Mantis Claw
12-20-2002, 12:28 PM
Trent Lott and Racism in the U.S. – Time to Face the Uncomfortable Facts?
Jeff Gates, December 19, 2002
Mississippi Senator Trent Lott's recent remarks in support of segregation only make obvious what has long been obvious: racism remains rampant in the body politic. Though he claims to be contrite, his 2002 comments are identical to those he used in 1980 at a Ronald Reagan rally, and are fully consistent with views he expressed as a columnist for the Council of Conservative Citizens, a political successor to the White Citizen’s Council, and close cousin of the Ku Klux Klan. With Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s endorsement of John Kennedy’s civil rights legislation in 1963, the stage was set for a Republican Party takeover of the Old South based on the GOP’s support for a racial perspective that Lott made clear. The only thing surprising about his comments was the surprise they generated within the all-white GOP whose members have long supported policies that generate the racist results chronicled below.
Beginning with Goldwater’s campaign against Johnson in 1964, the GOP has steadily played the ‘race card.’ Dubya’s father ran blatantly racist campaign ads featuring Willie Horton, a black ex-con. Dubya’s “southern strategy” included a successful effort to purge the voter roles of Blacks in key Florida voting districts. With GOP support, Jesse Helms ran against a Black candidate in 1990 with an anti-affirmative action ad depicting a pair of white hands crumpling a job-rejection notice. As the facts presented below make clear, Democrats are hardly stellar champions of the oppressed, particularly such Demopubs as Georgia Senator Zell Miller who promised in his 2000 campaign to represent ‘both’ parties:
Over the nearly four centuries of the slave trade, which continued until the end of the Civil War, between thirty and sixty million Africans were subjected to “triangle trade.” An estimated one third were killed during the raids while another third died during the journey.
The nation’s founders limited the vote to white, male property-owners.
In 1829, the maximum fine for teaching an African-American to read was $500.
In 1865, the nation’s African-American population owned approximately 0.5% of the nation’s wealth.
Between 1880 and 1930, a black southerner died at the hands of a white lynch mob at the rate of more than once a week. Postcards and souvenir photos spread the terror.
In 1935, Social Security was enacted. Farmers, farm workers and household workers -- disproportionately Black -- were excluded from coverage. By 1990, the nation's African-American population owned approximately one percent of the nation's wealth.
On March 21, 1995, the state of Mississippi ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery.
At the end of 1997, according to New York University Professor Edward Wolff, the modest net worth of the typical white family was eight times that of Blacks. The percentage of Black households with zero or negative net worth (31.3%) was twice that of whites.
In 1997, the median financial household wealth of African-Americans was $200 according to Professor Wolff. Similar patterns of exclusion are found in pension coverage, health care and paid vacations.
Disproportionately large numbers of minorities earn the minimum wage. The "living wage" is the amount needed to bring a family of four to the federal poverty line. In 1968, the minimum wage was 86% of the "living wage." By 1979, it had slipped to 80 percent. By 1998, it had plummeted to 64% of the living wage.
The Census Bureau reports that the pretax median income for all Americans was $1,001 higher in 1998 than in 1989. For the decade of the 1990s, that's an average annual raise, adjusted for inflation, of $111.22, or 0.3 percent during a decade when productivity rose 33 percent.
According to the Census Bureau, the top fifth of households claimed 49.2 percent of national income in 2000 while the bottom fifth got by on 3.6 percent. In 1998, the top-earning one percent had as much income as the 100 million lowest income-earners. IRS figures released in 2002 show that 21 percent of the nation's before-tax income flowed to the top one percent of the income spectrum in 2000., up from 14 percent a decade ago.
Only in 1999 did home ownership among blacks recover ground lost since 1983.
Despite the Clinton-Gore claim that poverty in 1999 was the "lowest level in a decade," the poverty rate throughout the 1990s was above any year in the 1970s.
The poverty rate among African-Americans was 26.1 percent in 2000, 2.5 times that of whites.
One in three African-American preschoolers live in poverty (vs. 1 in 4 whites).
Blacks account for disproportionately high incidences of family breakup, homeless-ness and functional illiteracy.
Today's poverty formula was created for President Lyndon Johnson during his "War on Poverty" in the mid-60s. Except for inflation adjustments, it remains unchanged from that era when it was designed to address severe nutritional deprivation in Appalachia provided "the housewife is a careful shopper, a skillful cook and a good manager who will prepare all the family's meals at home."
Raising the poverty threshold by 17 percent (the "experimental" level recommended by the Census Bureau) would boost the nation's poverty rate to an all-time record high, leaving 46 million Americans short of that minimal level. Approximately 46 million Americans have no health insurance.
Census data in 2000 confirmed that recent declines in the national poverty rate (since reversed) were a result of its decrease in the South with no change to speak of elsewhere except in the West, where it's on the rise. The South has long been a magnet for companies interested in a region (predominantly nonunion) where a large percentage of the population labors closer to the minimum wage.
Eighty percent of the most common causes of death are 80 percent more likely to occur among blue- than white-collar workers. By 1995, low-wage earners were losing 32% more days due to work-related injuries than high-wage earners. The injury gap magnifies the wage gap by as much as 30 percent.
In Unhealthy Societies - The Afflictions of Inequality, Sussex University professor Richard Wilkinson documents inequality as a key psychosocial force that degrades physical and mental health. A study of 17,000 British civil servants found that the heart-attack fatality rate among clerks and messengers was four times that of more highly paid administrators. After weeding out such obvious explanations as differences in diet or smoking, it became clear it was the intangible factors that made the difference, such as control over one's life and a sense of security. Once income reaches a basic level, the standard of living became practically a non-factor.
African-Americans have higher exposure to toxic work environments (in lower paying jobs) and a higher likelihood of residing in close proximity to toxic waste.
"Environmental racism" includes a far higher probability that minorities live near toxic plumes, landfills and freeways - along with a lack of fiscal resources to provide the neighborhood parks and recreation facilities essential for building community.
From 1980 to 1995, the number of diabetes cases rose 33 percent among blacks, three times the increase among whites and mirroring a disproportionate rise in cases of other infectious diseases as well.
