Let's throw some food! (respectfully)
Brett Brenner's Stance:
In recent years and more specifically the year 2020, many media outlets have proposed that America is fundamentally racist and runs a system that puts the African-American community at a disadvantage. The term used is systemic racism, and in reality, it's actually a myth, fueled by misused facts and twisted truths. Before digging into this, here’s something to think about. The three natural rights are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness/property. Equality is not on that list due to the fact that you cannot promise an individual a fair and equal life compared to someone else. Life is not fair in any way, but to state that America is racist and is setting many people up for failure just because you are unhappy is ridiculous and is more of an excuse than a truth.
The reason why this topic has seen a surge this year is because of the death of George Floyd. Systemic racism did not kill George Floyd; he died due to a mix of an officer doing his job wrong as well as poor choices that led him to that situation. The event obviously went viral, and it has been said that things like this happen way more than they really do. The reason that video and event went viral are because for something to go viral, it has to be unique. While George Floyd’s death was unjust and avoidable, it supplies zero evidence that America is fundamentally racist. Ronald Reagan once stated that “We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.” This quote surely holds more truth today than it ever did. The Bureau of Justice Statistics claimed that African-Americans committed 52% of homicides between 1980 and 2008, yet only making up about 13% of the population. With that example, as well as many other claims that are similar, it is clear that black crime rates may be to blame for why we see African Americans people in positions such as the one George Floyd was in.
Another big argument that claims systemic racism to be true is the history of America. It is said that because of America’s history of slavery, and then Jim Crowe laws, followed by redlining, we have created a racist system today that puts people of color at a major disadvantage. History most definitely has its consequences, but it is a much smaller factor for the gap we see in colored and whites today than it is said to be. Redlining was an awful policy, but it was made illegal in the 1960’s. In addition, it was followed by many effective acts that allowed those in low income minority neighborhoods to get loans. These acts include the Community Reinvestment Act and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975. Saying that black people are behind because of a racist America from 80-200 years ago is unfair and false. While white people today have had more great grandparents that were able to have higher paying jobs than those of black people today, inheritance is actually a very inefficient method to be rich in today's America. A study of millionaires done by Chris Hogan, a black radio show host and author, showed that only 21% of millionaires received any inheritance, and only 16% received an inheritance of $100k or more. Better yet, it also showed that only 3% received an inheritance of $1 million or more. With all of this being true, the same study ran a survey that claimed 74% of millennials believed millionaires inherited their money. So, with all of these numbers, acts, and facts, it is clear that the history of the U.S has a very small impact on today's gap.
Instead of blaming a racist America that hasn’t existed between 80 and 200 years ago and has been fixed, claiming that America and its policies are simply racist and made to hurt the black community, or saying that white people have a head start, let’s make a real claim that explains the gap between colored and whites, not an excuse that tells colored people that they are incapable of being successful because of the system. The real factors of the gap are poor decision making, high single motherhood rates, and crime rates. The good news is that all of this can be solved. We can take to social media and pop-culture to spark a culture change. We can invest into our education systems, and get more people to graduate highschool. We can allocate more money into low income neighborhoods, as well as allow kids to go to schools outside of their district if necessary. I am not here to say that racism is not real; it totally is, but bad people with bad intentions will always exist. What I am saying is that simply stating that any issues we have today exist mainly because of racism, and that we live in a racist society, is just an easy way out, untrue, and a poor solution to the problem. In actuality, we must focus more on classism.
Guy Bellingrath's Stance:
With the recent demonstrations and protests by supporters of Black Lives Matter, an important issue, race relations in America, has been brought to mainstream attention once more. It is the issue of racism that is not implemented through a lack of civil representation or the lack of basic human rights. It is in fact quite the opposite with many systems and laws in place that have been created by people in power to suppress and diminish the possibilities and opportunities that black men and women have in America.
