[zasz]

Systematic exclusion of black people from social programs, like the GI Bill and Social Security, and redlining, which prevented black Americans from building up wealth through homeownership the way white Americans were. "The Color of Law" is a good book on redlining.

To expand on the bit about Social Security, farmworkers were excluded, since farmworkers tend to be not white. It was a nice sneaky way to be racist without coming out and doing so explicitly.

[twybriny]

One of the things that confuses me quite a bit is the focus on laws that expired or have been abrogated 50-60-70-150 years ago and make it as if everything wrong with contemporary American society is caused directly by such laws and nothing else.

* GI Bill: adopted in 1944, expired in 1956.

* Social Security: adopted in 1935, unclear what the impacts were at the time. Unclear what the impacts are today.

* Redlining: created in 1934, illegal since 1977.

As an immigrant that landed in US post 2000 with $1000 to my name and a tenuous F1 situation, all this sounds like ancient history. Much more stringent appear, in no particular order and not pretending to be exhaustive:

* the whole F1/H1B situation, which depresses the domestic labor market in technical jobs, especially software, but also research at large

* global competition, especially with China

* the over financialization of the economy

* the profits accumulating at the very top since the 2008 Great Recession

* the explosion of real estate market in big cities, way above what we pretend the inflation rate is

* manufacturing decline

* offshoring of entire industries to East Asia

* right now, the covid19 lockdowns which are destroying the service economy, which was supposed to be the future of jobs

* the decimation of small business America due to same covid19 lockdowns.

* specifically for the black community, the lack of academic achievement

* the rise of the gig economy and Amazon warehouse jobs

* the opioid, homelessness and suicide crisis

* the obesity crisis, and the related food deserts

Again, not a young black guy or gal. But if I'd were, there'd be 10 high priority items on my worry list before I'd get to the Civil Rights Era. As a nation we seem to have abandoned the middle and working class of all colors. The public discourse is obsessed with Instagram influencers and race histories half a century old if not older, sometimes much older.

[jwagenet]

I believe the focus on the expired laws is based on the assertion the effects of those laws are entrenched in their communities still. In SF, historical redlining is still obvious despite some gentrification in much of the southeast and the area around Van Ness north of Market. In these areas, things like smaller (cheaper) units, poorer infrastructure, and less business development perpetuate the segregation brought about in the years of redlining. Social norms further set up expectations about who should be living in certain areas, see the recent incident over a white woman challenging a black man's home ownership in Pacific Heights (rich, white neighborhood).

[agar]

I can't weigh in from personal experience, but I look at it like a marathon. One set of runners face a first half of the race with mud, crushed glass, vertical climbs, and other obstacles, while other racers had a nice tailwind and extra drink stations.

Regardless of the obstacles faced in the second half (which are still more numerous than the competition's), can't you understand why runners would still look back at that first half to explain their fatigue, anger, and feelings of injustice? Particularly when looking ahead and thinking, "Oh God, this crap /again/??"

The marathon in this example actually spans multiple generations, but even the horrible segregation of the 50's was experienced first hand by the parents of black people still in the workforce today.

Sounds like you came into the race halfway through. As an immigrant you're still facing those unfair obstacles in front of you, but just remember that you don't have the fatigue of carrying the baggage from the first half.

[asfnasubfg231]

I agree with this, but not all immigrants are the same so you are generalizing here. Some immigrants have faced genocide due to colonialism, and have not been better off (also have baggage).

What are your thoughts on that, because that's A LOT of immigrants

[Auracle]

You could also argue that the large majority of black people still alive came in to the race halfway through as well. At some point it just becomes an excuse. Constantly blaming other people is a good way to never have any self improvement.

[imtringued]

Obviously the best way to get out of a bad situation is to help yourself first. The hardest part of this problem cannot be solved by outsiders but outsiders can certainly prevent progress if they put their minds to it. If you are a victim of discrimination then you must demonstrate through your own power that you you can succeed despite the discrimination. If you depend on help from others then you may not be taken seriously and you might never learn to help yourself.