The death rate from breast cancer fell 10 percent for all women from 1990 to 1995. The higher rate for black women remained unchanged at 27.5 per 100,000 vs. 21 per 100,000 for white women - 31% higher.
Medical researchers report fast-widening racial disparities in the incidences of asthma, major infectious diseases and other types of cancer.
In a recent New York study, the rate of hospitalization for asthma was 21 times higher in the Bronx and Harlem than that of more affluent parts of New York City, with particularly high incidences among African-American children.
Black heart attack patients are far less likely than whites to undergo cardiac cath-eterisation, regardless of the race of their doctors. Whites are five times more likely than blacks to receive emergency clot-busting treatment after suffering a stroke.
Black women are four times more likely than white women to die while giving birth.
Although the U.S. has seen a significant nationwide decline in chronic disability and institutionalization for people sixty-five and older, "almost all the improvement is among whites" reports the director of Demographic Studies at Duke University.
The National Institute of Aging found that blacks enjoy 56 years of reasonably good health, 8 years fewer than whites. Blacks die at age 70, six to seven years earlier than whites. That makes Social Security payroll taxes even more discriminatory. Now the largest tax paid by four-fifths of Americans, this hugely regressive "job tax" (15.4 percent on all earnings up to $80,400) hits hardest those who experience the most discrimination in the job market - and then pays them benefits over a far shorter life-span.
A July 1998 study of 282 U.S. metropolitan areas found that mortality rates are considerably more closely linked to relative than to absolute income. High inequality, high mortality. Low inequality, low mortality. Ichiro Kawachi and Bruce Kennedy of Harvard's School of Public Health suggest that the erosion of trust or "social capital" may lie behind inequality's adverse effect on health.
Psychologists chronicle the devastating impact on early childhood development where more personal and family trauma among Black children (from family stress, economic insecurity, etc.) triggers more aggressive interactions, even in their early years. Children translate that confused mix of emotional messages into feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, inferiority and low self-esteem along with a sense of personal defectiveness and vulnerability. That feeds a "shame-rage" spiral as they act out feelings of being excluded and disrespected ("dissed") in those low-income neighborhoods where this malady plays out in its most visible and violent form.
Prof. Wilkinson concludes that wide inequality is itself associated with poor health. That's because a society that condones wide economic disparities evokes a culture preoccupied with material pleasures, money and status. Those who cannot measure up develop a sense of inferiority and lower status. That triggers anxiety that quite literally eats away at people. As the anxiety becomes chronic, it releases stress hormones that degrade the body's immune system. The impact, he chronicles, is akin to rapid aging. These feelings "are so fundamental," Wilkinson notes, that "it is reasonable to wonder whether the effects on the quality of life are not more important than the effects on the length of life." Though that suggests a health crisis, not a word on this subject was heard during the 1993 debate on health care.
In Wilkinson's assessment, half the difference in societal violence, social cohesion and life expectancy is attributable to economic inequality. Homicide rates show a particularly strong correlation.
The typical American works 184 hours longer than in 1970 and earns about the same or less. Americans work 350 hours longer per year than the typical European. Parents in the U.S. spend 40 less time with their children than 3 decades ago; fathers in the U.S. spend, on average, 18 minutes per day with their children.
Psychologists document that without enough care children do not flourish. Without attention and stimulation, babies routinely languish, failing to reach their full potential. And without nurturing from their families, kids under-perform in school.
The U.S. pays childcare workers less than animal caretakers and parking lot attendants. With high turnover, children experience a series of "bonding breaks" as they connect with one then another in a series of typically low-paid, part-time, here-today-gone-tomorrow parent substitutes. Research shows that those children uncared for are more likely to develop an uncaring attitude ("No one cared for me."). Often the effect shows up as a poorly developed conscience.
In 1998, more than 65 million prescriptions were written in the U.S. for anti-depressants.
At one time, non-white votes counted only three-fifths that of whites. Now three-fifths of the prison population is non-white.
According to Human Rights Watch, one in every 20 black men over the age of 18 is in prison. There are now more young black men in prison than in college. A recent study by Human Rights Watch reports that 20% of men in prison are victims of forcible sex. In ten states, black men are sent to prison on drug charges at 27 to 57 times the rate of white men. One of every three African-American men ages 20 to 29 is either in prison, in jail or on probation/parole. A decade ago, the ratio was one in four.
In 2001, 10% of black men ages 25 to 29 were locked up, compared with 2.9% for Hispanics and 1.2% for whites.
Three of the strongest areas of economic growth nationwide: gated communities, security guards and prison construction.
The number of state prisons doubled in Georgia since 1980, from 19 to 41. A 1,000-bed facility offers 325 full-time jobs. In 1980, Georgia had roughly 12,000 "beds under management" and spent $78 million. By 1990, the state had 18,800 beds, all filled. In 2000, it had 44,000 beds, all filled -- and spent $893 million. Georgia's Department of Corrections projects 57,767 inmates by 2004.
Georgia's fiscal resources devoted to prisons rose from 2% in 1975 to 6% in 1999.
Europe-wide, the imprisonment rate is 60 to 100 per 100,000. The U.S. rate is 682 per 100,000 (6,926 for African-American males).
Though 1999 saw a nationwide slowdown in the inmate population, Georgia scored a 7.6% increase, the highest growth rate among the 10 largest prison systems.
Three-quarters (76%) of African-American 18 year-olds living in urban areas can now anticipate being arrested and jailed before age 36, ensuring that each will acquire a criminal record. In 1997, the Justice Department estimated that 29% of black males born in 1991 would spend time in prison during their lifetime while only 4% of white males would do so.
Among black men aged 25 to 34 with less than a high school education, the jobless rate is approximately 50 percent. If those in prison are included, the figure rises above 60 percent. Incarcerated low-skilled workers - those least likely to find work in a high-tech economy - renders their joblessness invisible and lowers official unemployment statistics by as much as 2 percent.
