Race Still Matters (But Republicans Won’t Admit It) — Part One

Among all the Republican candidates’ rhetoric about the necessity to create jobs and get people back to work, there is never a reference to racism and its impact on our society. It’s a topic they studiously avoid, but it is embedded within their ideology—an ideology that continues to have pernicious effects on our country. As a sociologist and community organizer (also disparaged occupations among some segments of society), I would like to share a few facts that I hope will cause them to reconsider their aversion to the subject and become engaged in a discussion about fairness and the quality of life here.

Although much contemporary Republican rhetoric is ostensibly designed to encompass everyone, their speeches are sprinkled with euphemisms and code words that reinforce stereotypes about people of color and the poor, e.g. dwelling on concepts of welfare, food stamps, immigrants, and miscreants who are supposedly sapping the strength of this nation. In actuality, the Republicans’ penchant for demonizing nonwhites and the poor is a calculated attempt to unify whites in a struggle to retain the power and privilege they have monopolized since the country was founded.

One of their most egregious errors is their failure to acknowledge the common origins and destiny of the people of this nation. Though they came from different places and for various reasons—some willingly, and others under duress, scientists have established through DNA research that we are all descendants from ancestors who lived in Africa about 60,000 years ago. There is only one human race, Homo sapiens, and there are no significant differences in intelligence or athletic ability based on the color of one’s skin or the shape of their ears, nose, lips or texture of their hair.

Now this is a difficult pill for some Republicans to swallow since the essence of their platform resides in assumptions about the innate moral inferiority of some people who are demonized as slackers, cheats, and ne’er-do-wells. It is much easier to blame the victims of racism and dysfunctional, unresponsive institutions than to tackle the systemic causes of the problems that plague our society. If we only expel illegal immigrants, lock up all the criminals, throw the welfare cheats off the public dole, curtail unions that shield incompetents and slackers, then we could save our society. And the plans they put forward at the local, state and national level are designed to do just that without regard to a few basic facts.

Republicans’ assume that the United States is a meritocracy with level playing fields that afford everyone equal opportunities to succeed, but research indicates that there are significant differences in the way people of color are treated, especially blacks and Latinos. Today, there are more Hispanic children living in poverty than white, over 6 million, even though Latinos account for less than a quarter of the nation’s children.

High school graduation rates (the percent of students who graduate with their peers in four years) reveal that less than half of black and Latino males complete high school compared to three-quarters of white males. Even more shocking are the incredibly low graduation rates of black and Latino males in some cities, hovering under 30 percent in Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland, New York City and St. Petersburg. Places where the white male rates are only around 50 percent—also deplorable.

The level of education has a direct impact on one’s earnings: high school graduates bring in $8,000 more a year than dropouts, and college grads $27,000 more. The types of jobs workers obtain are also linked to their education, with the more interesting and autonomous jobs going to the higher educated.

I’ve heard the retort that things have changed. We’ve got a black man in the Office of the President. We’ve got 640 black mayors across the country—a far cry from the ‘60s when there were none. But the political power of cities has vastly declined along with their wealth. Most are on life-support.

“Well,” they say, “there are 43 black Congressmen and 25 Latinos.” Yet, political power is still wielded by whites in this nation. There are no black Senators and only two Latinos. There have only been four black Senators since reconstruction. There is only one black governor (Patrick of Massachusetts) and two Hispanics (Sandoval of Nevada and Martinez of New Mexico). Since blacks and Latinos account for over a quarter of the population, they are underrepresented in both Houses of Congress and governorships. They have not fared any better on the Supreme Court, with just 2 blacks and one Latina in its 220 year history.

Looking at the economy, there are only four blacks and five Latinos heading Fortune 500 corporations. For decades the unemployment rate of blacks and Latinos has been double that of whites, and large numbers of them are stuck in low-paying dead-end jobs. This is partly a function of their low education attainment, but research shows that blacks and Latinos earn less than whites with the same educational attainment in the same jobs. Other studies show that people with ethnic names are less successful in job hunting—less likely to be asked for interviews than whites with Anglo names.

