African American contemporary issues
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African American contemporary issues have been of concern to many African Americans and other ethnic groups in the United States. Many African Americans have been discriminated and left impoverished in American society, but many African Americans have also risen to the middle and upper classes recently.
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Institutional racism and discrimination
Institutional racism is top-down discrimination, usually practiced or approved of by the government. Slavery could be seen as the beginning of institutional racism. Jim Crow, lynchings, race riots are later examples of this phenomenon.
In some American states, mostly in the South, felons can never vote again. This prevents numerous black men from voting, as they have disparate incarceration rates. Some suggest that the 2000 presidential election may have had a different outcome had all blacks who wanted to had the opportunity to vote. Studies suggest that employers are indifferent to a white male's participation in the military, but are appreciative when African-American men have served in the military. This upsets many because it appears that employers think of black males workers as needing to be tamed by the military. The idea suggests that employers will only hire black males if they have prior proof that the job applicant is submissive to authority figures.
Environmental racism
Environmental racism takes several forms, including placing toxic waste in minority areas, not offering adequate public health care to those areas, and failing to provide proper sanitation to minority neighborhoods. Environmental racism affects Native Americans and Latinos as well as African Americans. Many suggest that the disproportionate rates of infant mortality, asthma, and learning disabilities in black communities may be caused by environmental racism.
Some individuals assert that environmental racism is really environmental classism. However, at least one study states that hazardous wastes is disproportionately placed in minority areas, rather than low-income white areas. Race rather than, or more so than, poverty seems to inform this matter of injustice.
Education
Due, by and large, to widespread de facto segregation in housing patterns and white flight, many of the nation's economically depressed urban centers are populated predominantly by African Americans and other minorities. Public schools in the nation's inner cities and other centers of poverty which serve low-income families generally and consistently have failed to produce literate learners who achieve at or above grade level. African-American children, who are more likely to live below the poverty level than any other group in American society, consistently score below national or state averages on standardized tests. In many instances, when there are white children living within the areas served by failing schools, their families send them to higher-performing, out-of-boundary public schools, or to charter, magnet or private schools. Although a significant number of African-American children are served by below-average schools, this phenomenon is only restricted to the black lower and lower-middle classes. In many middle-class schools, African Americans do not perform as badly as the "inner-city" schools and also socially blend in with people of other races.
There are various factors lying behind the lower scores that schools in lower-income African-American neighborhoods achieve. One of the factors is that when the whole region is poor, the school is unable to provide experienced and trained staff to meet the needs of students. Because inner-city public schools are supported with fewer tax dollars, these schools usually spend less money per student than affluent middle-class public schools. Also, many African Americans are skeptical about the nature of the tests themselves, claiming the tests are biased against African Americans. Although many black schools in depressed urban areas fall below average, some have progressed and shown excellent academic scores as compared to other schools with similar demographic make-up. Five of Inglewood's elementary schools, for example, have made the Pacific Research Foundation's High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools list. [1] Other lower-income schools that were historically under-achieving are now also improving greatly and taking big steps toward better education of today's African-Americans youths.
The SATs have recently changed, partially in response to criticism from university administrators. This change was not aimed at reducing the race gap. [2]
Economics and employment
Economically, blacks have also benefited from the advances made during the Civil Rights era. The racial disparity in poverty rates has narrowed. The black middle class has grown substantially. In 2000, some 47 percent of African Americans owned their homes. However, African Americans are still underrepresented in government and employment. In 1999, the median income of African American families was $33,255 compared to $53,356 of whites.
There is, however, a significant African-American working class, which tends to neutralize or distort the tremendous progress among those in the black middle and elite classes. In times of economic hardship for the nation, African-Americans suffer disproportionately from job loss and underemployment, with the black underclass being hardest hit. The phrase "last hired and first fired" is reflected in the Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment figures. Nationwide, the September 2004 unemployment rate for blacks was 10.3 percent, more than twice that of their white counterparts, who were unemployed at the rate of 4.7 percent. [3] [4]
The income gap between black and white families is also significant. Employed blacks earn only 77 percent of the wages of whites in comparable jobs, down from 82 percent in 1975. Although rates of births to unwed mothers among both blacks and whites have risen since the 1950s, the rate of such births among African Americans is three times the rate of whites.