The U.S. prison industry now employs more people than any Fortune 500 company except General Motors. Prison construction, prison security, prison maintenance and ex-con supervision have emerged as an enormous public-works program, shoring up an economy in which blue-collar jobs have been exported abroad. Communities now regularly compete to be chosen as job-creating prison sites.
6.5 million Americans are under correctional supervision and reportedly more than 50 million have a criminal record.
As governor, Demopub Zell Miller tripled the number of prison cells and promptly filled them, assisted by one of the highest recidivism rates in the nation. That, in turn, was boosted by the lowest number of probation officers in the southeast, with an average caseload of 180 probationers (the average caseload in the 16 states is 85) and by the fact that 45% of inmates read at the sixth-grade level or below.
In 1973, the U.S. had 350,000 people imprisoned nationwide. The nation's prison population now exceeds 2 million. The U.S. has the highest proportion of its population in jail of any nation. Georgia ranks third nationally in its inmate population, with 965 per 100,000, trailing only Texas and Louisiana.
Nationwide, 1.4 million black males - 13 percent - can no longer vote as a result of felony convictions. In Alabama, the convicted-felon status of one-third of adult black males has stripped them of their right to vote, based on legislation that can be traced directly to the post-Civil War era.
Georgia leads the nation in deaths by execution during the twentieth century (80% of them black). In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Georgia's death penalty unconstitutional due to racial discrimination (Furman vs. Georgia).
While African-Americans make up less than 15% of Georgia's population, almost 50% of the males on the state's death row are Black.
Although 60% of murder victims in Georgia are African-American, the victims are white in over 90% of the cases in which executions have been carried out since 1973.
Of the 48 prosecutors authorized to seek the death penalty in Georgia, one is Black.
Six of 12 Blacks executed in Georgia since 1973 were sentenced by all-white juries.
In a 1990 study, Georgia was singled out by the American Bar Association for the inadequate legal representation routinely provided in capital cases.
Illinois, with a statewide public defender system, recently declared a moratorium on state executions after the convictions of 13 people on death row were called into question due to DNA testing. Georgia has no statewide public defender system.
In 75% of the cases in which federal prosecutors sought the death penalty in the past five years, the defendant has been a member of a minority group, and in more than half the cases, an African-American. Both Amnesty International and the UN Commission on Torture cited the U.S. in 2000 for its treatment of prisoners.
During the Clinton Administration, Washington eliminated funds to help states with capital appeals, and a GOP-controlled Congress approved a bill to speed up the review of capital cases in federal court.
Nationwide, black men are sent to state prison on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men. From 1986 to 1996, Georgia's African-American imprisonment rate for drug offenses rose 5,499 percent even though research confirms that treatment costs one-fifteenth as much to achieve the same reduction in societal cost
Of the $35 billion or so that America spends each year on tackling drugs, at least three-quarters is spent not on prevention or treatment but on capturing and punishing drug dealers and users. More than one in ten of all arrests - 1.5 million in 1999 - is for drug offenses. Some 40 percent of those drug arrests were for marijuana possession. Fewer than 20 percent were for the sale or manufacture of drugs. In 1997, 220,000 juveniles were arrested for drug offenses, 82 percent more than in 1993. Almost a third of Americans over 12 years old admit to having tried drugs at some point, almost one in ten (26.2 million) during 2000.
In six states - Florida, Mississippi, Virginia, Iowa, New Mexico and Wyoming - fully a quarter of black males are permanently barred from voting. In Florida alone, 204,600 black men, and in Texas 156,600 black men, have lost the vote (as of 2000). The political implications are as yet unknown, particularly for inner cities where, on average, more than a quarter of young black men are disenfranchised.
Nationwide, about seven percent of African-Americans are barred from voting because of felony convictions, compared with 2.1 percent of the general population.
In almost every election cycle since 1984, crime and drug legislation has been enacted in the month before the election. During the 1990s, more than 100,000 people were admitted to prison on drug charges every year - more than 1.5 million since 1980. Bill Clinton's last act as President was to sign legislation to fund the hiring of 150,000 new police officers (Congress had asked for 100,000).
According to the Survey of State Prison Inmates, 175,662 people were serving sentences of more than ten years in 1986; five years later, 306,006 were serving such sentences.
A report by The Sentencing Project notes that Blacks account for 13% of drug users, reflecting their numbers in the general population. Yet they constitute 35% of those arrested for drug possession, 55% of those convicted, and 74% of those sentenced to prison.
Two out of five blacks in prison have been convicted of drug offenses, compared to one in four whites
Mandatory minimum prison sentences and its variants are widespread even though opposed by the American Bar Association and the U.S. Sentencing Commission, adviser to Congress. Because these sentencing constraints remove discretionary power from the judge to determine just sentences, more than 100 senior federal judges refuse to hear drug cases. Of the police chiefs attending a 1999 conference on drug policy, 90 percent repudiated the War on Drugs.
More Americans are imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses than for crimes of violence. Drug offenders now account for roughly one in four of those in custody nationwide, and more than half of all federal prisoners. In only 12% of cases was a weapon involved. America's imprisonment rate for drug offenses alone exceeds the rate of imprisonment in most West European countries for crimes of all kinds.
Compared to the early 1970s, drugs are more plentiful, less inexpensive, of higher quality - and are easier to get than at any time in the past decade. The retail price for heroin in 2000 was one-fifth its price in 1980. The addict population remains unchanged yet deaths from illegal drugs have never been higher. In 1996, they numbered 14,843, more than double that reported in 1979, the year considered the peak of the current drug epidemic. In 1980, the U.S. had 52,000 Americans behind bars for drug violations. By 2000, that figure topped 400,000.
Jails and prisons filled with a million minority men are routinely characterized not as an international embarrassment or evidence of societal sickness, or even as an epidemic of lost potential, but as essential to the smooth functioning of society.
Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation: "Because of drug prohibition and drug enforcement, people of color are hounded by the police, their neighborhoods are destroyed by gun violence, their families are broken up, they are put at greater risk of disease, they are displaced from their homes, and their opportunities for education and employment are ruined."
