In the “Between Barack and a Hard Place” by Tim Wise, Wise explains institutionalized racism in the categories of income and jobs, housing, education, health care, criminal justice, and Hurricane Katrina Response. Institutional racism is the pattern where blacks and people of color have given some negative treatments based on their race or skin color. Wise gives some key points and statistics in each areas that disproves the idea that people have equal opportunities in the United States. In terms of income and jobs, Wise shows unequal opportunities for applicants with black-sounding names: “Job applicants with white-sounding names are 50 percent more likely to be called back for a job interview than applicants with black-sounding names.” (Wise …show more content…
Rattansi states the idea of institutionalized racism that highlights ethnic equalities. First, Wise mentions hiring practices: “An insistence on possession of high school diplomas and satisfactory performance on standardized tests excluded many blacks...despite the fact that it could not be demonstrated that the certificates and tests provided convincing evidence for ability to do particular jobs.” (Rattansi 139) It depicts that most blacks are excluded in the category of potential entry into skilled jobs and training. Second, Wise asserts: “Rules like school uniforms may not have been invented for purposes of discriminating against dress codes of ethnic minorities.” (Rattansi 139) It shows that there should not be the rules about discriminating ethnic minorities based on their race. Third, Wise states: “Inequalities are more often than not cumulative, so that poor housing...create cycles of disadvantage that are hard to break out of.” (Rattansi 140) It demonstrates that there are a lot of disadvantages for ethnic minorities. In addition, Rattansi shows some black inequalities’ statistics in terms of mortgage terms: “African Americans get less advantageous mortgage terms than whites.. Blacks pay higher interest rates for mortgages for properties that are worth less than those of whites.” (Rattansi 141) Moreover, Rattansi explains black-white disparities in the United States. Wise states: “Blacks suffer because they continue to experience a variety of forms of racism in the criminal justice system, employment, housing, and education.” (Rattansi 142) It shows that black disadvantages still continues where it shows inequalities in the society. Rattansi shows some statistics about the death penalty: “72 % of death penalty prosecution approvals by the attorney-general were
Black people are paid almost half of what white people are paid, which forces them to live in low income communities which tend to be unsafe, and also put their whole family in danger. Due to their low income, they might not be able to afford health care which causes them to “lose more work because of illness, have more carious teeth, lose more babies as a result of both miscarriage and infant death…” according to William Ryan from Blaming the Victim page 648. People who have low income due to the wage gap tend not to be able to afford college compared to white people, which hinders their future and their ability to succeed. In fact, on page 214 in Shades of Belonging: Latinos and Racial Identity, Sonia Tafoya states “Hispanics who identified themselves as white have higher levels of education and income and greater degrees of civic enfranchisement than those who pick some other race category.” This shows how minorities are mistreated in society unlike white people. In the end, it doesn’t matter what your abilities are because if you are not white you are not treated equally. “If you’re not white, you’re black,” (141 Sethi). Anyone who is not white in the United States are seen as inferior. If you’re not white, you 're not treated as an equal. Non-whites are judged based on their appearance and are made fun of due to their accents. Numerous non-whites are harassed and are told “you are in America, learn how to speak English!” When in fact, there is no official language of the United States. According to Sonia Shah in Asian American? on page 217, Asians are paid less in the workforce even when they have the same level of education as whites. Regardless of whether non-whites receive the same education level as whites, they are still not equal, not even in the work
Despite the passing of the Civil Rights Act and Affirmative Action, racism evolved from the blatant discrimination of the 1960s like segregation, to the slightly more passive racism of the 1990s such as unfair arrests/jail time (Taylor). Curtis’ writes three decades after the aforementioned progress and yet, looking back on the 90s, there is an alarming amount of similarities between the two.
William Julius Wilson creates a thrilling new systematic framework to three politically tense social problems: “the plight of low-skilled black males, the persistence of the inner-city ghetto, and the fragmentation of the African American family” (Wilson, 36). Though the conversation of racial inequality is classically divided. Wilson challenges the relationship between institutional and cultural factors as reasons of the racial forces, which are inseparably linked, but public policy can only change the racial status quo by reforming the institutions that support it.