However, many blacks have risen up to the middle classes — many have moved into the elite class, have increased their presence as professors, doctors, lawyers, government officials, and corporate executives. Since the 1960s and 1970s, the black middle class has also grown rapidly as many African Americans move from the so-called "inner cities" into the suburbs. Some communities which used to be mainly African American have now been replaced by other ethnic groups, such as Asians, Latinos, and even whites, and gentrification is not uncommon in many former "ghettos". The persistence of the underclass (concentrated in the inner city or rural areas), which carries with it all cyclical pathologies associated with poverty, continues to plague blacks as a group, draw media attention away from the more fortunate and affluent members of the black community, and distort the image of blacks, most of whom enjoy a standard of living significantly higher than most other groups in the Western world.
Note, however, that many blacks who progressed from inner city slums to the suburbs often express detached feelings toward blacks remaining in ghettos. This is especially true of many affluent blacks (such as atheletes, doctors, actors...etc). Furthermore, even though these people often feel shameful of their inaction, many believe that the blacks who are left behind are actually lazy and ignorant. [5]. Renowned African-American actor Bill Cosby has spoken out to this effect. [6]
Health and healthcare access
As a group, Black Americans have shorter life expectancies than the national average and often higher mortality rates for certain disease conditions. They suffer disproportionately from heart disease, AIDS, hypertension, stroke, sickle cell anemia, and diabetes. The rate of blacks organ and tissue donation in the U.S. is currently on par, percentage-wise, with that for whites; however, because as a group they require a disproportionately higher number of organ and tissue transplants, the result is a net deficit. Lower-income blacks’ lack of access to quality health care, a general and well-documented pattern of race-based discrimination in health care delivery, as well as deep-seated distrust of the medical establishment occasioned, in part, by the Tuskegee syphilis study all are contributing factors to these
The criminal justice system
Black experiences with and attitudes towards the criminal justice system often differ markedly from whites. Although the incidence of violent crime is dropping among blacks, more than one million African American men are currently in jail or prison. Homicide remains the leading cause of death among black men between the ages of 15 and 34. Because of many past incidents of maltreatment by law enforcement angecies, African Americans tend to distrust the criminal justice system much more than whites do. In 1991, the brutal beating of an unarmed black motorist, Rodney King, by four Los Angeles police officers was captured on videotape. An all-white jury later acquitted the police officers, sparking riots in Los Angeles and protests around the country. Ten years later in June 2001, a series of killings of black males in confrontations with police, and deaths in police custody, provoked rioting in in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine community.
Due to public safety concerns, local law enforcement, news media and the general public place a higher priority on combatting street crime, compared to white-collar crime — which is predominantly a phenomenon of white society. The higher profile of street crime in the media and law enforcement has given rise to the perception that African-Americans, particularly young, black men, are a "problem population" prone to thievery, violence and other criminal behavior. Such perceptions are a major factor in the kind of afrophobia which causes white flight and which, studies have shown, often causes non-blacks to assume criminal intent or activity on the part of blacks when there is none.
Historically, the police forces were often used by racists and white supremicists to victimize innocent blacks, sometimes acting in concert with vigilante groups such as the Ku Klux Klan or lynch mobs. This police system originated in the South during the 19th century, which was often used primarily to control slaves or ex-slaves. Issues of unnecessary or excessive force, police brutality, police corruption, racial profiling, suspicious deaths of black detainees while in police custody, and illegal detainment and interrogation are well-documented problems that perpetuate black distrust of, and antipathy toward, public law enforcement.
Many African-American communities have a notably higher crime rate than those of other communities. Poverty, alienation and despair in the black lower class have led to the rise of a number of professional street gangs and criminal networks.
Many law and justice agencies are are operated almost exclusively by non-blacks. Many blacks view the criminal justice system as a means of discriminating and sometimes oppressing African Americans.
See also
Categories: African Americans | African-American history | African American culture | Ethnic groups of the United States | Social justice