With police departments authorized to confiscate property seized from alleged drug offenders, police forces nationwide have become rapidly more militarized. Some 90 percent of police departments in cities with populations over 50,000, and 70 percent of departments in smaller cities, now have paramilitary units.
The number of women entering prisons quadrupled between 1980 and 1994, a rate far exceeding the growth of the male prison population. Researchers found that the overwhelming majority are caught in a spiral of poverty, racism, abuse and neglect. Seventy-five percent are in prison for nonviolent crimes, typically petty drug or property offenses that likely would not have warranted prison time prior to the War on Drugs. The 3-strike law also worked a disproportionate impact on minority women as many took the rap to protect loved ones from a second or third strike.
More than 90 percent have suffered physical, sexual or emotional abuse. Almost 80 percent are mothers. Most are single. Nearly 1.3 million minor children now have mothers under supervision by justice system agencies. Child advocate Don Keenan cites figures showing that 70% of those in prison came out of long-term foster care.
The War on Drugs has become, in its effect, a way to criminalize poverty and fill the prisons with minorities. Florida now spends more on corrections than on colleges. California, now the world's fifth largest economy, spends 10 percent of its fiscal resources on prisons while other social needs go wanting -- schools, infrastructure, the arts, environmental cleanup.
Prison guards were the largest single category of donor to the campaign of California governor Gray Davis in 1998 and the second largest in 2002.
In today's penal labor market, prisoners (dominantly black males) are packing golf balls for Spaulding in Hawaii, doing telemarketing for AT&T in Colorado and providing cheap labor for Microsoft and Eddie Bauer in Washington State.
With rehabilitation on the wane and punishment on the rise, isolation units and other misery-inducing modalities are becoming the penal norm. Texas is building five more "supermax" units designed to hold more than 3,000 people in which inmates get from three to seven hours of exercise a week, and from two to eight hours of visits a month - remaining in their bathroom-sized cells the rest of the time, fed through hatches in their doors and provided virtually no sensory stimuli for months or years on end. Many in these modern dungeons simply go insane.
Since fewer than 10 percent of prisoners receive a life sentence, the next few decades will see the steady release of millions of ex-cons -- primarily enraged, uneducated minority males, casualties of the War on Drugs, who either never acquired job skills or who lost relevant skills while in prison.
Societal re-absorption of these men has unknown implications for the nation's civic character, potentially tipping the scales against neighborhoods that are already marginal. With severe budget cutbacks for education and vocational training for prisoners, combined with limits on convicted felons' access to welfare, Medicaid, and other social services, some experts predict a future of violent chaos along with rising inner-city epidemics as ex-prisoners, lacking either work or the support of social services, spread TB, HIV and hepatitis. U.S. society faces a social calamity that's destined not to dissipate but to accumulate with the passage of time.
The potent combination of the War on Drugs, mass arrests of minorities, mandatory sentencing, political disenfranchisement and mass releases into sub-citizenship means that an overwhelmingly black community conceivably could be politically dominated by a white minority.
Reflecting scant hope of genuine economic inclusion, 51 percent of lottery tickets are bought by five percent of regular purchasers -- drawn from the poorest of the poor.
Nationwide lottery sales now exceed $35 billion per year. In 1975, seven in ten lottery ticket buyers told pollsters that they gamble for the excitement and the challenge. No longer. Two-thirds now say they bet to win, with African-Americans more likely than any other group to offer that response.
Black applicants were granted less than one percent of home mortgages approved between 1930 and 1960. In 1960, not a single African-American could be counted among the 82,000 residents of Long Island's famous Levittown housing tract.
Blacks bore a disproportionate burden of budget cuts as government spending on education, infrastructure and research plummeted from 24% to 14% of the federal budget from the mid-70s to 2000 when the U.S. General Accounting Office documented a need for $112 billion to fix up the nation's dilapidated public schools.
Georgia's "zero tolerance" policy is poised to ensure that black children gain self-fulfilling lower expectations with an early profiling that places many on a track for failure. Research confirms that black children in Georgia schools are far more likely to be disciplined. The Georgia Department of Education reports that black children accounted for three-fifths of school expulsions over the 1996-98 period. They make up only 9 percent of those qualified as "gifted" but 65`percent of those classified as "retarded."
Recent research confirms that little attention is given to the resources and services required to create equal opportunities for success. Thus, in rural Georgia, the Macon-based Center for Children and Education found that 35 percent more white than black students score above the national median in reading and math.
Georgia ranks 49th in SAT scores; 47 percent of high school students fail to graduate.
Public education has long favored the most favored. School-financing systems routinely gear school budgets to local property taxes, thereby favoring the most well-to-do neighborhoods. Plus that home-owning group claims a disproportionately larger share of those tax deductions claimed for mortgage interest payments.
The rhetoric of oppression always suggests that some people are less worthy-or at least not worthy in the same way as those generating the rhetoric. A ruse employed in the late 1990s reflects an unusually ingenious attempt to deflect attention from these historic trends. Proponents then pointed to a test-score gap in which black students with parents earning over $70,000 averaged 144 SAT points less than white students at the same family income level.
Their not-so-subtle message: lower intelligence among African-Americans accounts for the test-score "achievement gap." Thus, by implication, today's vast economic inequality is justified because clearly people of color just can't cope in this knowledge-intensive era. As Conley chronicles, if the test scores of black students are compared to those of whites with the same family wealth, the gap disappears. He urges that the race question be rephrased-"casting it in terms of stocks, bonds, business proprietorships, and real estate ownership rather than in terms of education and earnings."
The solution, Conley argues, lies in policies "geared toward rectifying wealth differences." The best advantage you can have, he points out, "is having parents with wealth."
Observation: In the biblical tradition, justice is viewed as liberation from oppression. Clearly the fight against racial oppression has hardly yet begun.
Note: these statistics were originally compiled in 2000 in conjunction with a Green Party Senate race in Georgia where I was the candidate. The compilation benefits from an occasional update and would benefit from more. Additional facts are sought, along with source citations (which, for brevity, I've omitted below).
Many of these statistics are cited in two of Jeff Gates' recent books, The Ownership Solution (1998) and Democracy at Risk (2000), both now in paperback. Note also the compilation of ownership and income statistics at www.sharedcapitalism.org.