The main system that oppresses black families and ultimately leads to more problems is the economic system in which America is based upon and was founded upon. Due to historically racist policies like redlining, which is a practice that denies home loans to colored families which in turn, decreases property value in specific areas. These wealth disparities segregate areas of cities or towns as substantially poorer and less desirable for business and commerce. This cycle of poverty and access being denied to move out of such areas is one of the main ways that African Americans have been systematically oppressed economically. Another factor of economic disadvantages for colored people in America is the implicit biases around employment. A study by the National Bureau of Economic research found that colored sounding names had a much lower chance of getting an interview or getting a callback for a job. Both of these forms of discrimination puts colored indivduals at a severe disadvantage economically which in turn leads to higher crime rates, higher single motherhood rights and lower overall financial literacy. In fact the average white family in America is 7 times more wealthy than the average African American family in America according to a Survey of Consumer Finances from 1983–2016. This is a distinct economic discrepancy and clearly portrays how a system containing racist policies and biases in America holds African Americans back at a systemic level.
One of the systemic racism issues that is most prevalent in today's media is police brutality against groups like Black Lives Matter advocating for change in the prison and police institutions. The two largest issues are how the prison industrial complex targets people of color and affects them disproportionately, and how racial bias affects policing on a national level. The prison industrial complex has many factors that contributed to its start but no factor is a bigger contributor than the start of the War on Drugs. When Nixon started the War on Drugs in 1971, his national campaign aimed to stop illicit drug trading by increasing prison sentences for drug offenders, either users or dealers. Presidents after him carried on this war by creating mandatory minimum sentencing policies laid out in the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and imposing stop and frisk laws. These new policies led to increased policing in order to crack down on crime and drug trading in historically poor communities, which were usually communities with a majority of people with color. As a result of a new influx of prisoners resulting from these policies, many prisons were incentivized to privatize (which means they were owned and run by a company that was contracted prisoners by the government). Prisons made more money if they could stay open longer and could expand the population they could hold within them. Prisons have become an industry at this point, as it places value on imprisoning people for as long as they can, regardless of the imprisonment practices morality. In order to keep the private prison industry afloat, policy makers and law enforcement continued the policies that targeted poorer communities and communities of people of color to fill these prisons. With this increased policing, tensions between African-Americans and police have risen with a huge disparity between how black and white people are policed. In a study from Stanford University, it was found that black motorists were 20% more likely to be pulled over than white drivers and 34 percent more likely to be searched than white motorists in traffic stops. This shows a clear racial bias in the most common way that the police interact with the general population. Another issue with policing in America is the use of excessive force. In a study done by the Justice Department in 2015, they found that poc were more than two times likely to receive excessive force or threatened verbally by a peace officer. They also reported that in 84% of cases across all demographics where force was used in a police encounter, it was perceived as excessive by the one on whom the force was being exerted upon. These stats are a clear indicator of how African-American citizens are treated differently by police and how racial bias plays a major part in policing within America today.
As these statistics and sentiments suggest, as well as my personal opinion, systemic racism is one of the most prevalent issues of our time. This must be acted upon quickly with legislation in order to preserve every American’s right to the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness without it being obstructed by a system that has been put in place to oppress black Americans for far too long.
Brett's Response to Guy:
The article starts off by naming redlining and economics as a contributing factor to systemic racism. I talked about it in my article, and I’ll begin by building off of it. I already mentioned the Community Reinvestment Act and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975, and how they helped low income neighborhoods get loans and were shown to be effective. Ultimately, redlining was made illegal in the 1960’s, and by the 1980’s banks were no longer giving loans at disproportionate rates. African-americans have since then received loans at fair rates compared to other races, and in addition, have seen an easier time getting into colleges as well. A Los Angeles TImes article revealed that requirements for black applicants in test scores and GPAs had lowered in another attempt to correct this issue. Interpret it how you would like, but one could make a case that it has actually been over-corrected due to the lower requirements. To continue, another study named The Equality of Opportunity Project revealed that the income gap between blacks and whites is not caused by race, but by sex. It compared different races of families with similar incomes and looked at how much their children would go on to make, and while the white and black women showed very similar results, the white men ranked noticeably higher than the black men. This shows that the gap is not caused by racism but instead by other factors.
