Equality in America?

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I've always believed that a person would not fully understand his/her own culture unless able to see it from the outside. I think I am getting this experience while studying abroad, and it has allowed me to observe certain things about American culture that I never have been able to before. In my Indian culture and civilization class, our professor asked us the following questions about the United States:

-Is everyone, regardless of race, gender, class, ethnicity, religion, etc treated equally?
-Is their truly equal opportunity for all?
-Is racism (all forms) truly resolved?

My answers to these questions are NO, NO, NO.

While overt discrimination is on the decline, there is still rampant institutionalized discrimination in the US that is discrimination that is present with an organization or institution. This manifests itself in many forms, but I will discuss the public education system, the criminal justice system and the housing market.

In the US, public education is funded by property taxes. Each individual district gets funding from the taxes collected within the district. And since the value of one property depends on the property around it, high-income people tend to live near each other and low income people tend to live near each other. This produces some very well funded schools with swimming pools, low teacher-to-student ratios and computers for each student. However, this also produces schools that are drastically underfunded where students must deal with collapsing ceilings, huge class sizes even in the lower grades, and lack of special or gifted education. These factors contribute the quality of education to be less than that of richer school districts. People in the US are quick to hate the idea of racism, but when it comes to actually equalizing the situation people are reluctant because no body would want to take away from their own child's education in order to level the playing field for all.

This type of situation also occurs in the criminal justice system. In the US, if you cannot pay for a lawyer, one is appointed to you by the court. These people are overworked and underpaid. The most skilled attorneys have no motivation to enter into this field of work. So this results in high income people being able to better defend themselves in the court of law. This proves true when examining the income level and racial background of people in prison and comparing the sentences they received for the same crime. Also, when a teenager misbehaves, the court is more likely to release the teen to middle or upper class married parents, with the idea that they will be better able to punish and look after the teen in the future.

The final place I will discuss is the housing market. The American suburbs were created after WWII after the creation of the GI Bill, which allowed returning (white) soldiers to take out very low interest loans from the federal government to build private family homes. This of course was not offered to black soldiers. The result of this was that neighborhood associations would not let minorities come into the neighborhood for fear that property values would drop because of the amount of loans on the house that would be built. This forever changed the housing market in American, creating the phenomena of "white flight" in which people tend to quickly move out of a neighborhood when minority populations move in for fear of their own home values dropping. So the minority who bought the house suddenly has a home worth less than when purchased. This means no capital, no mortgage loans to pay for such things as college loans for their children.

A way this would play out in real life would be a human resources manager deciding between two people to hire. The candidates have similar experience, college GPA's and personal skills. But the interviewer notices that one went to Harvard while the other went to a state school. The person who went to Harvard will most likely get the job because of the prestige that institution carries, but in reality only one of the candidates was able to afford to pay for such a college. So without even knowing it, the interviewer discriminated against one candidate for factors completely out of his control. These things may seem like insignificant factors but they permeate many areas of American life. For example, if a poor child receives an inadequate education, s/he is unlikely to get into college, which will cause s/he to get a poor-paying job. The same thing will mostly likely happen to the next generation of children because the biggest factor contributing to a child's eventual income is the parent's.

And final thoughts, in the Kentucky presidential primary 20% of respondents said that race was a significant factor for them deciding between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Of these people 80% voted for Clinton. This is a pretty scary statistic seeing that the amount of people who would actually admit this kind of attitude is probably much lower than the reality of the situation

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Comments

[Carol]

Your approach to these questions is interesting and very informative. I can see that you have given this some thought even before this assignment and have made your point well. Good job.

[Kelsey]

What is interesting that you didn't point out in this entry is how the discrimination of each institution - the educational system, criminal justice system and the housing market - are all connected together. In a college class I took last semester, a group of us were asked to solve the high murder rate of black youth in Philadelphia. To attempt to do this, our class tackled the housing market, educational system, criminal justice system, community programs, stereotypes and mentoring programs. Our group realized that this problem couldn't be pinpointing to one institution. Black youth were up against a network of discriminatory institutions that built and reinforced each other. Perhaps the most discouraging aspect of discrimination is that it is a multi-faced monster and attacking one part of it cannot kill it.