While some blacks and Latinos have significantly improved their social and economic status over the last five decades, it is apparent from these facts that political and corporate power still resides in the hands of relatively few white men who are reluctant to share it. Our next installment will focus on other types of racial disparities and explore the Republicans’ ideological support for blaming the victims of inequality and perpetuating the myth of meritocracy.

H. Roy Kaplan was the Executive Director of The National Conference of Christians and Jews for the Tampa Bay area. His most recent book is The Myth of Post-Racial America.

Comments

  1. REC

    Let me get this right. Genetic science accepts and can define race while social sciences negate race? Genetic science=based on hard facts and DNA while Social Science=based on egalitarian, leftist biases? I think i can see a problem here!
    YOU are anti-WHITE.

    All anti whites pretend to be anti racists. That’s why anti racism is just a code word for anti white.

    How many whites do you know who pretend to be racists?

    Anti-white only talk to us about two things: 1) How they are not anti-white and 2) How awful whites are.

    Ah, the ole “out of Africa” hypothesis.

    Why is that hypothesis only used to benefit Blacks in White countries outside Africa?

    In America & Europe, we’re told “we’re all from Africa” so we have to set aside our ethnic interests to not offend our Black “cousins.”

    In South Africa, even though “we’re all from Africa,” we’re told Whites have no right to the country they built. People shouting “we’re all from Africa” to “fight raaacisssm” aren’t anti-racist at all. They’re anti-White.

  2. iamjabali

    REC, you didn’t get it right. Genetic scientists do not accept or define race through hard science, but they DO accept that it is a social construct and that genetic variation and clumping occur based on geographical boundaries – although these boundaries are not discreet.

    “Race remains an inflammatory issue, both socially and scientifically. Fortunately, modern human genetics can deliver the salutary message that human populations share most of their genetic variation and that there is no scientific support for the concept that human populations are discrete, nonoverlapping entities. Furthermore, by offering the means to assess disease-related variation at the individual level, new genetic technologies may eventually render race largely irrelevant in the clinical setting. Thus, genetics can and should be an important tool in helping to both illuminate and defuse the race issue.”

    Nature Genetics 36, S28 – S33 (2004)

    Scientists also have proved through hard science that human kind in fact started in Africa.

    “Allele frequencies in populations can be compared to assess the extent to which populations differ from one another. The overall pattern of these genetic distances, summarized in a network diagram (Fig. 1), shows several important trends. First, populations tend to cluster according to their geographic distance from one another. This is to be expected, as geographically distant populations were less likely to exchange migrants throughout human evolutionary history. Second, the African populations are more diverse, a pattern consistent with many studies that have compared pi in various human populations22, 23, 24. Third, the largest genetic distance is seen between African and non-African populations. Finally, because this network is based on Alu insertion polymorphisms, it is possible to designate unambiguously the allelic state of the ancestral human population as one in which none of the insertions would be present. This allows us to ‘root’ the tree and shows that the root falls closest to African populations. All of these findings, which are in accord with many other studies based on different types of genetic variation assessed in different samples of humans25, 26, 27, 28, support an evolutionary scenario in which anatomically modern humans evolved first in Africa, accumulating genetic diversity. A small subset of the African population then left the continent, probably experienced a population bottleneck and founded anatomically modern human populations in the rest of the world29. Of special importance to discussions of race, our species has a recent, common origin.”

    (Same article – http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/full/ng1435.html)

    As to the country you built…did you do it alone, and did the benefits of the country extend to all parties with equal opportunity? Or was their a system in place that allowed for power and resources to be maintained within one group of people?

    And finally, when you come to the table to discuss the issues please come with pertinent information instead of slinging bilge. The web is fraught with valuable info you could use to educate yourself to help forward interesting conversation instead of spending your time trolling and sounding like a fool.

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