The other article also mentioned Implicit bias being a racist issue today, where blacks are receiving less callbacks for jobs than whites simply because of their names sounding black. When you look deeper into this topic, a lot of interesting facts are revealed. Two studies were done that focused on first names and last names, respectively. The study about first names did show a name such as Lakisha or DaShawn (names the article actually used) did receive less calls back. That same article also showed that names like these were mainly given by mothers with only a highschool education or less, showing a social status along with these names. “Only commonly given black names from lower social status origins are a strong signal of a person’s race,” Gaddis, a UCLA professor who did the research, stated. The second article showed no difference in call backs when using last names as the main variable. So, a traditionally white last name like Greenberg against a traditionally black last name like Jefferson showed very similar call backs. What does all of this reveal? It reveals the real issue is class discrimination, not race discrimination. This issue of social class discramination does not only apply when looking at the African-American community. For example, this same situation can be seen with Jewish people with the names Ben and Benjamin (pronounced Ben-ya-min). With this knowledge as well as what is stated in my original article, it can definitely be said that there is a income gap issue between whites and colored people, but to attribute the cause to racism would be wrong, misleading, and inaccurate.
The article also argued how the War on Drugs led to poor communities being targeted and prisons becoming industries and keeping people longer in order to make money off them. This began in the early 1970’s, about 50 years ago, a time when we lived in a more racist America than today. America has seen a huge leap in solving racism since then. The War on Drugs was an attempt to crack down on a real problem and put real criminals in jail. While it failed, it was not an attempt to put more blacks in jail and its purpose was not meant to target black people. If the source of the problem was a poorer community, with higher crime rates, then of course it would be targeted. If the source of the problem was in wealthy neighborhoods, then they would be targeted, and that has happened. Also, private prisons do not make a profit on having more black people in their populations compared to whites, and as of now 52% of the crime is made by African Americans, yet they only make up 13% of the population. Obviously you would see more of them in jail, because real criminals go to jail. The issue here is not caused by racism, it is more social status, culture, and class. If an all white poor neighborhood had been a source of drug issues, it would see an increase in policing because of the drugs, not the race of the people. In addition to that, prison reforms in recent years by both Barack Obama and his team as well as Donald Trump and his team have seen more people, especially those of color, either released from prison or get reduced sentences. An article by the Pew Research Center made a claim that the black imprisonment rate has seen a drop by a third since 2006. Lastly, we will talk about police brutality. Black Lives Matter has seemed to create a false narrative that police are the problem with black violence. The truth is black on black violence is way more more problematic, yet they do not focus on it. To start, only 9 unarmed black people were killed in 2019, while 19 unarmed white people were killed. With that being said, most people cannot name a white person killed by police, but they can name a colored person killed by police. This is because of a narrative driven by the media in order to advance their claim of a racist America. The true problem is homicides, where almost half of the victims are black, and in nearly all of those cases they were killed by other black people. The CDC also released a statement saying that black killings by police have decreased 75% in the last 50 years, while the same stat for whites has flatlined. The reality we have is that cops are working one of the hardest jobs there is, and they are all much more worried about getting home and not getting killed rather than making sure they are harming african-americans. Obviously it is possible for a racist person to become a cop, but saying that police and America have created a racist system that has forced the African-American community into a worse situation is false. A few people do not account for all of society, and bad police officers will always be showcased more often because it is a rare case. If something is common, it doesn’t go viral, but if something is unique and relatively special, then it will spread easily.
America has and will always have issues, but systemic racism is a myth. The main problems that it preaches are mostly true, such as wage differences and crime rates, but the causes of these issues are not even close to what they claim they are. Social status, income inequality, culture, crime, single-motherhood, and graduating rates are much more accurate causes of the issue rather than saying we live in a racist country with discriminatory rules. That statement is ridiculous, and creates another issue by telling people they are victims and there is nothing they can do about it. The true issues I mentioned can be fixed. We need to find a better solution to the problem than just saying that the system is flawed; a call to action is necessary and real work will have to be done in order to better ourselves, as it always has been required to make real change.
