For
Black History Month:
Lessons Not Learned
By Mary Shaw
07 February, 2007
Countercurrents.org
February
is Black History Month in the U.S. It gives us an extra reason to ponder
the journey of African-Americans from the early days of slavery, through
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, an on through the present day.
As we do so, most of us are
thankful that our society has evolved to where African Americans are
no longer bought and sold, treated not like people but rather as property,
without reward, without a voice, and virtually without any rights at
all.
Yes, we have evolved - somewhat.
African-Americans are free. Like most Americans, they live their lives,
go to school, have careers, have families. They are our teachers, our
doctors, our stockbrokers, our Secretary of State.
But, even so, is our society
really as enlightened today as we might like to believe? Have we really
learned enough from the horrible mistake of slavery?
Perhaps not so much after
all.
The Declaration of Independence
proclaims that all persons are created equal. But, while we no longer
practice slavery in this country, are people of color truly equal in
our society?
While African-Americans are
certainly much better off than they were in centuries past, the socio-economic
disparity between the races remains pronounced in the U.S. today.
According to the U.S. Census
Bureau, the 2005 median income for white households was $48,554, while
that of black households was only $30,858.
The Bureau also reports that
in 2001, 22.7 percent of blacks lived below the poverty level, while
only 7.8 percent of non-Hispanic whites lived below the poverty level.
And racism and race-based
discrimination, while not politically correct in this day and age, are
still rampant. People - especially white people - are just not comfortable
talking about it.
Witness Hurricane Katrina.
We didn't see very many white people trapped inside that stadium.
On a wider scale, race-based
inequity is perhaps most apparent in the criminal justice system, where
the color of the defendant's skin and the victim's skin play a significant
role in determining who receives the death penalty in the U.S.
According to the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), people of color have accounted for a disproportionate
43 percent of all executions since 1976, and currently account for 55
percent of inmates currently awaiting execution. While white victims
account for approximately one-half of all murder victims, 80 percent
of all death penalty cases involve white victims. Furthermore, according
to the ACLU, "as of October 2002, 12 people have been executed
where the defendant was white and the murder victim black, compared
with 178 black defendants executed for murders with white victims."
Sometimes when I quote these
statistics, the listener (usually white) will speculate that perhaps
black people proportionally commit more murders than white people, and
therefore are more likely to end up on death row. While this theory
is racist by its very nature, and not based on facts, we can easily
disprove it with actual numbers. A 1997 study of death sentences in
Pennsylvania from 1983 through 1993 showed that a black defendant was
38 percent more likely to receive a death sentence than a white defendant
accused of a similar crime. Yet Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, like
several other governors across the nation, continues to sign death warrants
and propagate this racially biased system.
None of this will change
until our society evolves a whole lot further. None of this will change
until WE change. All of us.
None of this will change
until each of us - white, black, brown, yellow, purple, or polka-dot
- can look in the mirror and look at each other and see humanity, not
color.
None of this will change
until, to paraphrase the great and wise Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
all people are judged not for the color of their skin but the content
of their character.
Mary Shaw
is a Philadelphia-based writer and activist. She currently serves as
Philadelphia Area Coordinator for Amnesty International, and her views
on politics, human rights, and social justice issues have appeared in
numerous online forums and in newspapers and magazines worldwide. Unless
otherwise noted, the ideas expressed in this article are the author's
own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Amnesty or any other
organization with which she may be associated. E-mail: [email protected]
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