Monday, April 29, 2013

You can read it like a Poetry.



Hello Pals,
I came a cross this piece and think it is great and well written. To be educated for me is to walk around with an opened mind and ready to face the truth in all its funky forms. Personally, I hate racism but not the racist folk. There will always be change of heart some days maybe long after my time and is taken over. To be who we are is simply  biologic with the rest as our human nature sometimes bequeathed on us by our parents or families at large. I know this is in the U.S but look beyond the settings.
Just read it below!!

IT GOES;

Each May, the city of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, hosts two separate week-long motorcycle festivals, one at the start of the month, the other around Memorial Day. In most ways the festivals are identical: each attracts more than 200,000 bikers from around the country who gun their cycles down the city’s main thoroughfare, proudly displaying their hardware to other cycle enthusiasts and admiring crowds.
But there’s one striking difference between the events: the bikers who flock to Myrtle Beach for Harley Week are white, those
who come for Black Bike Week during Memorial Day are black.
For Georgia State University sociologist Charles A. “Chip”
Gallagher, the twin festivals provided a rare and valuable reallife laboratory for examining racial disparities in modern
American society.
“For sociologists, it was a perfect natural experiment,
which we don’t get that often,” says Gallagher. “It was, quite
literally, two populations that are quite similar coming into the
same venue at almost the same time. We can look at the treatment of these two groups, see if it varies, and, if so, why.”
Essentially, it provided the opportunity to test whether
Myrtle Beach was as colorblind as it claimed to be. That is,
whether it treated the bikers as individuals rather than members of the racial groups to which they belonged. The experiment was timely, as sociologists today are increasingly questioning
the colorblind ideology and what effects it has on
American culture and law. Their interest is due in no small part
to the fact that colorblindness is used to support two very different
social agendas that are in direct conflict.
And there is no arena in which the struggle over the
meaning of colorblindness is more consequential than in the
nation’s courts, where the fate of affirmative action programs
and other racially based initiatives hang in the balance.
The very different treatment each group received from Myrtle
Beach and some local businesses wasn’t difficult to measure.
Gallagher’s challenge was to demonstrate why it happened.
Myrtle Beach, which is about 85 percent white, is heavily
dependent on tourism. Harley Week has been held each year
since 1940. All week long, white bikers cruise up and down
Pacific Boulevard and are enthusiastically embraced with welcome
signs, special merchandising, and other displays of appreciation for the tourist dollars that flow in.
But during Black Bike Week, the city shut down one lane
of traffic on Pacific Boulevard, forcing bikers to wait in queue
for their turn to cruise and causing long traffic jams. Myrtle
Beach tripled the number of police on duty, ticketed bikers for
minor infractions, and even (unsuccessfully) petitioned the governor
to send in the National Guard. In contrast to the welcome
mat laid out to white bikers by local businesses, 25
restaurants closed their doors over Memorial Day weekend.
In 2003, the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP) sued the city of Myrtle Beach and
the 25 restaurants, claiming they violated the civil rights of
black bikers by treating them differently because of their race.
When two prominent law firms in Washington, D.C.,
asked for his help as an expert witness in the case, Gallagher
warned them what the defendants would claim: that their
divergent treatment of the two groups was due to a variety of
factors, but race wasn’t among them.
Just as Gallagher predicted, the city claimed age differences
and increased criminal activity, not race, were the reasons
for ramped-up police numbers during Black Bike Week. It
alleged the black bikers were younger, and younger men tend
to be involved more in criminal activity.
But this allegation weakened when the NAACP showed
the average age of the black bikers was 34 versus 39 for the
whites. Criminal activity peaks in men at age 18 and drops dramatically
by age 30, so both groups of bikers had aged out of
their peak years for misconduct.
The city also claimed more police were needed because the
number of bikers was much higher during Black Bike Week. But
it had no hard numbers to back this up, and Gallagher testified
that research shows whites consistently overestimate the size of
black populations by a factor of two to three times. Moreover,
the NAACP claimed, the increase in criminal and traffic citations
issued during Black Bike Week was the result of the extra police
officers on duty, not excessive criminal activity by blacks.
As for more traffic problems during Black Bike Week, this
was a direct result of the city’s own traffic restrictions, which
caused traffic jams that didn’t happen during Harley Week,
the NAACP argued.
With each of the other factors debunked, the only difference
between the two groups was race. “In effect, we were
able to control for all the other variables typically used to dismiss
charges of racism,” Gallagher says.
A year ago the city settled the cases, agreeing to treat
both groups of bikers the same.
The cases were a victory not only for black bikers but all people
of color. And they also supported Gallagher’s theories about the
current state of race relations and attitudes in the United States.
According to national polling, the vast majority of white
Americans believe racial minorities no longer face discrimination in schools, housing, jobs, or other arenas, Gallagher notes.
They believe the United States has achieved a state of colorblindness, in which a person’s race has no meaning other than
as a cultural symbol.
“White Americans are very invested in the idea of colorblindness,” says Gallagher, because it legitimizes their privileged position in society. If the United States has achieved a
