I write to you as a fellow member, disturbed by a new development in our ranks.
According to the latest polls, most of you believe that anti-white racism – or “reverse racism,” as many of you refer to it – is now a bigger problem than anti-black racism. That, apparently, is the majority view in White America.
The view looks very different, however, in Black America.
In Black America, the unemployment rate is 16.8 percent, twice the unemployment rate in White America. 35 percent of black households have zero or negative net wealth, compared with 15 percent of white households — and the gap is growing. The average white household is 20 times richer than the average black household — the largest gap since the government started recording this data a quarter century ago.
The recent recession widened these gaps. In the twentieth century, most blacks had trouble getting mortgages. Banks discriminated against poor black neighborhoods. During the housing bubble, this discrimination took the opposite form: predatory lending. The void left by mainstream lenders was filled by pawn shops, payday lenders, and check cashing services that charged high fees and usurious interest rates. Blacks were far more likely to receive subprime loans and then to experience foreclosure. Even if a black household had the same creditworthiness, default risk, employment, income, and demographics as a white household, the black household usually received much riskier, more expensive loans.
But it’s not just the recession. The unemployment gap has existed as long as blacks have been free to find jobs, even among blacks and whites with the same education level. Employers are far more likely to call back job applicants with white-sounding names. They are significantly more likely to hire white job applicants with a criminal record than black job applicants without a criminal record.
In Black America, infants are twice as likely to die as in White America. That gap has also grown over the last three decades. Even if blacks had the same background characteristics as whites — maternal age, educational attainment, etc. — two-thirds of that gap would still exist. If Black America were its own country, it would rank 67th in infant mortality, just below Qatar and Uruguay.
In Black America, 4 percent of the male population is in jail, compared with 0.7 percent of men in White America. Blacks comprise 40 percent of prisoners in America, though they comprise only 13 percent of the general population.
And it’s not because they’re more likely to commit a crime. According to recent research, blacks are significantly more likely to be arrested than whites for the exact same crime. On average, a black criminal who murders a white victim will receive a significantly harsher punishment than if the murder had been committed by a white criminal, regardless of the characteristics of the victim or the quality of legal counsel.
White drug users outnumber black drug users four-to-one. According to one study, “White students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, use crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students.” Another study reported that “white youth aged 12-17 are more than a third more likely to have sold illegal drugs than African American youth.” Yet blacks are three times more likely to be arrested on drug charges.
As a result, blacks are unfairly disenfranchised more than whites. In the recent case Farrakhan v. Locke, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals openly admitted that “the statistical disparity and disproportionality evident in Washington’s criminal justice system arise from and result in discrimination,” yet they did not uphold the Constitution’s prohibition of racial discrimination in voting.
No wonder Congress won’t take their calls. Literally. Just like employers, legislators are less likely to respond to requests from blacks than from whites.
And they need to be heard. In a country where 13 percent of the population is black, only 10 percent of the House of Representatives is black, and there are zero black Senators.
In Black America, equal representation, the cornerstone of democracy, does not exist.
So while I understand your distaste for affirmative action and other diversity programs that seem like “reverse racism,” I urge you to remember that whites receive affirmative action too — only, we call it by a different name: everyday life in America.
Your fellow White American,
Anthony W. Orlando
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This op-ed was published in today’s Hazleton Standard-Speaker.
Some problems I see with your analysis:
It is true that many people see anti-white racism as much higher than anti-black racism in the USA today. Your pointing out economic disparities and even arrest records does not change this fact. Racism is a conscious belief that one race is inferior to another. Socio-economic disparities have to be proven to be caused by current racism, not just the effects of past discrimination.
You state that in Black America the unemployment rate is 16.8 percent, twice the unemployment rate in white America. This may be true, but you haven’t shown a cause and effect analysis to show this is based on current racism. Factors like education levels, high school drop out rates, distrust in government, abuse of welfare programs, etc can also play a role. Unless you can actually show there is a ceteris parabus analysis on your claims, your stats don’t show cause and effect based on present day racism. In 2009 alone, 5.2% of Whites dropped out vs. 9.3% of Blacks. That is also almost twice the rate of Whites.
You talk about average households but you forget to mention that the elite that have gotten richer are predominantly White. If you average their income with that of the average White American not among the elite, it will skew the national average. Considering the richest 2% own half the world’s wealth, averaging that wealth with that of the rest of White Americans not in that 2% would skew that income of your average White American substantially.
https://www.lcurve.org/images/LCurveFlier2003.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Personal_Income_by_Race.png
Plenty of studies have also shown that Sub prime lenders have targeted poorer neighborhoods more than richer neighborhoods and the ethnic divide in where people are buying has also affected which groups have experienced more sub prime loans.
Also, while I fully agree that there is still prejudice and racism. Especially in hiring practices, it has also been shown that level of comfort in the interview and in group and out group biases can come into play without the biases being racist. What would be interesting to see is if speech patterns, etc were also put into account as well as if there was similar levels of disparity in Black owned businesses as far as in group hiring. That again, could relate to comfort of sub culture or actual racism. A good test would be to send African American actors who tend to speak in what is seen as stereotypically main stream speech as well as White actors who speak in more stereotypically Black perceived speech like urban speech. It would also be interesting to see if Black owned businesses favored their own to some degree as well.
