Structural Racism In African American Society

In Merriam Webster Online Dictionary, the word segregation means a “cause or force the separation of (as from the rest of society).” American society has for decades segregated African-Americans from their White counterparts. Even today, with equal rights for all, many people of color feel segregated in their daily lives. However, today’s segregation does not compare to the 1930’s America. For instance, the laws in the 1930’s made African-Americans feel the weight of segregation in their daily lives and education.

Throughout Stephen Steinberg’s book the Ethnic Myth, multiple examples of how different ethnicities achieved economic ability and how others did not is discussed. He analysis a variety of different immigrant groups and how more than their cultural values played into whether or not they were successful in America. The following information in this paper will provide an example using black Americans as part of the “culture-of-poverty”.

Many Americans wonder why once-boomtowns like Chicago and Detroit have deteriorated into little more than ghetto villages surrounded by skyscrapers. The answer may be found in patterns from mid-20th-century urban segregation. Starting around the turn of the 1950’s, segregation laws intensified between whites and blacks, as portrayed in Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, named after the final line in one of Langston Hughes’ most famous poems. This created an idea of “white flight,” as white, middle-class citizens left urban areas out of fear that the presence of minorities would devalue their neighborhood land. In Hansberry’s story, the black, lower-class Younger family compares to the pattern of white flight observed in the mid-20th century by illustrating the xenophobia of whites, the occasional sleaziness of realtors, and the boldness of the minority groups during this period.

Gentrification is the process of renovating and improving a house or district so that it conforms to middle-class taste. Real Estate investors usually take low-income places that they feel have a chance to prosper economically, and turn them into areas that attract the middle and upper class workers. In doing so they feel like the low-income areas will be safer and more appealing, attracting more people to visit and live there. An improvement to a poor district sounds beautiful, but is gentrification as great as it’s sought out to be? Many residents have their doubts about gentrification due to the idea that the costs of their living will go up and they will be driven out of their neighborhoods. Gentrification is nothing to fear and should

Americans will. Institutional racism is a type of racism expressed by institutions, or social groups.

After recent protests in Baltimore, Badger (2016) explores the nature of policies set in the early 1900’s that have shaped the city of Baltimore, and that continue to have an effect on their quality of life. Actions such as redlining and urban renewal have perpetuated poverty and segregation in the same neighborhoods today as 75 year ago. This article calls attention to the effect of system-wide race discrimination in Baltimore, and how policies create a cyclical link between race and disadvantage in communities.

They argue that institutional racism in the housing market enacted by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), private loan and real estate institutions and actors, and white residents effectively and permanently isolated African Americans. Institutionalized racist practices of the housing market such as redlining and steering, coupled with white flight and structural disinvestment in African American neighborhoods, effectively isolated African Americans and further contributed to the creation of black ghettos. Thus, residential segregation concentrates poverty, erodes institutional and economic support, and ultimately causes its residents to normalize their problematic social environment of high levels of joblessness, teenage pregnancy, drugs, and violence. If the segregation of African Americans were to be resolved by their economic achievement and class mobility, middle-class African Americans should be able to enter white neighborhoods of comparable income levels. However, as Massey and Denton show, once the threshold of “too many black families” is crossed, white flight occurs and poorer black families move into the neighborhood, creating (and expanding) racially segregated

For centuries people of African descent have suffered of inhumane treatment, discrimination, racism, and segregation. Although in the United States, and in other countries, mistreatment and marginalization towards African descendants has stopped, the racism and discriminations has not. Unfortunately, there have been events proving such statement and it is upsetting to know that after all the decades of fighting for equality this is still an issue for blacks, especially for African-Americans living in our country.