Jeff Gates, December 19, 2002
Mississippi Senator Trent Lott's recent remarks in support of segregation only make obvious what has long been obvious: racism remains rampant in the body politic. Though he claims to be contrite, his 2002 comments are identical to those he used in 1980 at a Ronald Reagan rally, and are fully consistent with views he expressed as a columnist for the Council of Conservative Citizens, a political successor to the White Citizen’s Council, and close cousin of the Ku Klux Klan. With Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s endorsement of John Kennedy’s civil rights legislation in 1963, the stage was set for a Republican Party takeover of the Old South based on the GOP’s support for a racial perspective that Lott made clear. The only thing surprising about his comments was the surprise they generated within the all-white GOP whose members have long supported policies that generate the racist results chronicled below.
Beginning with Goldwater’s campaign against Johnson in 1964, the GOP has steadily played the ‘race card.’ Dubya’s father ran blatantly racist campaign ads featuring Willie Horton, a black ex-con. Dubya’s “southern strategy” included a successful effort to purge the voter roles of Blacks in key Florida voting districts. With GOP support, Jesse Helms ran against a Black candidate in 1990 with an anti-affirmative action ad depicting a pair of white hands crumpling a job-rejection notice. As the facts presented below make clear, Democrats are hardly stellar champions of the oppressed, particularly such Demopubs as Georgia Senator Zell Miller who promised in his 2000 campaign to represent ‘both’ parties:
Over the nearly four centuries of the slave trade, which continued until the end of the Civil War, between thirty and sixty million Africans were subjected to “triangle trade.” An estimated one third were killed during the raids while another third died during the journey.
The nation’s founders limited the vote to white, male property-owners.
In 1829, the maximum fine for teaching an African-American to read was $500.
In 1865, the nation’s African-American population owned approximately 0.5% of the nation’s wealth.
Between 1880 and 1930, a black southerner died at the hands of a white lynch mob at the rate of more than once a week. Postcards and souvenir photos spread the terror.
In 1935, Social Security was enacted. Farmers, farm workers and household workers -- disproportionately Black -- were excluded from coverage. By 1990, the nation's African-American population owned approximately one percent of the nation's wealth.
On March 21, 1995, the state of Mississippi ratified the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery.
At the end of 1997, according to New York University Professor Edward Wolff, the modest net worth of the typical white family was eight times that of Blacks. The percentage of Black households with zero or negative net worth (31.3%) was twice that of whites.
In 1997, the median financial household wealth of African-Americans was $200 according to Professor Wolff. Similar patterns of exclusion are found in pension coverage, health care and paid vacations.
Disproportionately large numbers of minorities earn the minimum wage. The "living wage" is the amount needed to bring a family of four to the federal poverty line. In 1968, the minimum wage was 86% of the "living wage." By 1979, it had slipped to 80 percent. By 1998, it had plummeted to 64% of the living wage.
The Census Bureau reports that the pretax median income for all Americans was $1,001 higher in 1998 than in 1989. For the decade of the 1990s, that's an average annual raise, adjusted for inflation, of $111.22, or 0.3 percent during a decade when productivity rose 33 percent.
According to the Census Bureau, the top fifth of households claimed 49.2 percent of national income in 2000 while the bottom fifth got by on 3.6 percent. In 1998, the top-earning one percent had as much income as the 100 million lowest income-earners. IRS figures released in 2002 show that 21 percent of the nation's before-tax income flowed to the top one percent of the income spectrum in 2000., up from 14 percent a decade ago.
Only in 1999 did home ownership among blacks recover ground lost since 1983.
Despite the Clinton-Gore claim that poverty in 1999 was the "lowest level in a decade," the poverty rate throughout the 1990s was above any year in the 1970s.
The poverty rate among African-Americans was 26.1 percent in 2000, 2.5 times that of whites.
One in three African-American preschoolers live in poverty (vs. 1 in 4 whites).
Blacks account for disproportionately high incidences of family breakup, homeless-ness and functional illiteracy.
Today's poverty formula was created for President Lyndon Johnson during his "War on Poverty" in the mid-60s. Except for inflation adjustments, it remains unchanged from that era when it was designed to address severe nutritional deprivation in Appalachia provided "the housewife is a careful shopper, a skillful cook and a good manager who will prepare all the family's meals at home."
Raising the poverty threshold by 17 percent (the "experimental" level recommended by the Census Bureau) would boost the nation's poverty rate to an all-time record high, leaving 46 million Americans short of that minimal level. Approximately 46 million Americans have no health insurance.
Census data in 2000 confirmed that recent declines in the national poverty rate (since reversed) were a result of its decrease in the South with no change to speak of elsewhere except in the West, where it's on the rise. The South has long been a magnet for companies interested in a region (predominantly nonunion) where a large percentage of the population labors closer to the minimum wage.
Eighty percent of the most common causes of death are 80 percent more likely to occur among blue- than white-collar workers. By 1995, low-wage earners were losing 32% more days due to work-related injuries than high-wage earners. The injury gap magnifies the wage gap by as much as 30 percent.
In Unhealthy Societies - The Afflictions of Inequality, Sussex University professor Richard Wilkinson documents inequality as a key psychosocial force that degrades physical and mental health. A study of 17,000 British civil servants found that the heart-attack fatality rate among clerks and messengers was four times that of more highly paid administrators. After weeding out such obvious explanations as differences in diet or smoking, it became clear it was the intangible factors that made the difference, such as control over one's life and a sense of security. Once income reaches a basic level, the standard of living became practically a non-factor.
African-Americans have higher exposure to toxic work environments (in lower paying jobs) and a higher likelihood of residing in close proximity to toxic waste.
"Environmental racism" includes a far higher probability that minorities live near toxic plumes, landfills and freeways - along with a lack of fiscal resources to provide the neighborhood parks and recreation facilities essential for building community.
From 1980 to 1995, the number of diabetes cases rose 33 percent among blacks, three times the increase among whites and mirroring a disproportionate rise in cases of other infectious diseases as well.
