1. The document summarizes the current situation of race in America across several areas including education, employment, housing, criminal justice, and economic outcomes. 2. While some progress has been made in dismantling legal segregation and increasing cultural acceptance, significant economic disadvantages for racial minorities persist in terms of poverty, income, and wealth. 3. Active discrimination also continues in areas like housing, employment, criminal justice system, and education funding between school districts. Racial disparities remain across incarceration rates, arrests for drug possession, and sentencing.

1. Lectures 15 & 16
October 26 & 28, 2010
Race in America

2. III. Current Situation of
Race in America

3. III. Current Situation
1. Historic Achievement:
Dismantling of the machinery of legal racial
segregation and oppression and erosion of cultural
supports for racism.
Progress is real:
• African-Americans in ads and on TV
• Acceptability of inter-racial marriage
• Emergence of a vibrant black middle class
• Positive images are common
• Political visibility: Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice,
Barak Obama

4. Education level completion rates by race, 1957-2008
High School
4-year College

5. MEN WOMEN
Managers Professional & Managers Professional &
technical technical
Black
White Racial differences in managerial,
professional and technical occupational
distributions, 1950 and 2000

6. III. Current Situation
1. Continuing realities of significant economic
disadvantage for racial minorities
• Stagnation of advances
• Household Poverty
• Poverty wages
• Unemployment
• Lack of wealth

7. Black median family income as a percentage
of white median family income

8. Ratio of Black to White Average Wealth

9. Under 6 years
Under 18 years

12. III. Current Situation
3. Continuing realities of active discrimination
• Petty harassment: taxis, surveillance in stores, etc.
• Housing
• Employment: the problem of “statistical discrimination”
• Criminal justice system: prison sentencing
• Lending
• Education: Central city schools

13. III. Current Situation: Housing
Data are from a “housing audit” study in which black and white
couples acted as “testers” seeking rentals and home purchases.

14. III. Current Situation: employment
“Statistical discrimination”:
A situation in which an employer makes a hiring decision
about an individual on the basis of beliefs about the average
characteristics of a social category rather than the
characteristics of the specific individual. Why? Because it is
less costly to do so, not because of an dislike of people in that
category.
Example:
Employers believe that on average a young black man will
be a less reliable employee than a young white man with
the same formal qualifications, and since it is difficult to
get reliable information about individual reliability, the
employer will rely on presumed group traits to make the
choice.

15. III. Current Situation: employment
Rates of “call backs” in Employment discrimination audit study
45%
40%
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
Whites with Whites with Blacks Blacks with
no prison prison without prison
record record prison record
record
Data from Devah Pager Sociology dissertation, 2002

16. III. Current Situation: education
Spending per pupil in rich suburbs and cities, 2006-7 school year

17. III. Current Situation: criminal justice
Incarceration rates by race, 2005

18. III. Current Situation: criminal justice

19. III. Current Situation: criminal justice
Imbalance in Arrests
Marijuana possession arrest
rates in some of California’s
largest cities 2006-08
Source: “Smoke and Horrors”,
op-ed by Charles M. Blow in
New York Times, October 22,
2010
Based on research by Harry Levine and Jon Gettman,
“Targeting Blacks for Marijuana: possession arrests
of African Americans in California, 2004-08”, (Drug
Policy Alliance, LA: June, 2010)

20. III. Current Situation: criminal justice

21. III. Current Situation: criminal justice

22. Numbers of Blacks,
Latinos and Whites
Arrested for Marijuana
Possession in New York
City in Two Decades
Source: Harry Levine,
“Marijuana Arrest
Crusade..continues” , NYCLU,
September 2009