We’ve all heard the words, but here’s the question — how exactly does someone come to believe anything like this is true?
“If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you,” she said.
“You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to. You had benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have. You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly.”
Miller also called the Black Lives Matter movement “a stupid waste of time” and said lower voter turnout among African Americans could be related to “the way they’re raised”.
It didn’t take long for her to completely derail her chair position with this statement, but two things are absolutely clear. This woman did not come up with all these ideas yesterday, and she quite clearly thinks all of this is simply matter-of-fact and not controversial at all. She does however present a crucial issue: Are white people keeping black people down or is it possible they’re stopping themselves from succeeding and excelling?
That’s what I will explore in this article which is Part 7 in my 8 part series; What has the GOP done for Black People Lately? The New Invisible Jim Crow
So the argument presented is that Ms. Miller presents is that there is essentially nothing of consequence during the last 50 years that could hold back the black community and that if they’ve failed it’s all their own fault. Racism is over. The Civil Rights Act ended it.
But the problem with that is that the Civil Rights Act only allowed people to sue and prosecute open discriminators. It gave law enforcement and courts the power to act, but the thing is that just because something becomes illegal doesn’t mean that no one continues to do it or takes steps to not . get. caught. as they do it. Lots of things are against the law, robbery, assault, murder, but none of those things have completely stopped. They still happen.
But first, it’s not like the policies of the Jim Crow era didn’t have a lasting impact. Policies such as Red-lining and “block busting” actually created “The Ghetto” in the first place.
Fifty years after the repeal of Jim Crow, many African-Americans still live in segregated ghettos in the country's metropolitan areas. Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, has spent years studying the history of residential segregation in America.
"We have a myth today that the ghettos in metropolitan areas around the country are what the Supreme Court calls 'de-facto' — just the accident of the fact that people have not enough income to move into middle class neighborhoods or because real estate agents steered black and white families to different neighborhoods or because there was white flight," Rothstein tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.
"It was not the unintended effect of benign policies," he says. "It was an explicit, racially purposeful policy that was pursued at all levels of government, and that's the reason we have these ghettos today and we are reaping the fruits of those policies."
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So when African-Americans managed to break out of those slums and buy a home in a neighboring area, whites could be persuaded that slum conditions were going to be brought with them. So the real estate agents would go into these neighborhoods and try to panic white families into selling their homes cheap to the real estate agents.
They used techniques: They would recruit blacks from the ghetto to walk around the neighborhood pushing baby carriages. They would phone call families in the white area and ask for names that were stereotypically African-American. ... All intended to give the impression that this was rapidly turning into another black slum.
The white families who panicked would then sell their homes to the real estate agents or the speculators at prices far below what they were worth. The speculators would then turn around and resell the homes to African-Americans at far more than they were worth because of the restricted supply, and this policy was called "blockbusting" and it was a policy that was condoned by state licensing boards throughout the country.
Segregation does continue and does impact the quality of life for black people. Many would argue that this type of bigotry and discrimination ended but usually the people with the most desperation to make everyone believe something doesn’t exist, are the people who are still doing it. People like these,
Discrimination against blacks, Hispanics and Asians looking for housing persists in subtle forms, according to a new national study commissioned by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. Though less likely to face overt obstacles, like being refused an appointment to see a home, minority customers were shown fewer available units than whites with similar qualifications, the study found.
They were also asked more questions about their finances, according to the study, and given fewer offers of help financing a loan.
“Although we’ve come a long way from the days of blatant, in-your-face housing injustice, discrimination still persists,” Shaun Donovan, the department’s secretary, said in a telephone conference on Tuesday unveiling the findings. “And just because it has taken on a hidden form doesn’t make it any less harmful.”
In each of the study’s 8,000 tests, one white and one minority tester of the same gender and age, posing as equally well-qualified renters or buyers, visited the same housing provider or agent. In more than half the test cases, both testers were shown the same number of apartments or homes. But in cases where one tester was shown more homes or apartments, the white tester was usually favored, leading to a higher number of units shown to whites overall.
In one test, a white customer looking for a two-bedroom apartment was shown a two-bedroom and a one-bedroom and given applications for both, while a Hispanic customer who arrived two hours later was told that nothing was available. In another, a real estate agent refused to meet with a black tester who was not prequalified for a loan, while a white tester was given an appointment without being asked if she had prequalified.