[malandrew]

What you’re describing is known as the soft bigotry of low expectations and the anti racism crowd is perpetuating this form of systemic racism:

https://1776unites.com/featured-essays/the-1619-project-perp...

[new2628]

This analogy would work if it weren't for the immigrants who arrive with no connections and resources, and successfully make it through hardships within one or two generations.

A more apt analogy may be a marathon where there are bystanders who latch on to half of the runners and keep telling them, "you cannot make it, you need us to help you, the race is unfair".

[imtringued]

Starting from scratch is easier than starting halfway through the race with your shoe laces tied together.

[taurath]

Immigrants tend to have a high amount of education or resources relative to the societies they come from. Those immigrants come with their own sets of biases. Social infrastructure for, say, Indian people moving to Bellevue, WA in terms of social connections and wealth is better than Black american's have just ever had.

[x86_64Ubuntu]

You make it sound like when those programs and patterns were ended, that the black community recovered overnight. Your post also acts as if the driving ideas of racism that lead to blacks being excluded from or vulnerable to the things you listed ended overnight also. And your post mentions how racism made the social landscape far more adversarial to blacks with things such as the War On Drugs used to target the black community.

Honestly to make such a post, one would have disregard network effects and intergenerational wealth transfer to a malicious level.

[pbhjpbhj]

I don't think you're being fair nsporillo (the GP commenter) asked what societal structures were [currently] a specific hindrance based on race. Noting that it appeared that the entire legal structure of society was the target.

In response someone posted about a load of laws, which it turns out are all historic.

They didn't say intergenerational wealth transfer (which is a poor-person issue not a race issue per se - though it has a non-representative racial profile for sure).

I'm not sure what you're suggesting with "network effects", presumably people in established positions of power can maintain a discriminatory hold on those allowed to join the group?

[imtringued]

Maybe you don't understand it because its so obvious to you but your "solution" basically involves all black people becoming migrants (at least within the borders of the US) and starting from scratch again. Now lets assume this is the perfect solution. Why would this method be so effective? What leaves black people and the communities they live in in such a bad condition that they have to get away from it? It takes dedication and effort over multiple decades to create a long lasting bad environment via bad political policies. By that same logic it will take a long time to recover from it if there is no dedication and effort put into recovery. Sure, migration is a quick way out for an individual but it's not a solution that scales to an entire population.

[pbhjpbhj]

All black people in USA? Or just poor people who haven't been lucky enough to break away from past injustices? Seems like rich and powerful people who are black are doing just fine??

Lots of people in the middle income brackets seem no worse off than other people too.

[socialdemocrat]

I agree that poverty and inequality in general is the real problem. But one must be able to point out that the shitty situations African-Americans are in today is the result of a whole bunch of dominos that fell over and if you follow them backwards they lead back to red lining, slavery etc.

Everybody is a product of the past. Hell, Anglo-Saxon’s are still worse off then Normans in the UK 1000 year after William the Conqueror.

There are people who never lived under communism who have to deal with the stain and prejudice of being an Ossi in modern Germany.

[dash2]

Have you got a cite for that Anglo-Saxon claim? It sounds like Greg Clark, but I think his finding was a bit less black-and-white (sorry) than that.

[zasz]

> * the obesity crisis, and the related food deserts > * specifically for the black community, the lack of academic achievement

Those are both related to a history of redlining. A huge factor in the wealth gap is due a lack of home ownership. Even now, real estate agents steer black customers away from the neighborhoods with good schools: https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/real-estate-agents-...

If someone's grandparents were forced to live in shitty housing and were never able to own their own home, that puts the next couple generations at a disadvantage. Most people who are able to afford a down payment on a home get financial assistance from their families. If one generation cannot help with that down payment, the next one sure as hell won't.

That point about the black academic gap is quite silly, because you're either ignoring or unaware of the fact that black students are punished more than white students for similar infractions in school: https://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/at-school-it...

I could go on all day finding more examples of other discrepancies that are current.

> As an immigrant that landed in US post 2000 with $1000 to my name and a tenuous F1 situation, all this sounds like ancient history.