The death rate from breast cancer fell 10 percent for all women from 1990 to 1995. The higher rate for black women remained unchanged at 27.5 per 100,000 vs. 21 per 100,000 for white women - 31% higher.
Medical researchers report fast-widening racial disparities in the incidences of asthma, major infectious diseases and other types of cancer.
In a recent New York study, the rate of hospitalization for asthma was 21 times higher in the Bronx and Harlem than that of more affluent parts of New York City, with particularly high incidences among African-American children.
Black heart attack patients are far less likely than whites to undergo cardiac cath-eterisation, regardless of the race of their doctors. Whites are five times more likely than blacks to receive emergency clot-busting treatment after suffering a stroke.
Black women are four times more likely than white women to die while giving birth.
Although the U.S. has seen a significant nationwide decline in chronic disability and institutionalization for people sixty-five and older, "almost all the improvement is among whites" reports the director of Demographic Studies at Duke University.
The National Institute of Aging found that blacks enjoy 56 years of reasonably good health, 8 years fewer than whites. Blacks die at age 70, six to seven years earlier than whites. That makes Social Security payroll taxes even more discriminatory. Now the largest tax paid by four-fifths of Americans, this hugely regressive "job tax" (15.4 percent on all earnings up to $80,400) hits hardest those who experience the most discrimination in the job market - and then pays them benefits over a far shorter life-span.
A July 1998 study of 282 U.S. metropolitan areas found that mortality rates are considerably more closely linked to relative than to absolute income. High inequality, high mortality. Low inequality, low mortality. Ichiro Kawachi and Bruce Kennedy of Harvard's School of Public Health suggest that the erosion of trust or "social capital" may lie behind inequality's adverse effect on health.
Psychologists chronicle the devastating impact on early childhood development where more personal and family trauma among Black children (from family stress, economic insecurity, etc.) triggers more aggressive interactions, even in their early years. Children translate that confused mix of emotional messages into feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, inferiority and low self-esteem along with a sense of personal defectiveness and vulnerability. That feeds a "shame-rage" spiral as they act out feelings of being excluded and disrespected ("dissed") in those low-income neighborhoods where this malady plays out in its most visible and violent form.
Prof. Wilkinson concludes that wide inequality is itself associated with poor health. That's because a society that condones wide economic disparities evokes a culture preoccupied with material pleasures, money and status. Those who cannot measure up develop a sense of inferiority and lower status. That triggers anxiety that quite literally eats away at people. As the anxiety becomes chronic, it releases stress hormones that degrade the body's immune system. The impact, he chronicles, is akin to rapid aging. These feelings "are so fundamental," Wilkinson notes, that "it is reasonable to wonder whether the effects on the quality of life are not more important than the effects on the length of life." Though that suggests a health crisis, not a word on this subject was heard during the 1993 debate on health care.
In Wilkinson's assessment, half the difference in societal violence, social cohesion and life expectancy is attributable to economic inequality. Homicide rates show a particularly strong correlation.
The typical American works 184 hours longer than in 1970 and earns about the same or less. Americans work 350 hours longer per year than the typical European. Parents in the U.S. spend 40 less time with their children than 3 decades ago; fathers in the U.S. spend, on average, 18 minutes per day with their children.
Psychologists document that without enough care children do not flourish. Without attention and stimulation, babies routinely languish, failing to reach their full potential. And without nurturing from their families, kids under-perform in school.
The U.S. pays childcare workers less than animal caretakers and parking lot attendants. With high turnover, children experience a series of "bonding breaks" as they connect with one then another in a series of typically low-paid, part-time, here-today-gone-tomorrow parent substitutes. Research shows that those children uncared for are more likely to develop an uncaring attitude ("No one cared for me."). Often the effect shows up as a poorly developed conscience.
In 1998, more than 65 million prescriptions were written in the U.S. for anti-depressants.
At one time, non-white votes counted only three-fifths that of whites. Now three-fifths of the prison population is non-white.
According to Human Rights Watch, one in every 20 black men over the age of 18 is in prison. There are now more young black men in prison than in college. A recent study by Human Rights Watch reports that 20% of men in prison are victims of forcible sex. In ten states, black men are sent to prison on drug charges at 27 to 57 times the rate of white men. One of every three African-American men ages 20 to 29 is either in prison, in jail or on probation/parole. A decade ago, the ratio was one in four.
In 2001, 10% of black men ages 25 to 29 were locked up, compared with 2.9% for Hispanics and 1.2% for whites.
Three of the strongest areas of economic growth nationwide: gated communities, security guards and prison construction.
The number of state prisons doubled in Georgia since 1980, from 19 to 41. A 1,000-bed facility offers 325 full-time jobs. In 1980, Georgia had roughly 12,000 "beds under management" and spent $78 million. By 1990, the state had 18,800 beds, all filled. In 2000, it had 44,000 beds, all filled -- and spent $893 million. Georgia's Department of Corrections projects 57,767 inmates by 2004.
Georgia's fiscal resources devoted to prisons rose from 2% in 1975 to 6% in 1999.
Europe-wide, the imprisonment rate is 60 to 100 per 100,000. The U.S. rate is 682 per 100,000 (6,926 for African-American males).
Though 1999 saw a nationwide slowdown in the inmate population, Georgia scored a 7.6% increase, the highest growth rate among the 10 largest prison systems.
Three-quarters (76%) of African-American 18 year-olds living in urban areas can now anticipate being arrested and jailed before age 36, ensuring that each will acquire a criminal record. In 1997, the Justice Department estimated that 29% of black males born in 1991 would spend time in prison during their lifetime while only 4% of white males would do so.
Among black men aged 25 to 34 with less than a high school education, the jobless rate is approximately 50 percent. If those in prison are included, the figure rises above 60 percent. Incarcerated low-skilled workers - those least likely to find work in a high-tech economy - renders their joblessness invisible and lowers official unemployment statistics by as much as 2 percent.
The U.S. prison industry now employs more people than any Fortune 500 company except General Motors. Prison construction, prison security, prison maintenance and ex-con supervision have emerged as an enormous public-works program, shoring up an economy in which blue-collar jobs have been exported abroad. Communities now regularly compete to be chosen as job-creating prison sites.