Or these.
A new study of nearly 240,000 home loan applications from 1998 in New York City concludes that conventional banks have largely ignored black neighborhoods, even those with above-average incomes, creating a vacuum that has been filled by high-cost and often abusive lenders.
The analysis was done by the staff of United States Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of Brooklyn. He called the results the best evidence yet of racial discrimination in loan decisions by banks and so-called subprime lenders that charge high fees and interest for home equity loans to borrowers with limited access to credit.
During the year that was studied, banks denied loan applications from blacks at nearly twice the rate for whites, even when they had the same income, the study found. The rejection rates were 21.6 percent for blacks and 11.4 percent for whites. Even blacks with incomes above $60,000 were rejected more often than whites with incomes under $40,000, with 20 percent of the blacks turned down compared with 17 percent of the whites.
With a good government, it should be the job of investigators and regulators to limit and stop this kind of behavior, but when Republicans are in power they take a hands off attitude about this and worse they participate in it as the Reagan Administration did with loans to farmers.
In 1997, Timothy Pigford – a soybean and corn producer from North Carolina – sued the United States Department of Agriculture.
Pigford’s lawsuit cited years of racial discrimination as the main reason as to why he and many other black producers were denied loans, and it eventually resulted in the largest civil rights settlement in the history of the United States.
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“The Pigford I and II class action lawsuits attempted to address a history of discrimination by the Department of Agriculture,” said Congressional Black Caucus Chair Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-OH) in a press release. “Between 1983 and 1997, thousands of African-American farmers were denied loans solely because of their race. These discriminatory practices resulted in severe economic consequences for farmers, often preventing them from maintaining and keeping their farms.”
And then there’s this.
A study I conducted in 2003 with Marianne Bertrand, an economist at the University of Chicago, illustrates how. We mailed thousands of résumés to employers with job openings and measured which ones were selected for callbacks for interviews. But before sending them, we randomly used stereotypically African-American names (such as “Jamal”) on some and stereotypically white names (like “Brendan”) on others.
The same résumé was roughly 50 percent more likely to result in callback for an interview if it had a “white” name. Because the résumés were statistically identical, any differences in outcomes could be attributed only to the factor we manipulated: the names.
Other studies have also examined race and employment. In a 2009 study, Devah Pager, Bruce Western and Bart Bonikowski, all now sociologists at Harvard, sent actual people to apply for low-wage jobs. They were given identical résumés and similar interview training. Their sobering finding was that African-American applicants with no criminal record were offered jobs at a rate as low as white applicants who had criminal records.
And again the Reagan Administrations record on addressing discrimination in general wasn’t awesome.
President Reagan even tried to veto the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1988, which stipulated that publicly funded institutions had to comply with civil rights laws in all areas of their organization. Despite his efforts, Congress had enough votes to pass the measure.
President Reagan did find success in cutting funding for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the civil rights division of the Justice Department — both organizations designed to crack down on discriminatory practices in education, housing, and the workplace. His cuts rendered both agencies toothless, causing the EEOC to file 60 percent fewer cases, and virtually ensuring that most cases of segregation in schools or housing at the Justice Department went uninvestigated.
So if the government does’t enforce the law, it’s not that surprising that black college graduates are twice as likely to be unemployed.
In 2013, the most recent period for which unemployment data are available by both race and educational attainment, 12.4 percent of black college graduates between the ages of 22 and 27 were unemployed. For all college graduates in the same age range, the unemployment rate stood at just 5.6 percent. The figures point to an ugly truth: Black college graduates are more than twice as likely to be unemployed.
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In fact, the center's study found that even black students who majored in high-demand fields such as engineering fare only slightly better than those who spent their college years earning liberal arts degrees. Between 2010 and 2012, 10 percent of black college graduates with engineering degrees and 11 percent of those with math and computer-related degrees were unemployed, compared with 6 percent of all engineering graduates and 7 percent of all those who focused their studies on math and computers.
College-educated blacks are also more likely than all others with degrees to confront underemployment, which the study defined as working in jobs that don't require a four-year degree. The proportion of young African-American college graduates who are underemployed has spiked since 2007 by fully 10 percentage points to a striking 56 percent. During that same period, underemployment among all recent college graduates has edged up only slightly to around 45 percent.
And apparently the source of this employment gap simply isn’t education.
