Race and Ethnic Relations
Darryl Hall
Department of Sociology
University of Nevada, Reno
African Americans
• The United States, with more than 34 million Blacks, has the eighth-largest Black population in the world; only Brazil, Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, and Tanzania have larger Black populations. Despite their large numbers, Blacks in the US have had almost no role in many crucial decisions that influenced their own destiny.
• Although most of the people brought forcibly to North America from Africa came from a limited geographic area of the African continent, they brought with them diverse cultural experiences and traditions. Today, we rarely remember these tribal or ethnic variations among the descendants of the Africans in the way we customarily do among Europeans.
Slavery
• For nearly half of U.S. history, slavery was not only tolerated but legally protected by the U.S. Constitution as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. In sharp contrast to the basic rights and privileges enjoyed by White Americans, Black people in bondage lived under a system of repression and terror.
• Slavery in the United States rested on five central conditions:
1) Slavery was for life
2) The status of slave was inherited
3) Slaves were considered mere property
4) Slaves were denied rights
5) Coercion was used to maintain the system
• Although slave codes varied from state to state and from time to time and were not always enforced, the more common features demonstrate the complete subjugation of the Africans. Slaves were prohibited from all of the following practices:
1) marrying or even meeting with a free black
2) gambling
3) buying or selling anything, except by special arrangement
4) possessing weapons or liquor
5) quarreling with or using abusive language toward Whites
6) possessing property (including money), except as allowed by his or her owner
7) making a will or inheriting anything
8) making a contract or hiring himself or herself out
9) leaving a plantation without a pass noting his or her destination and time of return
10)testifying in court, except against another slave
11)learning to read or write
• Numerous ideologies were developed to justify the enslavement of Africans. Slaves were viewed like children that needed the guidance of their white slave owners to survive. Africans were also described as “subhuman” in order to legitimate their enslavement.
• Further, a slaveholder wanting to do “God’s work on Earth” would encourage the slave church, finding it functional in dominating the slaves. The Christianity to which the slaves were introduced stressed obeying their owner. Complete surrender to Whites meant salvation and eternal happiness in the afterlife. In contrast, to question God’s will, to fight slavery, caused everlasting damnation.
• Antislavery advocates, or abolitionists, included both Whites and free Blacks. Many Whites who opposed slavery (e.g., Abraham Lincoln) did not believe in racial equality even though slavery was seen as a moral evil.
• Antislavery societies had been founded even before the American Revolution, but the Constitution dealt the antislavery movement a blow. The framers of the Constitution recognized and legitimized slavery’s existence. The Constitution allowed slavery to increase Southern political power by counting a slave as three-fifths of a person in determining population representation in the House of Representatives.
• On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in the Confederacy, over which the president had no control. Six months after the surrender of the Confederacy in 1865, abolition became law when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery throughout the nation.
Reconstruction
• From 1867 to 1877, during the period called Reconstruction, Black-White relations were unlike anything they had ever been. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 put each Southern state under a military governor until a new state constitution could be written, with Blacks participating fully in the process. Whites and Blacks married each other, went to public schools and state universities together, and rode side by side on trains and streetcars.
• In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting the denial of the right to vote on grounds of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Black men put their vote to good use; Blacks were elected as six lieutenant governors, sixteen major state officials, twenty members of the house of representatives, and two U.S. senators. Black officials created new and progressive state constitutions, and Black political organizations rivaled the church as the focus of community organization.
The Segregation Period
• Reconstruction was ended as part of a political compromise in the election of 1876 and, consequently, segregation became entrenched in the South by the close of the nineteenth century. The term Jim Crow became synonymous with segregation and referred to the statutes that kept African Americans in an inferior position. The Jim Crow Laws assured that blacks were segregated in housing, employment, education, and all public accommodations. Segregation often preceded laws and in practice often went beyond their provisions.
• In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that state laws requiring “separate but equal” accommodations for Blacks were a “reasonable” use of state government power. The institutionalization of segregation gave White supremacy its ultimate authority.