Yes, my family did that too. However, we are not black, and as a result, we didn't have to put up with banks refusing to give us a mortgage when we wanted to move to a wealthy suburb that had excellent public schools.

You came in on a student visa? That means you had a certain amount of social capital to rely on in your home country. How many people in your original country were too poor to apply for even an F1 visa and shoot for a richer life in America? Your experience is not remotely analogous to the continuing problems of racial discrimination faced by black Americans. You have absolutely not faced the same problems with building up intergenerational social capital that they have. My family made it out of China, but millions of Chinese peasants in the rural countryside, even if they are equally talented and hardworking as my family, will never have the chance. They're too far behind. That's why I chose to focus on the historical legislation. You may think that it doesn't matter, black people should've pulled themselves up by their bootstraps by now, but it doesn't matter if they lack the same headstart.

[brentis]

Well said. For those who didn't net out what he enumerated, there is a long list of things that will bring personal, family, and community suffering long before inequality on a race basis.

[hef19898]

If that list so long, do you mind sharing it?

[bsanr2]

>As an immigrant that landed in US post 2000 with $1000 to my name and a tenuous F1 situation, all this sounds like ancient history.

Well, it's not. In living memory:

>The wealth of black Americans was halved by the 2008 financial crisis, in part because of predatory lending practices which specifically targeted them by race and misrepresented their creditworthiness

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2015/01/24/t...

>A million black farming families essentially had their wealth-producing land stolen from them: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/this-la...

https://www.revealnews.org/episodes/losing-ground/

>Multiple black activists pushing for more advantageous policy have been imprisoned and assassinated, with allegedly some incidents as recent as the last few years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Martin_Luth....

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hampton

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOVE#1985_bombing

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/puzzling-number-men-tie...

>Black students have become subject to levels of segregation - and associated disparities in educational quality - at levels rivalling those of pre-Brown v Board America

https://www.propublica.org/article/segregation-now-full-text

https://projects.propublica.org/miseducation

>Because many black workers were exempt from the initial impementation of Social Security and the GI Bill, their children (Silent Gen and Baby Boomers, currently in the process of passing on their inheritances) and grandchildren (Gen X and Millennials) are suffering the consequences in lost wealth-building opportunities

>Countless black Americans have suffered from poor healthcare based on apathy and stereotypes

https://features.propublica.org/diabetes-amputations/black-a...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/20/black-american...

https://www.heart.org/en/news/2019/02/20/why-are-black-women...

>Black Americans have watched a completely different and profoundly more compassionate response to the white people affected by the opioid epidemic than they experienced in the crack/cocaine epidemic

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/crack-h...

https://thewitnessbcc.com/crack-epidemic-opioid-crisis-race-...

>Marijuana, long a a drug whose sale and use was the pretext for the overpolicing of black communities, and which provided off-the-record income for many marginalized from the mainstream economy, was legalized in several states, under schemes that made sure that the overwhelming majority of those who profited were white.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/02/22/marijuana-...

https://qz.com/1194143/even-after-legalization-black-america...

https://psmag.com/economics/the-green-rush-is-too-white-hood...

>Historical atrocities were buried until after those afflicted were unable to see justice in their lifetimes

https://tulsa.okstate.edu/news/shedding-light-local-history-...

And, of course, bare-naked discrimination exists across aspects of American life, including employment, compensation, educational opportunity, freedom of movement, criminal justice, real estate, and on and on and on. When these and many more injustices were not directly impactful, they served as poignant examples of the extreme apathy, if not antipathy, American society has had for black Americans. On top of it all, black Americans still live under the specter of police departments nationwide, which have been allegedly infiltrated by white supremacist organizations, and which assuredly indoctrinate officers with racist training and policy, and root out anti-racist individuals.

I'll leave you with

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/05/29/...

a response to Ta-Nehisi Coates' seminal work, The Case For Reparations (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...), which reopened the intellectual debate on racial justice with a focus on the subject above: racial injustice affecting living black Americans, however rooted it may be in the events of 50-60-70-150 years ago.