Guy's response to Brett:
In an article claiming to “debunk” systemic racism, it actually provides more evidence as to why systemic racism is prevalent in America. The main points brought up in the article talk about generational wealth, redlining, and the rate at which blacks commit homicide. All of these things provide direct evidence as to why systemic racism exists and continues to oppress Americans to this day.
In response to the fact that redlining was made illegal, the author does not account for the fact illegal things can still take place and even increase in the severity of which they occur. Just because it was made illegal does not mean that a sort of pseudo-redlining or segregation cannot be seen in America. An example is school segregation in America and provides evidence for how things that are illegal on the basis of race still take place today. The number of segregated schools (defined in this analysis as those schools where less than 40 percent of students are white), has approximately doubled between 1996 and 2016 according to the Atlantic. Now obviously school segregation is illegal, as was defined by the landmark Supreme Court case Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, and yet somehow racial segregation has worsened in the past 30 years. Another thing that has not helped the case of redlining is the fact that The Community Reinvestment Act recently had its standards for giving loans for housing and businesses weakened by the Trump Administration. The fact that 85 percent of “redlined areas” before redlining was made illegal still contain majority black inhabitants according to The Washington Post is also another statistic that proves redlining still has effects today and has not been addressed. So to say that making redlining illegal and that acts such as The Community Reinvestment Acts have helped communities affected by redlining is farce and completely untrue in its nature for the majority of African-Americans living today.
The other point that the article brings up is how 13 percent of the population is responsible for 52 percent of homicides. This statistic is misleading for many reasons. With this statistic being true, there could only be two reasons as to why it is true. Either the claim being made is that poc are inherently more criminal and look to incite violence at a higher rate which is just blatantly racist and has no evidence to support it, or it is the fact that black people are more likely to be impoverished and involved with gang violence, which would increase their exposure to violence and possible homicides. This number just provides more evidence as to how socioeconomically challenged populations face more obstacles in becoming successful. According to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, the homicide rate for colored men is 1.5 times higher than a white mans. Additionally, homicide is the leading cause of death for colored men ages 1-44 according to the CDC. These statistics prove that people in a poorer area or situation are more likely to be killed as opposed to someone in a richer area or situation.
The last point brought up in this article is about generational wealth and might be the worst point brought up to “debunk” systemic racism. The entire point of the statistic is to prove that generational wealth is not passed on and most people are left to create their own money. The thing that the statistics fail to show is that inheritance is not even close to all of what generational wealth is and does not account for a large number of factors of what create this type of wealth. Inheritance can create wealth for the next generation but the best way to create wealth is to own your house or real estate and invest in your child's education. According to the Urban Institute, 71.9 percent of white families own their house as opposed to only 41.8 percent of colored families. That’s more than a 30 percent difference and highlights how much easier it is for white families to acquire wealth in America. The other way that wealth is built in America is by investing in one's child's education. This is substantially more difficult for those in colored areas considering that the majority of schools face an almost 2500 dollar difference in spending per student compared to schools with a white majority. According to EdBuild, schools with a majority colored population have a 23 billion dollar deficit when compared to schools with a white majority. The fact that these two major ways to build wealth are so racially divided clearly shows how generational wealth can create a large gap and how inheritance does not mean much, if anything at all, when it comes to building wealth for generations to last.
All major points brought up in the article “debunking” systemic racism have proved to be a surface level analysis of the issue and fail to look deeper into the cause of relations regarding race. If one just looks into the issue a little deeper and not just the outcome of the system, it is easy to see that oppression still exists today and is an issue that needs to be addressed by the legislation in America.
Whom do you agree with?
*Keep in mind: neither opinion expressed is endorsed or in affiliation with the dinner table talk; this is all for educational purposes! This is specifically an article meant to address differing perspectives in order to expose one to new opinions :)
Brett's Sources:
Homicide/Crime reports
Community Reinvestment Act
Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975
Study of Millionaires
Guy's Sources:
https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2
How you letting racism on here