• It was in the political sphere that the Jim Crow Laws exacted their price the soonest. In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled in Williams v Mississippi that it was constitutional to use poll taxes, literacy tests, and residential requirements to discourage Blacks from voting. In Louisiana that year, 130,000 Blacks were registered to vote; eight years later this number dropped to only 1,342.
• The White primary was another obstacle that forbade Black voting in election primaries. By the turn of the century, the South had a one-party system, making the primary the significant contest and the general election a mere rubber stamp. Statewide democratic party primaries were adopted and explicitly excluded Blacks from voting on the constitutional grounds that since the party was defined as a private organization, it was free to define its own membership qualifications.
- One restrictive legal device for relegating African Americans to second class status was restrictive covenants, which were private contracts entered into by neighborhood property owners stipulating that property could not be sold or rented to certain minority groups, thus ensuring that they could not live in the area. In 1948, the Supreme Court declared in Shelley v. Kramer that restrictive covenants were not constitutional.
- African Americans who did not stay in their “place” were the victims of violent attacks and lynch mobs. It is estimated that as many as 6,000 lynchings occurred between 1892 and 1921.
The Civil Rights Movement
• For the majority of Black schoolchildren, public school education meant attending segregated schools. Southern school districts assigned children to school by race rather than by neighborhood, a practice that constituted de jure segregation. In one case, seven-year-old Linda Brown was not permitted to enroll in the grade school four blocks from her home in Topeka, Kansas; rather, school board policy dictated that she attend the Black school almost 2 miles away. This denial led the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund to bring suit on behalf of Linda Brown and twelve other black children. The NAACP argued that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to rule out segregation in public schools.
• In the Supreme Court case of Linda Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the unanimous opinion that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
• Although Brown marked the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, the reaction to it showed just how deeply prejudice was held in the South. Resistance to court-ordered desegregation took many forms: some people called for the impeachment of all the Supreme Court justices, others petitioned Congress to declare the Fourteenth Amendment unconstitutional, cities closed schools rather than comply, and the governor of Arkansas used the state’s National Guard to block Black students from entering a previously all-White high school in Little Rock.
• The success of a year-long boycott of city buses in Montgomery, Alabama dealt Jim Crow another setback. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks defied the law and refused to give her seat on a crowded bus to a White man. Her defiance led to the organization of the Montgomery Improvement Association, headed by 26 year old Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister with a Ph.D. from Boston University. The bus boycott was the first of many instances in which Blacks used nonviolent direct action to obtain the rights that Whites already enjoyed. The boycott eventually demanded the end of segregated seating.
• The Brown decision woke up all of America to racial injustice, but the Montgomery boycott marked a significant shift away from the historical reliance on NAACP court battles. Civil disobedience, which was based on the belief that people have the right to violate disobey the law under certain circumstances, became an important tactic in the civil rights movement.
African Americans Today
1) Law and Criminal Justice
• Discrimination has a long history in the American legal system. The U.S. constitution provided for the return of escaped slaves and held that a slave should be counted as two-thirds of a person for congressional apportionment and tax purposes.
• In 1857, the Supreme court ruled in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford that slaves remained slaves even when living or traveling through states where slavery was illegal, and that constitutional rights and privileges did not extend to African Americans: “We think . . . that they [African Americans] are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word “citizen” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to the citizens of the United States.”
• Although such racist ideas are no longer part of the law, numerous studies have shown that African Americans are more likely than whites to be arrested, indicted, convicted, and committed to an institution. The racial difference in incarceration rates is huge and growing. Today, about 1 in every 3 African American men is either in prison or on probation or parole.
• Racial prejudice is a significant part of this discrepancy. The expectations of police officers, prosecutors, and judges that African Americans are more likely to be criminals become a self-fulfilling prophesy: Because they are expected to commit more crimes, African Americans are watched more closely, and therefore are arrested and prosecuted more often. Blacks are more that twice as likely to be stopped by the police compared to whites, even when higher crime rates in minority neighborhoods are taken into account. Although whites make up 75% of the drug users in the U.S., blacks account for 75% of the inmates with drug charges.