6.5 million Americans are under correctional supervision and reportedly more than 50 million have a criminal record.
As governor, Demopub Zell Miller tripled the number of prison cells and promptly filled them, assisted by one of the highest recidivism rates in the nation. That, in turn, was boosted by the lowest number of probation officers in the southeast, with an average caseload of 180 probationers (the average caseload in the 16 states is 85) and by the fact that 45% of inmates read at the sixth-grade level or below.
In 1973, the U.S. had 350,000 people imprisoned nationwide. The nation's prison population now exceeds 2 million. The U.S. has the highest proportion of its population in jail of any nation. Georgia ranks third nationally in its inmate population, with 965 per 100,000, trailing only Texas and Louisiana.
Nationwide, 1.4 million black males - 13 percent - can no longer vote as a result of felony convictions. In Alabama, the convicted-felon status of one-third of adult black males has stripped them of their right to vote, based on legislation that can be traced directly to the post-Civil War era.
Georgia leads the nation in deaths by execution during the twentieth century (80% of them black). In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Georgia's death penalty unconstitutional due to racial discrimination (Furman vs. Georgia).
While African-Americans make up less than 15% of Georgia's population, almost 50% of the males on the state's death row are Black.
Although 60% of murder victims in Georgia are African-American, the victims are white in over 90% of the cases in which executions have been carried out since 1973.
Of the 48 prosecutors authorized to seek the death penalty in Georgia, one is Black.
Six of 12 Blacks executed in Georgia since 1973 were sentenced by all-white juries.
In a 1990 study, Georgia was singled out by the American Bar Association for the inadequate legal representation routinely provided in capital cases.
Illinois, with a statewide public defender system, recently declared a moratorium on state executions after the convictions of 13 people on death row were called into question due to DNA testing. Georgia has no statewide public defender system.
In 75% of the cases in which federal prosecutors sought the death penalty in the past five years, the defendant has been a member of a minority group, and in more than half the cases, an African-American. Both Amnesty International and the UN Commission on Torture cited the U.S. in 2000 for its treatment of prisoners.
During the Clinton Administration, Washington eliminated funds to help states with capital appeals, and a GOP-controlled Congress approved a bill to speed up the review of capital cases in federal court.
Nationwide, black men are sent to state prison on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men. From 1986 to 1996, Georgia's African-American imprisonment rate for drug offenses rose 5,499 percent even though research confirms that treatment costs one-fifteenth as much to achieve the same reduction in societal cost
Of the $35 billion or so that America spends each year on tackling drugs, at least three-quarters is spent not on prevention or treatment but on capturing and punishing drug dealers and users. More than one in ten of all arrests - 1.5 million in 1999 - is for drug offenses. Some 40 percent of those drug arrests were for marijuana possession. Fewer than 20 percent were for the sale or manufacture of drugs. In 1997, 220,000 juveniles were arrested for drug offenses, 82 percent more than in 1993. Almost a third of Americans over 12 years old admit to having tried drugs at some point, almost one in ten (26.2 million) during 2000.
In six states - Florida, Mississippi, Virginia, Iowa, New Mexico and Wyoming - fully a quarter of black males are permanently barred from voting. In Florida alone, 204,600 black men, and in Texas 156,600 black men, have lost the vote (as of 2000). The political implications are as yet unknown, particularly for inner cities where, on average, more than a quarter of young black men are disenfranchised.
Nationwide, about seven percent of African-Americans are barred from voting because of felony convictions, compared with 2.1 percent of the general population.
In almost every election cycle since 1984, crime and drug legislation has been enacted in the month before the election. During the 1990s, more than 100,000 people were admitted to prison on drug charges every year - more than 1.5 million since 1980. Bill Clinton's last act as President was to sign legislation to fund the hiring of 150,000 new police officers (Congress had asked for 100,000).
According to the Survey of State Prison Inmates, 175,662 people were serving sentences of more than ten years in 1986; five years later, 306,006 were serving such sentences.
A report by The Sentencing Project notes that Blacks account for 13% of drug users, reflecting their numbers in the general population. Yet they constitute 35% of those arrested for drug possession, 55% of those convicted, and 74% of those sentenced to prison.
Two out of five blacks in prison have been convicted of drug offenses, compared to one in four whites
Mandatory minimum prison sentences and its variants are widespread even though opposed by the American Bar Association and the U.S. Sentencing Commission, adviser to Congress. Because these sentencing constraints remove discretionary power from the judge to determine just sentences, more than 100 senior federal judges refuse to hear drug cases. Of the police chiefs attending a 1999 conference on drug policy, 90 percent repudiated the War on Drugs.
More Americans are imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses than for crimes of violence. Drug offenders now account for roughly one in four of those in custody nationwide, and more than half of all federal prisoners. In only 12% of cases was a weapon involved. America's imprisonment rate for drug offenses alone exceeds the rate of imprisonment in most West European countries for crimes of all kinds.
Compared to the early 1970s, drugs are more plentiful, less inexpensive, of higher quality - and are easier to get than at any time in the past decade. The retail price for heroin in 2000 was one-fifth its price in 1980. The addict population remains unchanged yet deaths from illegal drugs have never been higher. In 1996, they numbered 14,843, more than double that reported in 1979, the year considered the peak of the current drug epidemic. In 1980, the U.S. had 52,000 Americans behind bars for drug violations. By 2000, that figure topped 400,000.
Jails and prisons filled with a million minority men are routinely characterized not as an international embarrassment or evidence of societal sickness, or even as an epidemic of lost potential, but as essential to the smooth functioning of society.
Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation: "Because of drug prohibition and drug enforcement, people of color are hounded by the police, their neighborhoods are destroyed by gun violence, their families are broken up, they are put at greater risk of disease, they are displaced from their homes, and their opportunities for education and employment are ruined."
With police departments authorized to confiscate property seized from alleged drug offenders, police forces nationwide have become rapidly more militarized. Some 90 percent of police departments in cities with populations over 50,000, and 70 percent of departments in smaller cities, now have paramilitary units.
