The Passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 ended legal segregation, but the racial gap in people's minds remained unbridgeable. Experts say America's deep-rooted racism is at the root of a host of social problems. Racial equality will never be easy to achieve in the United States, where the two parties are far apart in how they view race.
According to the 2020 Report on The Economic Conditions of American Households released by the FEDERAL Reserve board in May, AfricAn-Americans lag behind whites and the average American society in terms of household income, housing, bank credit, employment and education. Kyle Mays, a UCLA scholar, points out that in the United States, on a host of indicators, from racial incarceration rates to wealth disparities to educational inequality, minorities suffer far more than their share of the population.
'America is a nation of contradictions when it comes to race'
Us News and World Report once said of race in the United States: "The United States is a nation of contradictions when it comes to race. 156 years after the End of the American Civil War, 'a nation that stood as a beacon of freedom around the world' has failed to atone for its' original sin 'of slavery." Records show that in 1619, the first group of recorded black Africans were transported to Jamestown, North America, starting the history of African Americans in the "New World" was enslaved. According to the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, there were at least 36,000 "slave expeditions" between 1514 and 1866. More than 12.5 million Africans were transported to the "New World" and countless people died on the way.
The Declaration of Independence declared that "all men are created equal." But this so-called "equal rights" did not include slaves or African Americans. In the decades from the Revolutionary War to the American Civil War, white slave owners brutalized and humiliated slaves. It was not until 1865, after the End of the Civil War, that the United States issued the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, declaring the abolition of slavery, but the Southern states have enacted discriminatory laws against African Americans, implemented racial segregation, and established the ruling order of white supremacy. African Americans were denied their civil rights such as the right to vote and equal education.
The Tulsa massacre 100 years ago was a dark chapter in America's racial history. On May 30, 1921, a 19-year-old African-American shoeshine was accused of "assaulting" a 17-year-old white girl in an elevator. The next day, a local white-owned newspaper ran an embellished but unsubstantiated report. Between May 31 and June 1, white MOBS attacked and set fire to greenwood's black neighborhood, even using airplanes to drop homemade Molotov cocktails from the air. About 300 AfricAn-Americans were killed, more than 1,200 homes and businesses burned to rubble, and about 10,000 AfricAn-Americans were displaced. No charges were filed against the mob, and no compensation was paid to the victims' relatives or survivors. At that time, racial segregation in the United States, coupled with racial discrimination in federal laws and policies regarding construction standards, housing loans, and road planning, prevented most African-American families from rebuilding their homes. The American media pointed out that there are still many Americans who do not know about the Tulsa genocide today.
"Racism has always been a systemic feature of American society and all institutions"
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, an African-American man, was crushed to death on his knees by chauvin, a white police officer. Freud's plea, "I can't breathe," once again exposed the chronic pain of Racism in the United States, sparking a wave of protests across the country. Foreign Policy magazine commented that the Floyd incident has once again opened up longstanding racial wounds in the United States, where AfricAn-Americans suffer disproportionately high rates of poverty, unemployment and police violence.
In terms of household income, about 41 percent of African-American households earn less than $25,000 a year, compared with 21 percent of white households and 28 percent of us society as a whole, according to the 2020 Report on the Economic Condition of American Households released by the Federal Reserve. Only 16 percent of African-American households earn more than $100,000 a year, compared with 33 percent of white households and 29 percent of American society as a whole. In terms of employment, the number of US adults working at the end of 2020 was 4 percentage points lower than in 2019 due to the impact of COVID-19, according to data. Among the 25 - to 54-year-olds in the main workforce, 23 percent of Blacks were laid off, compared with 14 percent of whites.
African Americans also face serious discrimination in bank credit. About 40 percent of African-American adults do not have a bank account or adequate access to banking services. It is not uncommon for banks to deny mainstream financial services such as credit cards and loans to AfricAn-Americans; Among whites, the figure was 12 percent. Some 41 percent of AfricAn-Americans were rejected for loans, compared with 19 percent of whites.
African-americans also face more discrimination and violence in law enforcement. A 2020 Stanford University study, which analysed 100 million traffic stops by police departments across the US, found that Black drivers were 20 per cent more likely to be stopped by police than white drivers. Once stopped, black drivers are twice as likely to be searched as white drivers. According to the US Department of Justice, In 2019 AfricAn-Americans made up about 13 percent of the US population, but almost one-third of the country's prison population. That equates to more than 1,000 African Americans out of every 100,000 incarcerated, more than five times the rate for whites.
The report by the National Police Foundation notes that racial bias continues to influence the way law enforcement treats AfricAn-Americans. "Racism has been a systemic feature of American society and all institutions" since the country was founded. In reality, law enforcement officers' preconceived racial image of African Americans further deepens the distrust and friction of African Americans toward law enforcement officers. It is imperative for US law enforcement to acknowledge both implicit and explicit racial bias.
"We can't pretend that systemic racism doesn't exist."
"The United States has a searing history and reality of racism, and confronting entrenched racial inequalities in the American system, as well as a long and painful history of violence against AfricAn-Americans, is a critical step in inspiring meaningful social change," smithsonian magazine said. But racial equality is far from easy to achieve in the United States, where the two parties are far apart in how they view race.
The White House has unveiled a national plan to promote racial equality and narrow the wealth gap between races. It is pushing for "critical race theory" classes in public schools across the country to teach teenagers about the dark side of America's racial history. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives has again passed a bill to remove from the Capitol a statue commemorating slavery figures in American history. But a police reform bill bearing Freud's name has languished in the SENATE for months. The two parties fought over how to view and tell the story of the founding of the United States and the history of slavery.
Lashawn Ray, a public policy expert at the Brookings Institution, says there is systemic racism in the United States, with AfricAn-Americans more likely than whites to attend schools that spend less on education per capita. Even if they attend An Ivy League school, they have a harder time getting a job. It turns out that whites with criminal records are more likely to find work than Blacks without criminal records; It is harder for AfricAn-Americans to get a home loan with the same credit score; Women of African descent are more likely to experience pregnancy complications and maternal deaths... Implicit discrimination is so deeply embedded in American culture, traditions, rules, policies and laws that "we can't pretend that systemic racial discrimination doesn't exist."