Many Americans today believe that racism and racial inequality are a thing of the past in the United States. Unfortunately, this is not so. The African American population has been disadvantaged economically and socially from the moment they were brought to what is now the United States. Although there was a war fought to destroy the slavery that defined the lives of African Americans in the U.S., things have never truly been completely fixed, and African Americans are still not born unto an equal playing field as white Americans. The Civil War seemingly should have put an end to this. The South fought and lost defending their slavery dependent economy and society, and the 1865 signing of the Thirteenth Amendment made slavery illegal in the United States. However, the battle would rage on, and continues to this day. Over the past 150 years since the war was fought, African Americans have continued to face hardships and disadvantages due to racial injustices in our country. The Thirteenth Amendment put an end to slavery, except in the case of punishment for a crime. In the years after reconstruction, many whites in the South were eager to move back to the slavery fueled economy, and quickly established the Jim Crow laws, which became a powerful force of racial oppression. African Americans were incarcerated for ridiculous “crimes”, and basically placed back into slavery as punishment. They were once again bought and sold as property for hard labor in coal mines and steel plants. These laws were used to strip black Americans of their rights from the time Reconstruction ended in the South until the Civil Rights Movement took place in the 1960s.
Aside from the obvious troubles that African Americans faced in the post-Civil War South, discrimination began to come from the Federal Government in the 1930s and ‘40s in the form of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, which featured many pieces of legislation that disadvantaged blacks. The National Housing Act of 1934 created the Federal Housing Administration, which insured loans for housing. The FHA had policies that specifically withheld blacks from securing mortgages on suburban housing, while allowing whites to move into suburban homes at very low monthly cost. This kept blacks from moving into white neighborhoods, and was clearly an act of segregation. The FHA established a standard of segregation and discrimination in lending to African Americans. The Wagner Act of 1935 created labor union monopolies, which allowed for exclusion of those outside of the union (blacks) from work. Most of the unions discriminated against blacks, so the jobs would not go to black workers. Also a part of the New Deal was the Social Security Act of 1935, which specifically excluded farm workers and domestic workers from receiving insurance for unemployment or old age. These jobs were both heavily occupied by African American workers, so this can be seen as clear government legislative discrimination. The idea that the government could pass these into law baffles me. Learning about this obvious institutional racism which occurred in the last 100 years is kind of eye-opening. Before this section on racial inequality, I already had a strong sense of the disadvantages African Americans have faced in America’s history and still face today, but I never imagined this kind of discrimination to have come from such a well renowned administration such as FDR’s was.
The most alarming fact that was brought up in this section was the fact that the average family income of black families has stayed between 54-63% of the average income of white families from 1965 to 2015. This statistic especially surprised me because it’s a topic that I’ve almost never heard talked about when income inequality is discussed, as much of the focus is on men and women. This situation is a result of the dark history of discrimination as well as several more modern factors which started to appear in the 1970s.. After the Civil Rights Movement, blacks finally had an opportunity to enter the blue-collar workforce. But just as soon as the opportunity arose, it was gone. Manufacturing jobs have been on a steep decline since the end of the 1960s, and they certainly wouldn’t give the scarce amount of jobs to a black man before a white man. Entering these types of jobs would have established an African American presence in the workforce, and promoted socioeconomic mobility in the black community. Additionally, job discrimination took place frequently, where white job networks would exclude African Americans workers from employment. In fact, studies show that job discrimination is still happening to this day. David Padulla’s 2013 study shows that call back rates for white male applicants are much higher than those for black male applicants of similar skill, with similar results when comparing women of each race. Even further, a 2003 study showed that white job applicants with a criminal record were more likely to get a call back than black male applicants with no criminal record. All of this is a bit unbelievable when first learning of it, but makes more sense when presented with the other information that came in the section. It seems impossible to me that some can deny that African Americans face a harder journey in achieving socioeconomic success than the average white American. I was aware of the general problems and history of discrimination in this country towards blacks, but this section introduced me to a large amount of new information that secure my opinions on the topic even further