The majority of our prison population is made up of African Americans of low social and economic classes, who come from low income houses and have low levels of education. The chapter also discusses the amount of money the United States loses yearly due to white collar crime as compared to the cost of violent crime. Another main point was the factors that make it more likely for a poor person to be incarcerated, such as the difficulty they would have in accessing adequate legal counsel and their inability to pay bail. This chapter addresses the inequality of sentencing in regards to race, it supplies us with NCVS data that shows less than one-fourth of assailants are perceived as black even though they are arrested at a much higher rate. In addition to African Americans being more likely to be charged with a crime, they are also more likely to receive harsher punishments for the same crimes- which can be seen in the crack/cocaine disparities. These harsher punishments are also shown in the higher rates of African Americans sentenced to
Though slavery was arguably abolished, “for thousands of blacks, the badge of slavery [lives] on” (Alexander 141). Many young black men today face similar discrimination as a black man in the Jim Crow era - in housing, employment, public benefits, and so-called constitutional rights. This discrimination characterizes itself on a basis of a person’s criminal record, making it perfectly legal. As Alexander suggests, “This is the new normal, the new racial equilibrium” (Alexander, 181).
Because workplace discrimination is closely tied with underemployment and unemployment, it’s important to know why blacks continue to obtain lower positions and promotions than their white co-workers. In The Social Psychological Costs of Racial Segmentation, Tyrone A. Forman discusses explanations of the separation of middle class African Americans in the workplace. The amount of blacks and whites co-working has grown, but blacks are often given the jobs with the lower prestige and rarely any chance of promotion. Despite increasing numbers of middle-class blacks working the same types of jobs, African Americans are primarily segmented...
Furthermore, the existence of racism has black people own reasons. For instance, many black people 's own performance for government provides ammunition for its policy of racial discrimination. As a results, for a long time, many black people because they can not get equal education opportunities, they without work, and some of them tend to engage in brutal drug deals, in their own way to imitate the entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism. Thus, in the black community, predatory crimes can happen all the time. Racist people called black people as “drug parasitize the unemployed”. Also, they think that the black people were lack of moral, polite, and conscience bloodthirsty warmonger. It seems that the government’s decision-makers makes a strong policy, and it is disadvantageous for black
Racial discrimination is a pertinent issue in the United States. Although race relations may seem to have improved over the decades in actuality, it has evolved into a subtler form and now lurks in institutions. Sixty years ago racial discrimination was more overt, but now it has adapted to be more covert. Some argue that these events are isolated and that racism is a thing of the past (Mullainathan). Racial discrimination is negatively affecting the United States by creating a permanent underclass of citizens through institutional racism in business and politics, and creating a cancerous society by rewriting the racist history of America. Funding research into racial discrimination will help society clearly see the negative effects that racism
Racial Disparities in the Criminal Justice System “We simply cannot say we live in a country that offers equal justice to all Americans when racial disparities plague the system by which our society imposes the ultimate punishment,” stated Senator Russ Feingold. Even though racism has always been a problem since the beginning of time, recently in the United States, there has been a rise in discrimination and violence has been directed towards the African American minority primarily from those in the white majority who believe they are more superior, especially in our criminal justice system. There are many different reasons for the ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system between the majority and the minority, but some key reasons are differential involvement, individual racism, and institutional racism to why racial disparities exist in Institutional racism is racism that is shown through government organizations and political institutions. In a report done by David Baldus in 1998, he discovered that when it comes to the death penalty, blacks are more likely sentenced to death than whites, and those who kill whites are more likely to be given the death penalty than the killing of blacks (Touré).