• Data collected annually by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (UCR) show that Blacks account for 28 percent of arrests, even though they represent only about 12 percent of the nation’s population. Conflict theorists point out that the higher arrest rate is not surprising for a group that is disproportionately poor and therefore much less able to afford private attorneys, who might be able to prevent formal arrests from taking place. Additionally, the UCR focuses on index crimes (mainly property crimes) most often committed by low-income people.
• In contrast to popular misconceptions about crime, African Americans and the poor are especially likely to be the victims of serious crimes. This fact is documented in victimization surveys, which are systematic interviews of ordinary people carried out annually to reveal how much crime occurs. These statistics show that African Americans are 28 percent more likely to be victims of violent crimes and are 22 percent more likely to be victims of property crimes than are Whites.
• The term differential justice refers to the tendency for Whites to be deal with more leniently than Blacks, whether at the time of arrest, indictment, conviction, sentencing, or parole.
• Several studies demonstrate that police often deal with African American youths more harshly than with White youngsters. For example, sociologists George Bridges and Sara Stern found in 1998 that probation officers were more likely to evaluate Black youth negatively and to describe them as potentially dangerous in their recommendations to judges than White youths who committed comparable violent offences and had similar records of prior convictions.
• Researchers on crime have used the term victim discounting to describe the tendency to view crimes as less socially significant if the victim is viewed as less worthy.
• One of the most extreme forms of victim discounting takes place in homicide cases. Numerous studies show that defendants are more likely to be sentenced to death if their victims were White rather than Black. Additionally, about 83 percent of the victims in death penalty cases are white, even though only 50 percent of all murder victims are White.
• Also, when a schoolchild walk into a cafeteria or schoolyard with automatic weapons and kills a dozen children and teachers it becomes a case of national alarm, but when children kill each other in drive-by shootings it is viewed as a local concern and the need to clean-up a dysfunctional neighborhood. Many note that the difference between these situations is not the death toll but who is being killed: middle-class Whites in the schoolyard shootings and Black ghetto youth in the drive-bys.
2) Education
- Several measures document the inadequate quantity and quality of education received by African Americans.
- The gap in educational attainment between Blacks and Whites has always been present. Despite programs directed at the poor, such as Head Start, White children are still more likely to have formal prekindergarten education than are African American children. Later, Black children are more likely to drop out of school sooner and therefore are less likely to receive high school diplomas, let alone college degrees. Although there has been some progress in reducing this gap in recent years, the gap remains substantial—with nearly twice the proportion of Whites holding a college degree as Blacks in 2000.
- Many educators argue that many students would not drop out of school were it not for the combined inadequacies of their education. Among the deficiencies noted include insensitive teachers, poor counseling, unresponsive administrators, overcrowded classes, irrelevant curricula, and dilapidated school facilities.
- Although several of these problems can be addressed with more adequate funding, some are stalemated by disagreements over what changes would lead to the best outcome. For example, there is a significant debate among educators and African Americans in general over the content of curriculum that is best for minority students. Some schools have developed academic programs that take an Afrocentric perspective and immerse students in African American history and culture. However, a few of these programs have been targeted as ignoring fundamentals, as in the debate in Oakland, California over recognizing Ebonics as a language in the classroom.
- It has been more than 40 years since the U.S. Supreme Court issued its unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. The challenge was to have integrated schools even though the neighborhoods were segregated. Initially, courts sought to overcome this de facto segregation (i.e., school segregation that resulted from residential patterns). Typically, students were bused within a school district to achieve racial balance.
- In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled in Millikin v. Bradley that it was improper to order Detroit and the suburbs to have a joint metropolitan busing solution. This and other Supreme Court decisions have effectively ended initiatives to overcome residential segregation, once again creating racial isolation in the schools. Indeed, even in Topeka, one-third of the schools are segregated today.
