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WORD COUNT
704
APRIL 29, 2009
A BLACK
PRESIDENT DOESN’T MEAN RACISM IS GONE IN AMERICA – by Peter Phillips
Racial
inequality remains in the United States. People of color continue to
experience high rates of poverty, significant unemployment, police
profiling and repressive incarceration. School segregation is a
continuing concern among race scholars as well.
According
to a new Civil Rights report published at UCLA, “Reviving the Goal of an
Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge,” by Gary
Orfield, schools in the United States are currently 44 percent nonwhite,
and minorities are rapidly emerging as the majority of public school
students. Latinos and blacks are the two largest minority groups.
However, black and Latino students attend schools more segregated today
than during the civil rights era. Schools are still separate and not
equal more than fifty years after the U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v.
Board of Education. Orfield’s study shows that most severe segregation
in public schools is in the Western states, including California, not in
the South as many people believe.
This new
form of segregation is primarily based on how urban areas are
geographically organized—as Cornel West so passionately describes— into
vanilla suburbs and chocolate cities.
Schools
remain highly unequal, both in terms of money, and qualified teachers
and curriculum. Unequal education leads to a diminished access to
colleges and future jobs. Nonwhite schools are segregated by poverty as
well as race. These “chocolate” low-income public schools are where most
of the nation’s dropouts occur, leading to large numbers of virtually
unemployable young people of color struggling to survive in a very
troubled economy.
There is a
white people’s side of segregation as well. Diminished opportunity for
students of color invariable creates greater privileges for whites.
White privilege is a concept that is overtly difficult for many whites
to accept. Whites like to think of themselves as hard working and that
whatever they achieve is due to deserved personal efforts. In many
cases, this is in fact partly true, as hard work in college often pays
off in many ways. What is difficult for many whites to accept is that
geographical and structural racism still serves as a significant barrier
for many students of color. Whites often say racism is in the past, and
we need not think about it today. Yet, inequality stares at us daily
from the barrios, ghettos, and from behind prison walls. Inequality
continues in privileged universities as well.
An example
of white privilege is how Sonoma State University in California (SSU)
has recently achieved the status of having the whitest and likely the
richest student population of any public university in the state.
Research shows, that beginning in the early 1990s, the SSU
administration specifically sought to market the campus as a public ivy
institution—offering an Ivy-League experience at a state college price.
Part of this public ivy packaging was to advertise SSU as being in a
destination wine-country location with high physical and cultural
amenities. These marketing efforts were principally designed to attract
upper-income students to a Falcon Crest-like campus.
To achieve
the desired outcome of becoming a wine-country public ivy, the SSU
administration implemented a special admissions screening process that
used higher SAT-GPA indexes than the rest of the California State
University (CSU) system. According to Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres in
“The Miner’s Canary,” high SAT scores correlate directly to both race
and income with little relationship to actual success in college.
SSU also
conducted recruitment at predominately white upper-income public and
private high schools throughout the West Coast and Hawaii. The result
was that SSU freshmen students with family incomes over $150,000
increased by 59 percent since 1994 and freshmen students from families
below $50,000 declined by 21 percent (2007 dollars). The campus remained
over three-quarters white during this fifteen-year period, while the
rest of the CSU campuses significantly increased ethnic diversity.
We are at
a time in society when a majority of the population has elected a black
president of the United States. This presidency is a hugely symbolic
achievement for race relations in the United States. We must not,
however, ignore the continuing disadvantages for people of color and the
resulting advantages gained by whites in our society. Institutional
policies and segregation contribute to continuing inequalities that
require ongoing review and discussion. Efforts against racism must
continue if we are to truly attain the civil rights goal of equal
opportunity for all.
--
Peter
Phillips is a professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University. His
recent research study “Building a Public Ivy: Sonoma State University:
1994-2007,” is online at:
http://www.projectcensored.org/articles/story/building-a-public-ivy/
A photo of Peter Phillips is available
CLICK HERE
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