Theory” has become an easy way for Republican politicians and their allies in the media to denigrate the efforts of Black Americans to have the nation’s public schools offer a more complete and realistic version of our nation’s history. Thus, the very politicization of the study of CRT stands as yet another piece of evidence that racism remains very much alive in this country.