This blog post was triggered by the events that took place in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015. In particular, it was triggered by some comments I read that had been left on BBC News’ report of the shooting that took place. I’ve included a few of the worst here.
For those of you who don’t know what happened in Charleston, let me give you a brief overview. Dylan Roof, a 21 year old white male, walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church and watched the churchgoers pray for an hour before yelling “I have to do it. You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go” and opening fire, going on to gun down 6 African-American women and 3 African-American men. Before I proceed any further, I’m going to list the victims and convey my immense sorrow and condolences to their families; I pray they stay strong throughout this horrible tragedy.
Rev. Clementa Pinckney
Rev. Sharonda Singleton
Myra Thompson
Tywanza Sanders
Ethel Lee Lance
Cynthia Hurd
Rev. Daniel L. Simmons Sr.
Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor
Susie Jackson
May their souls, along with the souls of all victims of hate crimes based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation or any other basis for discrimination, rest in peace.
Now for a short history lesson.
The Emanuel AME church is a historically significant, predominantly African-American church that was established in 1787. It was closed down by the white community in South Carolina after they caught wind that one of the members of the church, the blacksmith Denmark Vesey, was planning a slave insurrection. The church reopened after the end of the civil war. It’s symbolism for the fight against slavery and inequality did not stop there; Martin Luther King Jr. also led marches from its steps, thereby continuing the historic fight for justice. To quote Rev. Carey Grady, the pastor of Reid AME Church in Columbia, South Carolina, “Emanuel represents that history of a church fighting to overcome the shackles of oppression.”
Let’s fast-forward 50 years from the day MLK Jr. was assassinated. Today, we don’t have doctrines like "separate but equal" that basically made racial discrimination legal, but does that mean it doesn’t exist? If you’re going to pretend that racial discrimination is a thing of the past, you live under a rock.
First of all, what constitutes the racial discrimination that I’m referring to? According to humanrights.gov.au, racial discrimination is when a person is treated less favorably than another person in a similar situation because of their race, color, national or ethnic origin or immigrant status.
This means that racial discrimination does not always come in the form of overt racial slurs (if you want to know what qualifies as a racial slur click here) or outright violence or right-wing extremism in pointy white hoods. Racial discrimination is the system through which society has kept people of color in a permanent state of inferiority to people of white skin even after we’ve achieved so-called “equality”. Let’s take a look.
1. Between 1934 and 1968, the Federal Housing Administration introduced the policy of “redlining”. This process allowed homeownership loans to whites (in fact, around $120 million worth of loans), but explicitly denied loans to blacks, destroying the possibility of investments wherever colored people lived and thus forcing them into the “ghettos” considerably poorer than the neighborhoods whites occupied ($120 million in loans does wonders). The subsequent effect was segregation that lasts to this very day. Although the process of redlining has been outlawed, a more psychological kind of racial discrimination persists to this day in the housing market. According to a report put out on an experiment done by the US Department of Housing and Development in 2012, minorities in nearly all cases were told about and shown fewer properties than white people. Blacks were told about and shown about 17% fewer homes than whites, while Asians were told about 15.5% fewer homes and shown nearly 19% fewer properties.
2. The chain of discrimination doesn't stop with the real estate market. Property taxes fund schools, meaning children with families that live in nicer, more expensive houses receive better education opportunities. Better education opportunities means access to better jobs, resources, and connections, all eventually leading to more wealth. Ironic? In addition, according to the U.S Education Department's 2011-2012 Civil Rights Data Collection, minority students receive more punishment and have less access to experienced (and often even QUALIFIED) teachers. 7% of black students attend schools where as many as 20% of teachers are unlicensed or uncertified. 25% of school districts pay teachers in "white" high schools around $5000 more than teachers in high schools with higher minority enrollment. This takes away incentive for experienced teachers to instruct at schools with more colored students. The culmination of this inequality, in addition to being a clear violation of almost every legal act to ensure equal rights to education, is a lower academic performance for minority students and a far greater risk of their dropping out of school. And even if they don' t drop out of school on their own, minority students are 3-4 times more likely to be suspended than white children. Black children make up 40% of all school expulsions and are 18 times more likely to be sentenced as adults in the court system than white children.
3. As if its presence in the education system and the housing market were not bad enough already, racial discrimination has seeped through to the workplace as well. Many of you may have heard the infamous statistic that when identical resumes, two with “white-sounding names” (Greg and Emily), and two with “african-american sounding names” (Lakisha and Jamal), were sent out to 1300 job ads, the job-seekers with “white-sounding names” were, on average, 50% more likely to receive a call-back as compared to job-seekers with “black-sounding names”. That shows clear discrimination when it comes to hiring individuals, but maybe that racial discrimination abates when the individuals officially become employees! LOL nope. The wage gap between black and white employees in particular is at upwards 30% according to Kellogg.com. People continue to blame blacks and all other people of color for their situation, despite the fact that it is the social construct of society that has existed for hundreds of years that has made it almost impossible for equality to prevail. Racial discrimination takes place in so many forms. It takes place when violence is committed against specific groups of people based on their race, as shown in the case of the shooting at Mother Emanuel church. It takes place in the YouTube comment sections, when fanatics blame people of color for claiming “fake victim status” and praise racist bigots as being “national heroes”. The worst part is that racial discrimination takes so many forms in our everyday lives that we are almost desensitized to it when we see it occur around us, like when a coworker makes fun of an immigrant worker for his or her accent, when an enraged driver yells “Go back to your country!” to someone who has lived in the US for all their life, or when a movie-goer chooses not to sit in the same row as a person of another race due to an ingrained prejudice he or she might not even be aware of, or when a person belonging to one ethnic race claims a person of another race got into a college or university because they played the race card. In the words of my friend Steffi Cao “it’s not a contest of ‘who has it worse’ between minorities", because the fact that discrimination exists at all on the basis of appearance is a scar on the face of our society.