utopic state where people are no longer judged or disadvantaged by the color of their skin, then someone’s fortunes or
misfortunes are due entirely to the choices they make. If so,
then life circumstance don’t control one’s fate, self-determination does, a notion deeply engrained in the American ethos,
Gallagher notes.
“The idea is, you get what you work for. Just like you can
choose to be Donald Trump, you can choose to be
Condoleezza Rice. And you can choose to be in a ghetto or a
barrio. It’s a choice, like a smorgasbord,” explains Gallagher.
If whites get an advantage because of the color of their
skin, then their dominant status isn’t legitimate, an idea that’s
threatening to them. “Colorblindness lets them see the playing field as being level—because if it isn’t level, it means
[whites] have gotten privileges [they] didn’t deserve,” he says.
By embracing the concept of colorblindness, “white America
can truly imagine that we’re a meritocracy and where you end
up reflects individual hard work and bootstrapping.”
That’s why the Myrtle Beach cases were so important,
Gallagher says: despite the city’s best efforts to prove it was
colorblind and that the disparate treatment of blacks wasn’t
based on race, the facts proved otherwise.
“Advocates of colorblindness typically do not give the real
reasons that they support colorblind social policies,” says John
Skrentny, a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego.
“They will say that colorblindness is important because it preserves
meritocracy and equal opportunity, but they also accept all sorts
of exceptions to meritocracy—the law gives veterans preferences
in civil service jobs, for example, and nepotism is legal.”
In 2007 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down two school integration
plans—one in Seattle, one in Louisville—that considered
students’ race during the admissions process in order to
maintain diverse student bodies.
The court based its decision on an interpretation of colorblindness
that holds that racial classifications are unconstitutional
except in very narrow circumstances—even when the intention
is to redress racial inequities. Writing for the majority, Chief
Justice John Roberts said, “The way to stop discrimination on
the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
The school cases are the latest in a 20-year series in which
the high court has relied on this new interpretation of colorblindness
to dismantle programs and initiatives that assist
minorities. This trend worries civil rights advocates and continues
to garner the interest of social scientists.
“What’s most interesting about colorblindness is that it
both has the ability to fight against inequality [and] can be used
to fight against policies designed to reduce inequality. There
aren’t many ideologies that hold these opposing forces,” says
Brian Lowery, an associate professor of organizational behavior
who studies perceptions of inequality at Stanford University.
In the school cases, both the majority and the dissent relied
on Brown v. the Board of Education, the seminal case in the
fight against racial discrimination, to support their opposing
positions, with the majority relying on the notion of colorblindness
to support its rejection of the school integration schemes.
The majority’s use of the term “colorblind” as a weapon against
affirmative action is no small irony: it was coined in 1896 by
Justice John Marshal Harlan to support civil rights for blacks. In
his solo dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson, the landmark case that
upheld the policy of “separate but equal” treatment for blacks
and whites, Harlan—a former slave owner who became a
champion of minorities—wrote, “Our Constitution is colorblind,
and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.
In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”
Harlan’s word became a rallying point for those supporting
racial equality. During the civil rights movement, the term
colorblind became essential to the argument that the U.S.
Constitution requires all people, regardless of race, receive
equal treatment, and overt racism was outlawed.
The civil rights movement focused on glaring examples of
racial discrimination. But after that battle ostensibly was won,
racism persisted, albeit in more subtle ways. “You still have a
lot of racial inequalities but they aren’t supported by overt
racism. They’re justified in more private or covert kinds of ways.
Call it ‘smiling discrimination,’ where there are no names or
bad words used, but practices are clear and consistent,” says
Eduardo Bonilla Silva, a sociologist at Duke University who studies
race and ethnicity.
Then, 20 years ago, an odd turn of events with enormous social and legal implications took place.
“Sometime in the 1980s, ‘colorblind’ was essentially
hijacked by conservatives, whites and non-whites alike, and
used for a very different purpose—to advocate for the rights
and equal protection of white people,” says Victoria Plaut, who
studies models of diversity, including colorblindness, at the
University of Georgia. If the U.S. Constitution requires the
nation be colorblind, this argument goes, then it’s illegal to
use racial classifications for any purpose, even to address current
instances of discrimination.
This interpretation took hold quickly. In the 1990s, the
U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the use of racial classification
to advance the rights of minorities in numerous cases in the
areas of employment, redistricting for voting, and contracts,
among others. In 2003, by a slim majority, the high court
upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative
action program for admissions because race was only one of
many factors taken into consideration. But at the same time,
the court struck down the admissions scheme in the university’s
undergraduate program after finding it was more of a
quota system where race was the primary factor. The 2007
school cases in Seattle and Louisville are the latest to seize upon
colorblindness to dismantle diversity plans.
“That means on the one hand, affirmative action
programs, school district plans, and other racially cognizant