- Today, racial diversity is still largely absent in schools. In 2000, seven out of ten African American students attended schools in which fewer than half the students were White. In fact, 37 percent attended schools that had less than 10 percent White students. There has been little evidence of racial integration over the last 30 years; indeed, if there has been any trend, it is that the typical African American student was less likely to have White classmates in 2000 than in 1970.
- A diverse student population does not guarantee an integrated, equal schooling environment. For example, tracking in schools, especially middle and high schools, intensifies segregation at the classroom level. Tracking is the practice of placing students in specific curriculum groups on the basis of test scores and other criteria.
- Tracking has the effect of decreasing Black-White classroom interaction as African American children are disproportionately assigned to general classes, and more White children are placed in college preparatory classes.
- Some studies indicate that African American students are more likely than White students to be classified as learning disabled or emotionally disturbed. African American children are almost three times more likely to be labeled as mentally retarded and placed in special education classes.
3) The Economic Picture
- The general economic picture for African Americans has been gradual improvement over the last 40 years, but this improvement is modest compared with that of Whites, whose standard of living has also increased. In terms of absolute deprivation, African Americans are much better off today but have experienced much less significant improvement with respect to their relative deprivation to Whites.
- There is a significant gap between the incomes of Black and White families in the United States. Black family income resembles that of White families more than 10 years ago.
- Higher unemployment rates for Blacks have persisted since the 1940s, when they were first documented. Since 1990, the national unemployment rate for Whites has ranged from 3.0 percent to 6.0 percent, whereas for Blacks it has ranged from 7.0 percent to 11.0 percent.
- The unemployment picture is especially grim for African American workers aged 16 to 24. Many factors have been cited by social scientists to explain why official unemployment rates for young African Americans exceed 30 percent:
1) Many African Americans live in the depressed economy of the central cities
2) Immigrants and illegal aliens present increased competition
3) White middle-class women have entered the labor force
4) Illegal activities at which youth find they can make more money have become more prevalent
- The picture grows even more somber when we realize that we are considering only official unemployment. The federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics counts as unemployed only people who are actively seeking employment. Therefore, to be counted as unemployed, a person must not hold a full-time job, must be registered with a government agency, and must be engaged in writing job applications and seeking interviews. It does not count people so discouraged that they have temporarily given up looking for employment.
- The problem of unemployment is further compounded by underemployment – working at a job for which one is overqualified, involuntarily working part-time, or being employed only intermittently.
- The official unemployment rate for African American teenagers in a central city is about 40 to 45 percent, well above the 25 percent jobless rate for the nation as a whole during the depression of the 1930s. If we add to the official figures the discouraged job seeker, the rate of unemployment and underemployment of African American teenagers in central-city areas climbs to 90 percent.
- African Americans, who constitute 12 percent of the population, are underrepresented in high-status, high-paying occupations. Less than 7 percent of lawyers, judges, physicians, financial managers, public relations specialists, architects, pharmacists, and dentists are African American. One the other hand, they account for more than 15 percent of cooks, health aides, hospital orderlies, maids, janitors, and stock handlers.
4) Health Care
• In 1996, a shocking study in a prestigious medical journal revealed that two-thirds of boys in Harlem, a predominantly Black neighborhood in New York City, can expect to die in young or mid-adulthood—that is, before they reach age 65. In fact, they have less chance to survive even to 45 than their white counterparts nationwide have of reaching 65.
• Compared with Whites, Blacks have higher death rates from diseases of the heart, pneumonia, diabetes, and cancer. The death rate from strokes was twice as high among African Americans as it was among Whites. Such epidemiologic findings reflect in part the higher proportions of Blacks found among the nation’s lower classes. White Americans can expect to live 77.7 years. By contrast, life expectancy for African Americans is only 72.4 years.
• Blacks represent less than 7 percent of practicing physicians. This is especially significant given that communities with a high proportion of African American residents are four times more likely to have a physician shortage than are White neighborhoods. Applications by Blacks to medical schools declined beginning in 1997. There is also evidence of a declining presence of minorities among medical school faculty members, reflecting disenchantment with rolling back of affirmative action in many professional schools.
