A Black President Doesn't Mean Racism Is Gone in America
Tuesday 21 April 2009
by: Peter Phillips, t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Racial inequality remains problematic in the US. People of color continue to experience disproportionately high rates of poverty, unemployment, police profiling, repressive incarceration and school segregation.
According to a new civil rights report, "Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge," by Gary Orfield, schools in the US 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. Over fifty years after the US Supreme Court case: Brown vs. Board of Education, schools remain separate and not equal. Orfield's study shows that public schools in the Western states, including California, suffer from the most severe segregation in the US, rather than schools in the Southern states 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 in qualified teachers and curriculum. Unequal education leads to 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 troubled economy.
Lees verder: http://www.truthout.org/042109B
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