Economic and Racial Inequality Obliterate Opportunity in America: Do We Care?
The 50th anniversary this month of the passage of the Civil Rights Act has produced some soul-searching journalism. How is it our society has made so little progress?
In an early April interview at Salon.com, Stanford University professor and education writer Linda Darling-Hammond describes the injustices in public education in the United States: “First of all, we have a dramatically unequal allocation of wealth in the society, which is getting worse…. Then we need schools that are equitably funded, with more money going to the students who have the greatest needs…And then beyond that, I think we have to be sure that the state builds a high-quality teaching force, well-prepared for all candidates… It’s a fundamental problem of the red-lining… around those schools that allowed them to become such poor places for teaching and learning. That is the real problem that has to be addressed.”
During the same week, Valerie Strauss printed in the Washington Post a column by Economic Policy Institute advocate Elaine Weiss and New York University sociologist Patrick Sharkey in which they declared: “Stuck in place. That seems the most accurate description for the circumstances in which many African-American children and their families find themselves today… When it comes to neighborhood and school inequality, the federal government has always had a short attention span. Small-scale, short-term initiatives to address urban disadvantage have come and gone, but our nation has never made a commitment to durable policies with the capacity to transform communities, schools, and the lives of families within them. As a result, neighborhood inequality has been passed down to the current generation. About two out of three African Americans who were raised in poor neighborhoods grow up and raise their own children in similarly poor neighborhoods compared to just two out of five whites… These disturbing statistics indicate that racial inequality is multi-generational. The challenges facing black children today are a continuation of the disadvantages experienced by generations of their family members. And the cumulative experience of life in the nation’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods is most severe.”
Then last Saturday’s NY Times published a disturbing and moving reflection on racial segregation by columnist Charles M. Blow: “The landmark act brought an end to legal racial segregation in public places. But now we are facing another, worsening kind of segregation Economic and Racial Inequality Obliterate Opportunity in America: Do We Care? | janresseger:
