Kai Wright looks at the Center for American Progress' new report on how the recession is affecting people of color and points to this relevant excerpt:
African Americans and Hispanics have lost more economic ground and done so more quickly than their white counterparts from the end of 2007 to the summer of 2009, and the economic fortunes of minorities have fallen from lower levels than those of whites to begin with. This means that the gap in the economic security between minorities and whites is widening in this recession, as it has in previous ones.[...]
The data show that there are apparent structural problems such as labor market segmentation, credit market steering, and discrimination in the U.S. economy and particularly in the labor market that present an unlevel playing field for minorities. Policymakers need to pay closer attention to these problems.
As Wright notes, there's a bizarre hunt for villains when it comes to racism that often misses the point--that nominally "color blind" public policy often results in outcomes that are indistinguishable from those that might arise from past policies that were deliberately structured to harm people of color. Wright also points out that changing policy to mitigate such outcomes is the kind of thing the right likes to demonize:
Those are the “concrete policy steps” that Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh have said add up to Obama’s secret “reparations” plan. Whether or not these people are racist is beside the point; they are working to build a racist world. That’s the debate, and we cannot allow them to hide it behind coded language about the size and nature of government.
There is frankly, something to this. Leaving aside the fact that the South developed its allergy to "big government" around the time that black people started to be included in the social safety net, last week UNC Chapel Hill Professor Marc J. Hetherington and Vanderbilt Professor Jonathan D. Weiler did a study on opposition to health reform with racial resentment and concluded the following (via Yglesias):
As evidence of the link between health care and racial attitudes, we analyzed survey data gathered in late 2008. The survey asked people whether they favored a government run health insurance plan, a system like we have now, or something in between. It also asked four questions about how people feel about blacks.Conservatives often argue that they are looking for "equality of opportunity" rather than "equality of outcome." But I'm not really sure how one measures the former by completely ignoring the latter. What's weird is that I think one of the central conservative insights is how injustice perpetuated by government operates under its own inertia, and can be difficult to dismantle after the fact. But there's an incredibly large part of the conservative movement devoted to denying that there are any structural problems whatsoever that contribute to ongoing racial inequality.Taken together the four items form a measure of what scholars call racial resentment. We find an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.
Not all of the solutions are "big government" solutions either--reforming our system of corrections is something that's drawn support from libertarians and liberals alike. But I'd say many in the mainstream right come down on the side of denying racial inequality is an issue worth addressing at all.
-- A. Serwer
