let's pretend. let's pretend that institutional racism no longer exists

[cali]

but that economic injustice still does. Black poverty rates are still almost 3x what poverty rates are for whites. The social safety net is still tattered. 47% of black children are still living in poverty. Kids in inner cities are still dying from random gunfire. Inner city schools are still crumbling, and doing a poor job. And the trajectory is still largely the same; more and more kids, disproportionately minorities, trapped in the horrors of poverty.

Fewer young black men are now murdered by cops. That's good. Prospective employers no longer screen applicants by what they believe are black sounding names. Also good. But if you read at a 4th grade level because you didn't have the benefit of a decent education, you're still screwed- I refer you back to that horrifying statistic about the number of black children growing up in poverty. The drug war is still on, but penalties for crack are now no different from regular cocaine. But if you can't afford bail, you're still screwed. If you can't afford a lawyer, it's the same raw deal.

Food insecurity hasn't gone away. The damage wrought by growing up in poverty is still impacting millions of lives- and we know how extensive that damage is. Access to healthcare is still limited. Medicaid doesn't cover millions of poor people. The Voting Right Act has been restored, but voting patterns remain large the same, meaning that large percentages of poor people still don't vote.

What I'm trying to illustrate is that civil rights and economic justice are of equal importance and together they are more powerful in effecting change, than pitted against each other or just plain separated. The Moral Monday Movement is an excellent template for how that can work,, though it's still in it's infancy.

When I see people saying that economic justice isn't that important, I see crumbling schools and what they represent. When I see people saying that poverty in the U.S. isn't that bad, I'm simply gobsmacked.

Economic injustice as it impacts the black community is closely related to institutional racism, but it can't be remedied only by stopping the systemic racism in our institutions.

We need both to effect change, and not one before the other, but working in tandem.

[malthaussen]

1. I would presume that those who consider social justice more important than economic...

... interpret concerns with "economic injustice" to be really code about restoring the white middle class, which is a position not entirely without merit. Frankly, whenever I hear some politician -- whatever his name -- make noises about "Restoring the American Dream" I want to gag, since that "Dream" is both unsustainable and has never been extended to the majority of Americans to begin with.

But I hardly see that it is necessarily an either/or proposition.

-- Mal

[cali]

4. yeah, I understand that, and I agree with you that the rhetoric about restoring

the American dream is vague bullshit that doesn't really address the crisis I'm referring to. But investing in schools, repairing the social safety net, funding organizations such as legal aid and enrolling more people in Medicaid, does. So does investing in infrastructure and expanding job training programs and raising the minimum wage. That means raising taxes on the wealthiest.

[Maedhros]

19. When I think "economic justice", I think more of the working class.

Specifically, "justice" equates to "workers enjoying the full benefits of their efforts."

Also, equal pay for equal work.

[JaneyVee]

2. Yes, they are equally important, but....

You can't have economic justice without social justice first. Social justice could eliminate institutional racism, then comes economic justice close behind.

[cali]

6. you are saying they aren't equally important when you say one takes precedence over the other.

Obviously, I disagree. I think they're inseparable. That's why Reverend Barber and other leaders of temPoral Monday's movement have fashioned their effort so that both are given equal weight, and both work in concert. If you put off one in favor of the other, the result will be unsatisfactory in the real world.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

3. Lack of social equality and lack of income equality enhance the lack of both.

And, the reverse is true.

More social equality enhances income, more income equality enhances social equality.

We may never get rid of income inequality or social inequality but ignoring either, or both, will definitely be fruitless.

[frazzled]

5. It's not true that employers no longer screen applicants by "black-sounding" names

I just read a recent article about this, but can't find it. Nevertheless, this well-known study from a dozen years ago documented the employment bias with precision:

In the study "Are Emily and Brendan More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?" Marianne Bertrand, an associate professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and Sendhil Mullainathan of Massachusetts Institute of Technology use a field experiment to measure the extent of race-based job discrimination in the current labor market.

