Four lectures on Saturday focused on the inequality in U.S. institutions and government as part of the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice's workshop series.
In a talk titled "Has the Voting Rights Act Worked? Confronting the Legacy of Political Discrimination," Linda Williams, associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, addressed the concept of a "Third World America" where minorities, particularly blacks, are denied their proper roles as citizens. Williams relayed what she called "a hook drawn from the sin of New Orleans": an interview she had seen in the news after Hurricane Katrina in which a reporter thanked a middle-aged black woman he had been interviewing for her account and referred to her as a "refugee." The woman responded, "I am not a refugee. I'm an American."
Williams further discussed these "racialized" grounds of citizenship with reference to the Voting Rights Act, some provisions of which are scheduled to expire in 2007. The act, originally signed in 1965, paved the way to the polls for blacks and other minorities and facilitated an increase of minority elected officials in the United States. Having broken through what Williams called a "wall of whiteness," the Voting Rights Act once again stands at risk of fading into the backburner of American politics, she said. (Most of the act's provisions are permanent, according to the Department of Justice.)
Amanda Lewis '92, associate professor of African-American studies and sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, discussed the gaps in education between black and white students. In her research in Detroit and California, Lewis found a four-year educational gap between black and white students of the same age. She attributed this to the segregation of public schools and unequal school funding. "Whiteness is embodied social power," Lewis said. "Several components of white supremacy are incorporated into schools."
According to Lewis, in general, schools favor white-related interests and there exists a "culture of school" conducive to teaching white students.
The gap in education between black and white students reflects economic gaps as well, Lewis said. In schools with a majority of black and Latino students, 82 percent of the students come from families recognized as poor; in predominantly white schools, the number is only 6 percent.
In a lecture titled "The Dynamics of Racial Inequality," Professor of Economics Glenn Loury discussed the nation's "failure to recognize social responsibility." Loury said that the infant mortality rate of blacks in the United States is higher than in some developing countries. One-third of black children live in poverty while one-sixth of white children do.
"The wheel is turning," Loury said. "People are recognizing the failure at the core of our institution." But this does not necessarily signify change, Loury said. "We can still sleep at night without a hint of irony," he said, adding, "I get a feeling of desperation when I think about the slipping away of the race issue."
Tyrone Forman, assistant professor of sociology at UIC, in his lecture on "Race, Apathy, and Hurricane Katrina," showed Wolf Blitzer's report on the hurricane, in which Blitzer called the survivors "so poor and so black." Blitzer's blunt phrasing poses the pressing question of whether the government would have responded quicker and more efficiently had the majority of those in need been white, Forman said.
In a survey after the hurricane, 66 percent of blacks believed that the response would have been quicker had those in need been white, compared to only 26 percent of whites who believed the same, Forman said, citing a poll by the Pew Center for the People and the Press conducted in early September.
Forman discussed larger concepts of "colorblind racism" and "sanctioned ignorance" in which racial apathy is employed to ignore controversial issues over race and prejudice. "It is a contemporary form of subtle prejudice," Forman said. The trend is spreading throughout the country, according to Forman. People are more inclined to avoid the issue of race than they are to acknowledge its presence in the nation's political, economic and educational forums, he said.
"It is not just what you do, but what you do not do," Forman said.