When we are born, we don't know the difference between white people or black people or brown people, but instead we see them for who they are. We see them for when they share their toys with us or when they take our toys without asking. We judge people based on their actions and intentions, not by the colors of their skin. So what happens during the course of life that causes such a drastic change in the way we see other human beings? Why does it become permissible to judge people based on their appearance or their backgrounds rather than based on their personalities or their actions? And of ALL the ways to judge people based on unfounded or preconceived notions about their appearance, why on EARTH do we judge by the amount of pigment (or lack thereof) in an individual’s skin?!
I have one more thing I want to address in this blog post before I sign out which is the confederate flag controversy.
To those people who think the confederate flag represents southern pride, fried chicken and sweet tea, please stop kidding yourself. According to the man himself, William Tappan Thompson, the creator of the second confederate flag, the flag represents the people "fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored man." There are hundreds of other ways to show your southern pride if it's that close to your heart, and that's coming from someone who's lived in Louisiana for three years. However, using southern pride as an excuse to fly a confederate flag is an outright offence to anyone who did not stand for the same values as those who believed in the "supremacy of the white man", and especially to anyone whose families had been persecuted because of it. Now, knowing this, if you still want to fly your flag, be my guest, but don't come tell me it's okay for a government building to claim to serve all people of the United States of America equally yet fly a flag that symbolizes inequality and injustice.
Alright I know my thoughts are getting rather jumbled now and this probably isn't the most well-organized blog post you've ever read so I'm going to clarify the point I'm trying to make. Racial discrimination is alive and kicking, and chances are we're all guilty of it in some shape or form. However, by papering over this gaping wound in American history and pretending everything is okay, we not only make it acceptable for others to pretend it doesn't exist, but we also forget the plight of the people who have suffered most from that wound. On the other hand, by acknowledging it and by being aware of its presence in our lives, we show our support and solidarity with those people. We acknowledge the mistakes of the past and we show our willingness to see them corrected. So in short, don’t be afraid to talk about this. No change in our culture will ever come about if we don’t realize there’s a need for change.
Rev. Clementa Pinckney
Rev. Sharonda Singleton
Myra Thompson
Tywanza Sanders
Ethel Lee Lance
Cynthia Hurd
Rev. Daniel L. Simmons Sr.
Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor
Susie Jackson
May their souls, along with the souls of all victims of hate crimes based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation or any other basis for discrimination, rest in peace.
Now for a short history lesson.
The Emanuel AME church is a historically significant, predominantly African-American church that was established in 1787. It was closed down by the white community in South Carolina after they caught wind that one of the members of the church, the blacksmith Denmark Vesey, was planning a slave insurrection. The church reopened after the end of the civil war. It’s symbolism for the fight against slavery and inequality did not stop there; Martin Luther King Jr. also led marches from its steps, thereby continuing the historic fight for justice. To quote Rev. Carey Grady, the pastor of Reid AME Church in Columbia, South Carolina, “Emanuel represents that history of a church fighting to overcome the shackles of oppression.”
Let’s fast-forward 50 years from the day MLK Jr. was assassinated. Today, we don’t have doctrines like "separate but equal" that basically made racial discrimination legal, but does that mean it doesn’t exist? If you’re going to pretend that racial discrimination is a thing of the past, you live under a rock.
First of all, what constitutes the racial discrimination that I’m referring to? According to humanrights.gov.au, racial discrimination is when a person is treated less favorably than another person in a similar situation because of their race, color, national or ethnic origin or immigrant status.
This means that racial discrimination does not always come in the form of overt racial slurs (if you want to know what qualifies as a racial slur click here) or outright violence or right-wing extremism in pointy white hoods. Racial discrimination is the system through which society has kept people of color in a permanent state of inferiority to people of white skin even after we’ve achieved so-called “equality”. Let’s take a look.
1. Between 1934 and 1968, the Federal Housing Administration introduced the policy of “redlining”. This process allowed homeownership loans to whites (in fact, around $120 million worth of loans), but explicitly denied loans to blacks, destroying the possibility of investments wherever colored people lived and thus forcing them into the “ghettos” considerably poorer than the neighborhoods whites occupied ($120 million in loans does wonders). The subsequent effect was segregation that lasts to this very day. Although the process of redlining has been outlawed, a more psychological kind of racial discrimination persists to this day in the housing market. According to a report put out on an experiment done by the US Department of Housing and Development in 2012, minorities in nearly all cases were told about and shown fewer properties than white people. Blacks were told about and shown about 17% fewer homes than whites, while Asians were told about 15.5% fewer homes and shown nearly 19% fewer properties.