A higher percentage of white Americans obtain college degrees: 41 percent, compared to the black population’s 22 percent. But data from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) show that differences in education can’t explain fully the entirety of the unemployment gap. According to research from Valerie Wilson, an economist at EPI, for black Americans with the same level of education level as white Americans, the unemployment rate is consistently nearly twice as high.
Wilson looks at census data and finds, unsurprisingly, unemployment is highest for those who didn’t attend college at all. Among those who hadn’t completed high school, whites had an unemployment rate of 6.9 percent. But for black Americans, the situation was much more extreme: Their unemployment rate was almost two-and-a-half times higher, at 16.6 percent. And a gap persists even among those who have completed a bachelor’s degree or higher, with an unemployment rate of 4.1 percent for black Americans compared to 2.4 percent for white Americans with the same degree.
For every level of educational attainment, black Americans have unemployment rates that are similar to or higher than those of less educated white Americans. For instance, white Americans who only obtained a high-school diploma have a very similar unemployment rate to black Americans who completed at least a college education: 4.6 percent vs 4.1 percent. “This disparity suggests a race penalty whereby blacks at each level of education have unemployment rates that are the same as or higher than less educated whites,” writes Wilson.
Black Americans have to have better criminals records, better credit and better education just to get a fraction of the opportunities that less wealthy, less educated whites receive. They were also specifically targeted by lenders for self-destructing self-prime loans.
Black Americans were unequally issued loans on unfavorable terms during the sub-prime loan bonanza that prefigured the housing crisis and are still suffering in its aftermath, a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union has found.
The resulting economic downturn has adversely affected them to a much greater degree than white homeowners, said the ACLU’s Rachel Goodman, who said the findings suggest banks knowingly preyed on black mortgage-seekers when it came to issuing sub-prime mortgages.
“Race must have been a factor somewhere in the decision-making, because it otherwise doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Goodman said. Goodman pointed out that the report differs significantly from other studies of wealth by race, in that it compares people who are all homeowners and thus presumably fit some definition of “middle class”.
Goodman said the black families in the study, which surveyed 3,000 households (741 of them black), had been subjected to “redlining” – denying or charging more for necessary services – loans to people in historically black neighborhoods, which made the residents of those neighborhoods particularly susceptible to predation by fly-by-night mortgage outfits pushing sub-prime loans so they could turn them around on the then-booming secondary market.
Again, “Red-Lining”. Still.
And the fact is that when you’re being discriminated against about 50% of the time in lending, housing and employment and specifically targeted by banks so that you lose your home the end result might be an income and wealth gap which was greatly widened by the Great Recession.
The wealth of white households was 13 times the median wealth of black households in 2013, compared with eight times the wealth in 2010, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. Likewise, the wealth of white households is now more than 10 times the wealth of Hispanic households, compared with nine times the wealth in 2010.
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Our analysis of Federal Reserve data does reveal a stark divide in the experiences of white, black and Hispanic households during the economic recovery. From 2010 to 2013, the median wealth of non-Hispanic white households increased from $138,600 to $141,900, or by 2.4%.
Meanwhile, the median wealth of non-Hispanic black households fell 33.7%, from $16,600 in 2010 to $11,000 in 2013. Among Hispanics, median wealth decreased by 14.3%, from $16,000 to $13,700. For all families — white, black and Hispanic — median wealth is still less than its pre-recession level.
A number of factors seem responsible for the widening of the wealth gaps during the economic recovery. As the Federal Reserve notes, the median income of minority households (blacks, Hispanics and other non-whites combined) fell 9% from its 2010 to 2013 surveys, compared with a decrease of 1% for non-Hispanic white households. Thus, minority households may not have replenished their savings as much as white households or they may have had to draw down their savings even more during the recovery.
The simple fact is that cause of the Great Recession is shared, but it was the constant GOP bleat for “deregulation” that led to the repeal of Glass/Steagall which set the stage for the housing crisis and crash.
It is true that the financial crisis has enough blame to go around. Borrowers were reckless, brokers were greedy, rating agencies were negligent, customers were naïve, and government encouraged the fiasco with unrealistic housing goals and unlimited lines of credit at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Yet, the fact that there were so many parties to blame should not be used to deflect blame from the most responsible parties of all—the big banks. Without the banks providing financing to the mortgage brokers and Wall Street while underwriting their own issues of toxic securities, the entire pyramid scheme would never have got off the ground.