From July 2001 to May 2002, Bertrand and Mullainathan sent fictitious resumes in response to 1,300 help-wanted ads listed in the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune. They used the callback rate for interviews to measure the success of each resume. Approximately 5,000 resumes were sent for positions in sales, administrative support, clerical services, and customer service. Jobs ranged from a cashier at a store to the manager of sales at a large firm.

The catch was that the authors manipulated the perception of race via the name of each applicant, with comparable credentials for each racial group. Each resume was randomly assigned either a very white-sounding name (Emily Walsh, Brendan Baker) or a very African-American-sounding name (Lakisha Washington, Jamal Jones).

The authors find that applicants with white-sounding names are 50 percent more likely to get called for an initial interview than applicants with African-American-sounding names. Applicants with white names need to send about 10 resumes to get one callback, whereas applicants with African-American names need to send about 15 resumes to achieve the same result.

In addition, race greatly affects how much applicants benefit from having more experience and credentials. White job applicants with higher-quality resumes received 30 percent more callbacks than whites with lower-quality resumes. Having a higher-quality resume has a much smaller impact on African-American applicants, who experienced only 9 percent more callbacks for the same improvement in their credentials. This disparity suggests that in the current state of the labor market, African-Americans may not have strong individual incentives to build better resumes.

http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.html

Ah... I just found that other article, from the NYT:

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.

These kinds of methods have been used in a variety of research, especially in the last 20 years. Here are just some of the general findings:

■ When doctors were shown patient histories and asked to make judgments about heart disease, they were much less likely to recommend cardiac catheterization (a helpful procedure) to black patients — even when their medical files were statistically identical to those of white patients.

■ When whites and blacks were sent to bargain for a used car, blacks were offered initial prices roughly $700 higher, and they received far smaller concessions.

■ Several studies found that sending emails with stereotypically black names in response to apartment-rental ads on Craigslist elicited fewer responses than sending ones with white names. A regularly repeated study by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development sent African-Americans and whites to look at apartments and found that African-Americans were shown fewer apartments to rent and houses for sale.

■ White state legislators were found to be less likely to respond to constituents with African-American names. This was true of legislators in both political parties.

■ Emails sent to faculty members at universities, asking to talk about research opportunities, were more likely to get a reply if a stereotypically white name was used.

■ Even eBay auctions were not immune. When iPods were auctioned on eBay, researchers randomly varied the skin color on the hand holding the iPod. A white hand holding the iPod received 21 percent more offers than a black hand.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/upshot/the-measuring-sticks-of-racial-bias-.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0

[malthaussen]

7. OP says "let's pretend." n/t

[cali]

9. did you miss the let's pretend that these things no longer exist? seems like you did

[frazzled]

12. No, I didn't ... it's just that

the OP decided to pretend that economic conditions and educational opportunities remained dire and unequal to that of whites, while cops magically stopped murdering young black men and employers no longer showed racial bias.

That's loading the deck from the get go. Any ensuing arguments are specious.

How about let's pretend the opposite: that social injustices remain rampant while economic and educational opportunities improve. What conclusions can we draw? Pretending is neither social science nor political policy.

[cali]

14. I so write that op. the point is that the two are inseparable

[frazzled]

18. Your argument is circular

You're simply "proving" what you already believe, and have to resort to "pretending" to do so.

Look, I don't want to start an argument. I think members here, and particularly African-American members, are wanting to make clear that, regardless of economic status (whether as individuals or as a group), the mere possession of a black face imposes imbalances in our society that perhaps you can not understand or imagine. All we're asking is that you try to reflect on that reality for a moment.

[giftedgirl77]

11. No, you have to pretend...

Because the simple fact is regardless of economic status your skin is still going to be brown & therefore one is more prone to social injustices.

Pretending is the only way to not make that a fact.