The history of the United States is littered with exclusionary methods that create complex webs of structural racism that have persisted from the times of indentured servitude and slavery to the modern day. During the 1970s specifically the practice of redlining was in full swing, and many people of color were forced to work unskilled or semi-skilled jobs due to widespread workplace discrimination. These structures serve to create obstacles to the success of minorities, those not traditionally considered to be ‘white’. Generations of people of color have been affected as they are continually denied access to better education, higher paying jobs, and even legal citizenship. One particular example is Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose memoir My Beloved World details her experiences as the first generation daughter of working class Puerto Rican immigrants. Rather than being seen for her vast accomplishments in high school, at Princeton University, and as a United States Supreme Court Justice, she has had to battle assumptions made about her character and the path to her success that cause her to be racialized as lazy and therefore unworthy of achievement; assumptions that are solely based on her race, class, and gender. Despite the promises made by the United States to provide equal opportunities for all its citizens, many minorities are still subject to the ideology that they are lazy, undeserving, poor, and inferior purely because of their race, as shown in Sonia Sotomayor’s interactions with her school nurse and a shopkeeper in an upscale store. Regardless, members of these historically disparaged minorities reveal contradictions as they strive to overcome the racism they must face every day yet are still faced with discrimination in ...
There exists symbolic racism and statistical discrimination, which play into society’s biases and put black people at a disadvantage. Symbolic racism suggests black people have different social values and statistical discrimination explains the hostility towards black people as a group. The relationship between symbolic racism and statistical discrimination is that the two forms of racism feed into each other. In having experiences with a few black individuals, the person judging them might subconsciously generalize all black people based on that experience, which is statistical discrimination. This leads to symbolic racism because they now perceive black people as a group to be different. This is evident in the hiring practices of some employers, both white and black, who have explained their biases against hiring black people. Employers cite issues based on their observations with black employees, claiming that when some of their black employees “talk black,” customers are driven away, or that employers have had experiences with employees who were lazy, leading to a general distrust of the commitment of black employees. It is not wrong for the employers’ experiences to shape their perceptions, but generalized perceptions have put black people as a group in an undesirable
2010, “Racial Disparities in Sentencing: Implications for the Criminal Justice System and the African American Community”, African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies 4(1): 1-31, in this Albonetti’s study is discussed in which it was found that minority status alone accounted for an additional sentence length of “one to seven months.” African American defendants were “likely to receive pretrial release but were more likely to be convicted, and be given harsher sentences after conviction than white defendants charged with the same crimes.” One of the reasons behind this are the sentencing laws, it is seen that these laws are designed in a way that they tend to be harsher towards a certain group of people, generally towards the people of color than others thus leading to inequality with the sentencing
Discrimination has always been there between blacks and whites. Since the 1800s where racial issues and differences started flourishing till today, we can still find people of different colors treated unequally. “[R]acial differences are more in the mind than in the genes. Thus we conclude superiority and inferiority associated with racial differences are often socially constructed to satisfy the socio-political agenda of the dominant group”(Heewon Chang,Timothy Dodd;2001;1).
...valent within the United States. It prevents minorities from getting equal opportunities when being employed. Certain neighborhoods are discriminated against due to the socio-economic level and the impoverished situation. There are not many mixed neighborhoods due to segregation of whites, blacks and other groups. Everyone is not given the same equal educational environment because of their race and where they live. Blacks in disadvantaged neighborhoods are less likely to go to private schools and have to settle for urban schools, whose standards are questionable. There are more incarcerated blacks than any other racial group, which suggest that there is some level of disparity and discrimination against this minority groups. Due to the points made above, it is obvious that racism still exists in the United States and Obama’s presidency did not cease its existence.
Racist and racism are provocative words in American society. To some, they become curse words. They are descriptive words of reality that cannot be denied. Some people believe that race is the primary determinant of human abilities and capacities and behave as if racial differences produce inherent superiorities. People of color are often injured by these judgements and actions whether they are directly or indirectly racist. Just as individuals can act in racist ways, so can institutions. Institutions can be overtly or inherently racist. Institutions can also injure people. The outcome is nonetheless racist, if not intentional (Randall).