2. The chain of discrimination doesn't stop with the real estate market. Property taxes fund schools, meaning children with families that live in nicer, more expensive houses receive better education opportunities. Better education opportunities means access to better jobs, resources, and connections, all eventually leading to more wealth. Ironic? In addition, according to the U.S Education Department's 2011-2012 Civil Rights Data Collection, minority students receive more punishment and have less access to experienced (and often even QUALIFIED) teachers. 7% of black students attend schools where as many as 20% of teachers are unlicensed or uncertified. 25% of school districts pay teachers in "white" high schools around $5000 more than teachers in high schools with higher minority enrollment. This takes away incentive for experienced teachers to instruct at schools with more colored students. The culmination of this inequality, in addition to being a clear violation of almost every legal act to ensure equal rights to education, is a lower academic performance for minority students and a far greater risk of their dropping out of school. And even if they don' t drop out of school on their own, minority students are 3-4 times more likely to be suspended than white children. Black children make up 40% of all school expulsions and are 18 times more likely to be sentenced as adults in the court system than white children.
3. As if its presence in the education system and the housing market were not bad enough already, racial discrimination has seeped through to the workplace as well. Many of you may have heard the infamous statistic that when identical resumes, two with “white-sounding names” (Greg and Emily), and two with “african-american sounding names” (Lakisha and Jamal), were sent out to 1300 job ads, the job-seekers with “white-sounding names” were, on average, 50% more likely to receive a call-back as compared to job-seekers with “black-sounding names”. That shows clear discrimination when it comes to hiring individuals, but maybe that racial discrimination abates when the individuals officially become employees! LOL nope. The wage gap between black and white employees in particular is at upwards 30% according to Kellogg.com. People continue to blame blacks and all other people of color for their situation, despite the fact that it is the social construct of society that has existed for hundreds of years that has made it almost impossible for equality to prevail. Racial discrimination takes place in so many forms. It takes place when violence is committed against specific groups of people based on their race, as shown in the case of the shooting at Mother Emanuel church. It takes place in the YouTube comment sections, when fanatics blame people of color for claiming “fake victim status” and praise racist bigots as being “national heroes”. The worst part is that racial discrimination takes so many forms in our everyday lives that we are almost desensitized to it when we see it occur around us, like when a coworker makes fun of an immigrant worker for his or her accent, when an enraged driver yells “Go back to your country!” to someone who has lived in the US for all their life, or when a movie-goer chooses not to sit in the same row as a person of another race due to an ingrained prejudice he or she might not even be aware of, or when a person belonging to one ethnic race claims a person of another race got into a college or university because they played the race card. In the words of my friend Steffi Cao “it’s not a contest of ‘who has it worse’ between minorities", because the fact that discrimination exists at all on the basis of appearance is a scar on the face of our society.
When we are born, we don't know the difference between white people or black people or brown people, but instead we see them for who they are. We see them for when they share their toys with us or when they take our toys without asking. We judge people based on their actions and intentions, not by the colors of their skin. So what happens during the course of life that causes such a drastic change in the way we see other human beings? Why does it become permissible to judge people based on their appearance or their backgrounds rather than based on their personalities or their actions? And of ALL the ways to judge people based on unfounded or preconceived notions about their appearance, why on EARTH do we judge by the amount of pigment (or lack thereof) in an individual’s skin?!
I have one more thing I want to address in this blog post before I sign out which is the confederate flag controversy.
To those people who think the confederate flag represents southern pride, fried chicken and sweet tea, please stop kidding yourself. According to the man himself, William Tappan Thompson, the creator of the second confederate flag, the flag represents the people "fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored man." There are hundreds of other ways to show your southern pride if it's that close to your heart, and that's coming from someone who's lived in Louisiana for three years. However, using southern pride as an excuse to fly a confederate flag is an outright offence to anyone who did not stand for the same values as those who believed in the "supremacy of the white man", and especially to anyone whose families had been persecuted because of it. Now, knowing this, if you still want to fly your flag, be my guest, but don't come tell me it's okay for a government building to claim to serve all people of the United States of America equally yet fly a flag that symbolizes inequality and injustice.
Alright I know my thoughts are getting rather jumbled now and this probably isn't the most well-organized blog post you've ever read so I'm going to clarify the point I'm trying to make. Racial discrimination is alive and kicking, and chances are we're all guilty of it in some shape or form. However, by papering over this gaping wound in American history and pretending everything is okay, we not only make it acceptable for others to pretend it doesn't exist, but we also forget the plight of the people who have suffered most from that wound. On the other hand, by acknowledging it and by being aware of its presence in our lives, we show our support and solidarity with those people. We acknowledge the mistakes of the past and we show our willingness to see them corrected. So in short, don’t be afraid to talk about this. No change in our culture will ever come about if we don’t realize there’s a need for change.