[cali]

13. the simple facts are that poverty is a greater factor

in determining health, financial success, educational achievement than race.

[giftedgirl77]

16. As pointed out to you previously our brown skin puts us

at greater risk of harm especially by law enforcement & if the person is male. It doesn't get better if we make more money. We aren't advocating that we don't want economic justice, because that would be fantastic. What we want is for us to not have to fear for our lives or our children's lives every time they walk out of the house. The dismissive way you attempt to toss that aside is very discouraging.

[Igel]

20. It pays to add another caveat to the "black-sounding names" bit.

I don't know if it was this specific study or one that was structured the same way (and had the same results) but there was a bit more to it.

The researchers had an inference--that racism accounted for the difference. However, upon peer review it was pointed out that they had a confound that they had not considered and which might account for a non-racial factor in responses: Were the employers looking at race or correlates to race? Race is physical; but there are non-racial correlates to race. (If you often make pierogies, you're not likely to be black, for instance. If you're Latino, odds are you don't traditionally have lutefisk on Xmas eve.) It's always good when a reviewer avoids easy, quick thinking to ask if there's something going on that isn't obviously true by assumption.

So they repeated the study on a smaller scale. Under the names on the resume they indicated the race explicitly:

Name: Emily Walsh
Race: Black (or white or African-American).

The respondent at HR knew the race of the person involved. Not much changed. If the bias was racial, then the HR knew that the person they'd interview would be white or black. And then there was the risk of having their racial bias be explicit and subject to litigation. But the bias against certain names continued. A black Emily Walsh (or whatever name was used) was as likely as an unraced Emily Walsh to be picked.

The researcher's inference was a bit more subtle than racism and went to the family's cultural background. "Emily" would be more likely, in those surveyed, to fit in with office culture; "Jamal" would have been more likely raised in a household that explicitly drew a strong difference between home culture and the kind of culture that would be present in a standard office. There's no necessity for this assumed correlation to be true. (In my classroom experience it isn't, but that's only after looking over rosters for the last couple of years--there may be a correlation, but it's far less than 1.0; before I questioned my assumptions about 5 minutes ago I think I'd have agreed with this assumption, which merits a bit more thought on my part.)

BTW, the news accounts when this study was published focused precisely on "blacks got fewer calls than whites." It left the thinking at the easy, quick level that the anonymous reviews had quite properly rejected. Some who did report the actual results simplified them to the quick and easy "I heart confirmation bias" level, and some didn't see the difference between race and culture.

[Cleita]

8. I have been in countries where racism isn't an issue, but something comes to replace it

and that is classism. In those countries, you belong to a certain class, and you can be any race, but you stay in the class you were born in. You can have loads of money or none but you will still be judged by your class and if you are lower class you will always get less that the top class gets in the way of not only property, but prestige and entry to social opportunities that aren't available to the lower classes.

So it seems hierarchy is in our genes. Even studying our primate cousins shows that. The question is how do we overcome this and practice the equality we all crave?

[cali]

10. that's certainly a valid point

[romanic]

15. Kind of like the caste system in India right?

I heard that's still in play over there.

[Cleita]

17. Yes, not as extreme, but similar.

Maybe more like the old feudal system, of King to Lord, down to the peasants. The nobility will always be nobles. The merchants, and professionals like lawyers and doctors, will always be there and the peasants remain peasants. In this case it's whose family you belong to and if one of the family members, who is an aristocrat, should be white and marry a black, the children would still be aristocrats even though of mixed race as long as they are legitimate. I had a friend whose family had a European title and was eligible to make her debut in society. Her family was too poor to buy her a formal to do so, so I lent her my prom dress for the occasion. However, since I was a foreigner of low birth, I could not enter society like she did, but the fact that her family was poor didn't make a difference either because she was born into that class.

[HornBuckler]

21. I agree, we need improvement in both in tandem. k/r

[JI7]

22. then black poverty rates would not be as high