initiatives are illegal, but on the other, it’s very difficult to prove
discrimination exists because you don’t have anyone owning
up to it. So there’s no intent to discriminate [unless you have]
a smoking gun,” says Bonilla Silva.
During the civil rights movement, the smoking guns for
change were such things as signs that read: “No Jews, No
Blacks.” It was easy to use these as concrete evidence of
discrimination, Bonilla Silva says. But with discrimination
pushed underground today, and surfacing in far more subtle
ways, it’s much harder to prove. How does a person of color
effectively argue to a court that he was discriminated against
while shopping because clerks followed him around asking
“Can I help you? Can I help you?”
The Supreme Court isn’t out on an activist limb in its interpretation of the term colorblind, at least not a limb that’s unpopular. Most white Americans share the same definition and believe the use of color or race for any purpose today is wrong, especially since—in their eyes—racial disparities no longer exist.
At the same time, racial discrimination is thriving, as the Myrtle
Beach cases and other sociologists’ work demonstrate.
Devah Pager, a sociologist at Princeton University who
studies race, conducted a series of classic audit studies that
show just how prevalent discrimination
is today. In these field experiments in 2001 and 2004, she had
young men pose as job applicant at a variety of employers in
Milwaukee and New York City. Their education and workplace
qualifications were exactly the same, yet one set of men was white, the other black. She expected to find a disadvantage in hiring for black men, but the
dramatic results surprised even her.
“The basic finding was that blacks were half as likely to
get a call-back or job offer relative to an equally qualified white
applicant,” says Pager. But there was an even more disturbing
result: Pager found black men with no criminal history fared no
better than a white man just released from prison. “I expected
race would be an issue but I didn’t think it would rival the
effect of a felony conviction,” she says.
Pager says that many employers believe themselves to be
colorblind, looking only for the first person who is well-qualified
for a job. But, especially with low-level, entry-level jobs that
require few concrete skills or qualifications, employers tend to do
a very cursory review of applicants. In those situations, race can
unconsciously influence an employer’s decision about who
seems to be the best candidate. “Those are the ways in which
the strength of continuing racial stereotypes undermine our conscious
effort to achieve some sort of colorblindness,” she says.
Sociologist Katherine Beckett of the University of
Washington has studied racial disparities in the enforcement of
drug laws in Seattle. She and her research colleagues have
compared independent information on drug users against
police arrest data and found blacks are dramatically overrepresented
among arrestees. These disparities are impossible to
explain by the race-neutral reasons police rely on, including
that certain areas in their jurisdictions have higher crime rates
or that they are merely responding to increased citizen complaints
in a particular area. As Gallagher did in the Myrtle Beach
cases, Beckett and her colleagues have demonstrated that
these disparities are actually created by different policies and
practices, including who’s arrested, who’s prosecuted, and even
where police are patrolling.
With regard to arrest rates, cities vary greatly in racial composition,
geography, and the use of public space. “Some police
departments are less aggressive on arrest, but the disparities are exacerbated at the prosecution or sentencing stage,” she says.
“I try to assess the race-neutral explanations for racial disparities,
either by looking at the literature or at what officials
actually say,” she continues. However, her research shows that
these colorblind explanations usually fall short. And, for some
crimes and in some areas of the law, as Beckett says, “it’s nearly
impossible to meet the evidentiary standards needed to
establish discrimination.”
Making colorblind ideals and legal standards even more
complicated, in Skrentny’s view, are new values of diversity and
multiculturalism.
“Large institutions, including the government, universities,
and corporations, want to be racially diverse. A value on diversity
is overshadowing a value on colorblindness, in my view, at least
in terms of what institutions promote about themselves,” he says.
But, “Americans don’t universally value universalism, so
to speak—we vary a lot in what kinds of differences we accept
or find appropriate as criteria for preferences or exclusions,” he
continues. “We give preferences to veterans in civil service jobs
and don’t decry age categorizations, yet there is great controversy
regarding race categorizations.”
Meanwhile, the future of race in the legal arena will turn on
which interpretation of colorblindness dominates.
“If the idea that we can never take race into account is the
one that wins, a slew of policies will go away,” says Lowery.
“On the other hand, if colorblindness means commitment to
equality, then certain existing policies will be reinforced.”
Which will prevail?
“My guess is ... that colorblindness as an aspiration for
equality is losing ground,” Lowery says. “I think right now colorblindness
is a contested idea, in the sense that it’s not obvious
who’s going to win the debate over what it means.”
Bonilla Silva goes even further. Colorblindness is “Martin
Luther King’s dream, but not our reality ... It’s a language dream
that provides an image of progress that allows Americans to
think we’ve moved beyond race without really addressing our
racial injustices and inequalities.”
His prediction?
“I’m afraid America is becoming meaner and more divided,
holding on to colorblind ideas even as the situation of people of
color continues to deteriorate. It’ll be a schizophrenic America.”

Credits to Elaine McArdle: 
She is a journalist and writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
She is the co-author of The Migraine Brain

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