“Overall, the percentage of black residents in Kansas City — which rose from 17.5 percent in 1960 to 31 percent in 2000 — has now dropped to 29 percent” (As Whites Flock to Kansas City, Blacks Pick the Suburbs 1). Segregation in Kansas City has been a problem for decades. One of the biggest problems in the 1940’s-1960’s is segregation in neighborhoods. This is one of the biggest concerns because it concerns where people eat, go to school, go to work, and many other aspects of their lives. African Americans were forced to live east of Paseo and all white people lived to the west of it. “ Many African-Americans worked and lived in the West Bottoms, but the second industrial revolution

Racial inequality has plagued our society for centuries and has been described as a “black eye” on American history. It wasn’t until the passing of The Civil Rights Act of 1965 that minorities were given equal protection under the law. This was a crucial step on our society’s road to reconciling this injustice. However, the effects of past racial inequality are still visible to this day, and our society still wrestles with how to solve this issue. In 1965, President Lyndon B Johnson said: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say you are free to compete with all the others, and still just believe that you have been completely fair. This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity––not legal equity but human ability––not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result” (Garrison-Wade & Lewis, 2003). That same year, President Johnson signed an executive order mandating government contractors “take affirmative action” in

The study of slavery in the southern half of the United States prior to the Civil War examines the institution in a capitalistic sense, choosing to see the punishment of slaves as unlikely due to the paternalistic relationship that allegedly existed between slaves and their masters. Recently, historiographical texts, such as River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom by Walter Johnson, have taken up the mantle of disproving this. In his introduction, Johnson describes the institution of slavery as such: "The Cotton Kingdom was built out of sun, water, and soil; animal energy, human labor, and mother wit; grain, flesh, and cotton; pain, hunger, and fatigue; blood, milk, semen, and shit." In regards to the title of his book, Johnson asserts that the importance of slavery in terms of economic history did not lie with Massachusetts, but along the Mississippi River, additionally dismantling prior historiography surrounding slavery. Serving as the major thesis of his book, Johnson convincingly and ambitiously argues that slaves labored, resisted, and reproduced in the Mississippi Valley Region, and it was the response by southerners to material limitations, such as land degradation, in this region that slaveholders increasingly projected their power onto

Due to unfortunate circumstances, the great injustice of slavery makes up a significant portion of America’s History. In addition following the Civil War,that legacy was expressed through the Jim Crow Laws,which promoted segregation. These new laws

Introduction: In the bible, the promise land has been depicted as some sort of holy paradise. A sanctuary for the suffering and enslaved.  A place of happiness and tranquility. The home to the heavy hearts and burdens. Unfortunately, no one has gone to the “promise land” and came back to earth to tell his tale, however, this sort of heaven has been  personified into what Americans’ call north and west. These two regions of land bred opportunity and freedom. Citizens and immigrants gravitated toward these city hubs all searching for their promise land but, at what cost? In the reading, Manchild in the Promise Land by Claude Brown, it highlighted the African American experience during migration and the societal,economic effects it had upon the lives of these people. The

He talks about how cities were seen as ‘dirty’ and infested with homeless people, drug addicts, panhandlers, and porn shops everywhere, while the suburbs were seen as a ‘clean’ and orderly place to settle down and raise a family, particularly referring to the ‘white-flight’ that occurred in the 1970s and 80s. Hayes discusses how the migration of black people out of the South turned America’s cities into places of ‘concentrated blackness.’ “Federal policy facilitated both the construction of the ‘ghetto,’ large areas of black residents and disinvestment, and white flight to the suburbs, abetted by subsidized mortgages and racially discriminatory lending guidelines.” (Hayes, 2017, p. 40) Because of institutional racism and classism, the cities became concentrated areas for the Colony, and the suburbs became a place of escape and solace for the

"When did race become so consequential for where people lived? Research on the 1930s and 1940s makes clear that there was class variation within the ghetto at that time, but that both middle class and working-class blacks were unable to escape its grasp … entrapment was a new development, and that previously ‘well-to-do African Americans’ had been more able to find housing commensurate with their social status” (Logan, Zhang & Shertzer, 2015, p. 9)