It was Glass-Steagall that prevented the banks from using insured depositories to underwrite private securities and dump them on their own customers. This ability along with financing provided to all the other players was what kept the bubble-machine going for so long.
What we have here, is the new invisible plausibly deniable Jim Crow. Laws exist against all this, yet just like other crimes it can and does still happen. People like Ms Miller don’t see any of this, because it’s hard to detect by design. Nobody these days openly admits they do this. But think about it, if you’re starting position is that black people are getting some truckload of benefits you aren't getting — are you going to be willing to give them an even break? Would someone who thinks like Ms. Miller be expected to be open and fair if you were looking for a job, or to buy a home from her?
You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you,” she said.
“You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to. You had benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have. You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly.”
We don’t have the same schools everybody else gets. We don't get special benefits for college, which is an issue I addressed in part 3 of this series, we don’t get every opportunity, none of that was “given to us.”
It is true that the issue of race and racism has gained a great deal of coverage in recent years and she may not necessarily be wrong that the increased coverage may be at least tangentially related to the President. Starting with the false arrest of Prof. Skip Gates to the killings of Trayvon Martin, Jonathan Ferrell, Jonathan Crawford III, Darrien Hunt, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Sam Dubois, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, Phillando Castille, Tyre King, Keith Lamont Scott and now Terence Cutcher it is true that sometimes the news media will ask the first African-American President what he thinks about it and he usually answers them because in many of these cases there is an open question of bias.
Simply because Obama is black, he’s been asked about several of these cases and that alone has helped heighten the profile of this issue. So yes, in a sense she is right, the visibility of racism is higher than has been in decades — but she is wrong that this is something the President did deliberately. He didn’t.
The fact is that this was already happening, and it’s easy to show that going all the way back to the police killing of Leonard Deadwyler in 1968 which sparked the Watts Riots, the shooting of Yula Love in 1978, the coverup and murder of Ron Settles in 1981 by Signal Hill Police, the beating of Rodney King in 1991 which sparked the L.A riots, the shooting of Amadou Diallo in 1999, Patrick Dorismond in 2000 and Sean Bell in 2006. Obama didn’t cause any of that.
There is also the presumption in her statement that none of that is a legitimate issue, or that it doesn’t have any impact or affect on anyone. That all of these racially targeted killings, beatings, excessive stops, searches and thousands upon thousands of humiliations have no lingering effect or trauma on the psyche of those on the receiving end, their family and their community.
If we were talking about a woman who had been viciously raped over and over again, would we not expect that she might flinch, cry out and react with anger when yet again confronted with the prospect of yet another attack? Wouldn’t we expect someone on the receiving end of repeated traumas and humiliations to have at least some lingering post-traumatic stress? Wouldn’t that stress have an impact on their children, and wouldn’t that stress continue to the next generation as the trauma continues to occur, not just in the past but in the present as well?
These challenges are not insurmountable. Modern discrimination on it’s own isn’t completely debilitating, but it also quite clearly has an impact. Some of that impact may be internalized, and it may cause people to grow frustrated, angry, conspiratorial and to point fingers and blame at others a bit quickly.
We should be understanding that things have a cause.
There was and is an action, which has prompted a reaction. Some have responded to these challenges negatively and fallen into despair and self-destruction, but many others in the black community have risen to the challenge and with courage succeeded anyway in business, media, entertainment and sports. We have our own array of millionaires and billionaires from Dr Dre, to Jay Z, Beyonce, Russell Simmons, Oprah, Robert Smith (founder of Vista Equity Partners), Michael Jordan, Robert L. Johnson (Owner of BET), John H. Johnson (founder of JET & Ebony magazine), and Barry Gordy (founder of Motown Records). And before them came Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, Rafer Johnson and Muhammad Ali each pushing and punching there way through the cracks in the Jim Crow wall. As more of that wall has come down over the last 50 years many more of us have succeeded culminating in the Presidency of Barack Obama.
But that doesn’t mean the job is done and that we shouldn’t continue to push to clean up the remaining pieces of that now smashed wall, even if it becomes more difficult as those pieces shrink in size. It may not ever be completely gone, but we can clean it up much more.
People like Miller — and frankly much of the GOP which clearly agrees with her — are not only wrong, their perspective and attitude is exactly what makes the continued cleanup more and more difficult.