March 03, 2015

Racism Hidden in Plain View

Robert Kuttner Co-founder and co-editor,
'The American Prospect
10/25/2015 10:07 pm ET

One of the odd things about our era is that 50 years after the great civil rights era, ugly realities that the black community knows all too intimately are finally being recognized by the broader society. The question is whether constructive change will result.

The Sunday New York Times , based on its own exhaustive study of tens of thousands of traffic stops, reports that blacks are far more likely to be stopped, then arrested and sometimes brutalized, for minor traffic infractions than whites. The piece, focusing on the relatively moderate city of Greensboro, N.C., provides more detail than has ever been reported in a major press account. This was no surprise to the black community, which lives these realities daily.

Since Ferguson, the press has been paying more attention to the killings of young black men by police. The pattern is not new; only the intensified press coverage is.

The media has also been shining a belated spotlight on the fact that people of color are far more likely to be jailed for minor offenses for which whites generally are released in their own recognizance, or allowed to make modest bails.

We are also getting far more coverage of the racial disparities in who gets sentenced to prison for what crimes and for how long. This wasn't really "news" either. It just didn't get the attention it deserved.

To add insult to injury, it's shocking (and not entirely surprising) that as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, voting rights of African-Americans are being taken away by rightwing state governments, using the very techniques that the 1965 Act prohibited -- techniques that were legalized after the fact by a partisan Supreme Court.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-kuttner/racism-hidden-in-plain-vi_b_8386536.html