[phaus]

>Black Americans have watched a completely different and profoundly more compassionate response to the white people affected by the opioid epidemic than they experienced in the crack/cocaine epidemic

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/crack-h....

https://thewitnessbcc.com/crack-epidemic-opioid-crisis-race-....

Great post and you brought up a few things I hadn't considered. Just curious about this one though. America in general has gradually shifted towards a view that drug addicts are sick people that need help. The shift was already taking place before opioids and methamphetamine addiction reached epidemic levels. How much of an impact do you think systemic racism had on the response to the opioid epidemic and how much can just be attributed to the fact that we have gotten smarter about drug addiction in general?

I'm not super educated on the opioid epidemic, but is there evidence that even now the resources allocated for a response are being distributed unfairly?

[taurath]

> How much of an impact do you think systemic racism had on the response to the opioid epidemic and how much can just be attributed to the fact that we have gotten smarter about drug addiction in general?

Most of society now empathizes with drug addiction because its hit white society a lot and the race of users can't be used as a political scapegoat. As long as you're white, the richer you are, the less likely you are to go to jail for it. Rehab is for rich people.

We haven't gotten smarter about drug addiction in general, which is why we have the largest prison population in the world.

> is there evidence that even now the resources allocated for a response are being distributed unfairly?

Given a huge percentage of the "response" is police and prisons, and police and prisons dramatically discriminate against people by race, yes.

[phaus]

>We haven't gotten smarter about drug addiction in general, which is why we have the largest prison population in the world.

Legalization and decriminalization of Marijuana is still a relatively recent phenomenon. It seems to me like it will eventually get legalized by the federal government. If that happens, wouldn't we expect this to get better? The right thing to do would be to release everyone that was in jailed on marijuana related charges as long as they weren't also convicted of something more serious (like violence). Maybe I'm being too optimistic.

I think a lot of Americans realize how insane it is that we jail more people than any other country. While progress is always slow, it seems like we're hearing more politicians talk about doing something about it.

[taurath]

While its true drugs won the war on drugs, that doesn't mean the racist and political underpinnings of keeping people locked up for nonviolent drug offences go away overnight. Actual real police reform and breaking the prison-industrial complex is a big goal of the current protests, but once again its conservatives with their decades of fear who are holding up progress.

[pbhjpbhj]

>As long as you're white, the richer you are, the less likely you are to go to jail for it. Rehab is for rich people. //

Any sources to support this, that equally wealthy people go to jail in higher proportions - for the same [drug] crime - if they're non-white?

[taurath]

I couldn't find one for drugs specifically, but this link is a decent one:

https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2018/02/the-race-g...

The probability of being jailed for more than a year is over 20% for the poorest 20% of Blacks, and just over 10% for the poorest 20% of whites.

[jimbokun]

> America in general has gradually shifted towards a view that drug addicts are sick people that need help.

Just a coincidence that this shift happened as more white people started suffering from such addictions?

[catalogia]

It probably has more to do with the internet facilitating the dissemination of information that ran counter to the governments' anti-drug propaganda.

[taurath]

There seems to be a concerted effort on HN to downvote any non right-wing viewpoints, especially quality posts like this one.

[3nob9sh3nsOwn]

Adolph Reed has written on the Social Security exclusions that you're referencing, and the issue is not so clear cut: [1].

The initial iteration of Social Security excluded many types of temporary and informal labor. Although black workers were disproportionately impacted by these exclusions, the large majority (about 75%) of people who were excluded were white. One possible reason why these exclusions were in place is that getting accurate payroll figures for informal jobs is difficult. In any case, these exclusions were lifted between 1950 and 1955.

Keep in mind that Social Security was not the only New Deal program, and things like the Public Works Administration disproportionately benefited African Americans. The New Deal was extremely popular among African Americans, and is one of the major reasons why most African Americans switched over to voting for the Democratic Party. That's what makes the recent narrative that the New Deal was racist (and to blame for today's disparities) so strange.

1. https://newrepublic.com/article/155704/new-deal-wasnt-intrin...