The number of women entering prisons quadrupled between 1980 and 1994, a rate far exceeding the growth of the male prison population. Researchers found that the overwhelming majority are caught in a spiral of poverty, racism, abuse and neglect. Seventy-five percent are in prison for nonviolent crimes, typically petty drug or property offenses that likely would not have warranted prison time prior to the War on Drugs. The 3-strike law also worked a disproportionate impact on minority women as many took the rap to protect loved ones from a second or third strike.
More than 90 percent have suffered physical, sexual or emotional abuse. Almost 80 percent are mothers. Most are single. Nearly 1.3 million minor children now have mothers under supervision by justice system agencies. Child advocate Don Keenan cites figures showing that 70% of those in prison came out of long-term foster care.
The War on Drugs has become, in its effect, a way to criminalize poverty and fill the prisons with minorities. Florida now spends more on corrections than on colleges. California, now the world's fifth largest economy, spends 10 percent of its fiscal resources on prisons while other social needs go wanting -- schools, infrastructure, the arts, environmental cleanup.
Prison guards were the largest single category of donor to the campaign of California governor Gray Davis in 1998 and the second largest in 2002.
In today's penal labor market, prisoners (dominantly black males) are packing golf balls for Spaulding in Hawaii, doing telemarketing for AT&T in Colorado and providing cheap labor for Microsoft and Eddie Bauer in Washington State.
With rehabilitation on the wane and punishment on the rise, isolation units and other misery-inducing modalities are becoming the penal norm. Texas is building five more "supermax" units designed to hold more than 3,000 people in which inmates get from three to seven hours of exercise a week, and from two to eight hours of visits a month - remaining in their bathroom-sized cells the rest of the time, fed through hatches in their doors and provided virtually no sensory stimuli for months or years on end. Many in these modern dungeons simply go insane.
Since fewer than 10 percent of prisoners receive a life sentence, the next few decades will see the steady release of millions of ex-cons -- primarily enraged, uneducated minority males, casualties of the War on Drugs, who either never acquired job skills or who lost relevant skills while in prison.
Societal re-absorption of these men has unknown implications for the nation's civic character, potentially tipping the scales against neighborhoods that are already marginal. With severe budget cutbacks for education and vocational training for prisoners, combined with limits on convicted felons' access to welfare, Medicaid, and other social services, some experts predict a future of violent chaos along with rising inner-city epidemics as ex-prisoners, lacking either work or the support of social services, spread TB, HIV and hepatitis. U.S. society faces a social calamity that's destined not to dissipate but to accumulate with the passage of time.
The potent combination of the War on Drugs, mass arrests of minorities, mandatory sentencing, political disenfranchisement and mass releases into sub-citizenship means that an overwhelmingly black community conceivably could be politically dominated by a white minority.
Reflecting scant hope of genuine economic inclusion, 51 percent of lottery tickets are bought by five percent of regular purchasers -- drawn from the poorest of the poor.
Nationwide lottery sales now exceed $35 billion per year. In 1975, seven in ten lottery ticket buyers told pollsters that they gamble for the excitement and the challenge. No longer. Two-thirds now say they bet to win, with African-Americans more likely than any other group to offer that response.
Black applicants were granted less than one percent of home mortgages approved between 1930 and 1960. In 1960, not a single African-American could be counted among the 82,000 residents of Long Island's famous Levittown housing tract.
Blacks bore a disproportionate burden of budget cuts as government spending on education, infrastructure and research plummeted from 24% to 14% of the federal budget from the mid-70s to 2000 when the U.S. General Accounting Office documented a need for $112 billion to fix up the nation's dilapidated public schools.
Georgia's "zero tolerance" policy is poised to ensure that black children gain self-fulfilling lower expectations with an early profiling that places many on a track for failure. Research confirms that black children in Georgia schools are far more likely to be disciplined. The Georgia Department of Education reports that black children accounted for three-fifths of school expulsions over the 1996-98 period. They make up only 9 percent of those qualified as "gifted" but 65`percent of those classified as "retarded."
Recent research confirms that little attention is given to the resources and services required to create equal opportunities for success. Thus, in rural Georgia, the Macon-based Center for Children and Education found that 35 percent more white than black students score above the national median in reading and math.
Georgia ranks 49th in SAT scores; 47 percent of high school students fail to graduate.
Public education has long favored the most favored. School-financing systems routinely gear school budgets to local property taxes, thereby favoring the most well-to-do neighborhoods. Plus that home-owning group claims a disproportionately larger share of those tax deductions claimed for mortgage interest payments.
The rhetoric of oppression always suggests that some people are less worthy-or at least not worthy in the same way as those generating the rhetoric. A ruse employed in the late 1990s reflects an unusually ingenious attempt to deflect attention from these historic trends. Proponents then pointed to a test-score gap in which black students with parents earning over $70,000 averaged 144 SAT points less than white students at the same family income level.
Their not-so-subtle message: lower intelligence among African-Americans accounts for the test-score "achievement gap." Thus, by implication, today's vast economic inequality is justified because clearly people of color just can't cope in this knowledge-intensive era. As Conley chronicles, if the test scores of black students are compared to those of whites with the same family wealth, the gap disappears. He urges that the race question be rephrased-"casting it in terms of stocks, bonds, business proprietorships, and real estate ownership rather than in terms of education and earnings."
The solution, Conley argues, lies in policies "geared toward rectifying wealth differences." The best advantage you can have, he points out, "is having parents with wealth."
Observation: In the biblical tradition, justice is viewed as liberation from oppression. Clearly the fight against racial oppression has hardly yet begun.
Note: these statistics were originally compiled in 2000 in conjunction with a Green Party Senate race in Georgia where I was the candidate. The compilation benefits from an occasional update and would benefit from more. Additional facts are sought, along with source citations (which, for brevity, I've omitted below).
Many of these statistics are cited in two of Jeff Gates' recent books, The Ownership Solution (1998) and Democracy at Risk (2000), both now in paperback. Note also the compilation of ownership and income statistics at www.sharedcapitalism.org.