While recent research, does show blacks are significantly more likely to be arrested than whites for the exact same crime, the study you link to also points out that “Even with the striking clarity of findings in our sample, we have noted substantial heterogeneity in the strength of effects across studies. Our moderator analysis did not reveal obvious substantive sources of this variation, but we speculate on some that might be incorporated into future research on the effects of suspect race on police discretion. Notable in this body of studies was the rarity with which researchers explicitly took into account the ecology of police decision making. The theoretical importance of the police environment for explaining police practices was articulated four decades ago (Reiss and Bordua, 1967), but it remains an underdeveloped aspect of empirical research on police discretion (Klinger, 2004).”
“ The impact of neighborhood context on police decision making is of growing interest among scholars. Klinger (1997) presented an ecological framework for explaining the “vigor” by which police exert their authority by examining the socioeconomic and crime features of the beat in which the police–citizen encounter occurs. He argued that the standards of tolerable conduct and the thresholds for police intervention are respectively lowered and raised in areas with large amounts of socioeconomic disadvantage and violent crime. A few studies have taken neighborhood-level effects into account in predicting various forms of police discretion and have found with some consistency that disadvantaged and high-crime areas are more likely to experience punitive, enforcement-oriented policing, with all other things being equal (Skogan and Frydl, 2004: 189).”
Clearly while many of the crimes might be identical as far as the act involved, what has not been taken into account is the environment of the crime and police hyper sensitivity in areas of high crime, especially violent.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2011.00230.x/full
The claim that on average, a black criminal who murders a white victim will receive a significantly harsher punishment than if the murder had been committed by a white criminal, regardless of the characteristics of the victim or the quality of legal counsel might be true, although the study is basing itself on reversals on the appeal level and the study itself says that it is a debatable claim. What has not been considered is if a White criminal who kills a Black victim is given an equal sentence or worse in interracial crime. What we do know is that statistically, more murders occur per capita of white victims by black perps than vice versa.
You claim that “White drug users outnumber black drug users four-to-one. According to one study, “White students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, use crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students.”
Only problem is that when I went to your resource and pulled up the numbers what actually was shown was that while 17.1% of White Americans had ever tried cocaine vs 8.8% of Black Americans, White Americans had the majority of their cocaine users in the infrequent users chart of 1 to 5 days of use in the last year vs Black Americans who had the majority of their users in the frequent users category of more than 100 days in a year. Frequency of use leads to geting caught more often. When looking at crack, the percentage of people who ever tried was very similar in both groups. But again the frequency of use in African Americans was twice as high. Same with heroin. The other question to factor is how much drug use was also related to violent crime neighborhoods.
https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/quicktables/quickconfig.do?29621-0001_du
Furthermore, this study clearly shows that drug use in Blacks is 10.7% vs 9.1% in Whites.
https://oas.samhsa.gov/NSDUH/2k10NSDUH/2k10Results.htm#2.7
As for your legislator claim, please look at page 33:
https://butler.research.yale.edu/papers/AJPS_Discriminate.pdf
I found it interesting that while there was a bias that was negative towards responding to the black sounding name in 7.6 Percent of White Republicans and 6.8% of White Democrats, there was a whopping 16.5% bias against the White sounding name in Minority Democrats.
You make some good points. Thank you for your feedback. A few quick replies:
1. I did not claim that all of the unemployment gap was due to racism, but the discriminatory practices of employers, mortgage lenders, and the judicial system all suggest that racism is a significant contributor. Many of the studies I cited control for background factors like education levels, eliminating those explanations.
2. You say “the elite that have gotten richer are predominantly White,” and that’s not cause for concern?
3. When I say “average,” I’m referring to the median, not the mean. I avoid the word “median” because most readers don’t know what it means. Sorry for any confusion.
4. The mortgage lending research I cited controls for income and creditworthiness, so it’s not simply a question of rich vs. poor neighborhoods. It’s specifically a racial divide.
5. When you say “in group and out group biases can come into play without the biases being racist,” it depends on what those groups are. If the in group “sounds white” and the out group “sounds black,” then that’s the definition of racial discrimination. Just because the discriminator doesn’t recognize it as discrimination doesn’t make it any less discriminatory. Unconscious biases can be just as harmful as conscious ones.
6. Yes, police “hyper-sensitivity” in black neighborhoods is a more complicated and profound problem. I will try to analyze that issue in a future essay. However, the reasons for this policy do not justify the racially unbalanced outcomes.
7. The easiest way to resolve the prevalence vs. frequency problem is to measure the number of drug crimes, which is the statistic most directly relevant to arrests and imprisonments. According to government data, “blacks were no more likely to be guilty of drug crimes than whites and…white youth were actually the most likely of any racial or ethnic group to be guilty of illegal drug possession and sales. Any notion that drug use among blacks is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data; white youth have about three times the number of drug-related emergency room visits as their African American counterparts.” (Michelle Alexander, 2010, “The New Jim Crow,” p. 97) Remember that there are 223 million white Americans and only 39 million black Americans. Even if black drug use rates were slightly higher, there would still be far more white drug users overall, which should result in far more white arrests and imprisonments.
8. Yes, black legislators discriminate against white constituents, but since there are so few black legislators, that effect is greatly outweighed by the discrimination of white legislators against black constituents.