Reply #79: Unequal Perspectives on Racial Equality

[Brewman_Jax]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/23/AR2008032301417_pf.html

Excerpt from the article: Social psychologists Philip Mazzocco and Mahzarin Banaji once asked white volunteers how much money would cover the "costs" of being born black instead of white. The volunteers guessed that about $5,000 ought to cover the lifetime disadvantages of being an average black person rather than an average white person, in the United States. By contrast, when asked how much they wanted to go without television, the volunteers demanded a million dollars.

Mazzocco and Banaji were taken aback: The average black person in America is 447 percent more likely to be imprisoned than the average white person, and 521 percent more likely to be murdered. Blacks earn 60 cents to the dollar compared with whites who have the same education levels and marital status. The black poverty rate is nearly twice the white poverty rate. Blacks tend to die five years earlier than whites; the infant mortality rate among black babies is nearly 1 1/2 times the rate among white babies. And because of long-standing patterns of inheritance, blacks and whites begin life with substantial disparities in family wealth.

"The point we were making is, whatever the cost of being black might be, whites are vastly underestimating it," said Mazzocco, of Ohio State University at Mansfield. "You throw in the 5-to-1 wealth gap . . . if you wanted to put a dollar-and-cents value on the difference, you would come up with a number much larger than $5,000."

The unusual experiment is one of dozens that have found that whites tend to have a relatively rosy impression of what it means to be a black person in America. Whites are more than twice as likely as blacks to believe that the position of African Americans has improved a great deal. Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to believe that conditions for African Americans are growing worse.

This follows the same reasoning Tim Wise found in his article "Why Whites Think That Blacks Have No Problems" www.alternet.org/story/11192. This goes back to the basic premise that racism, to white people, is a personal problem at the individual level, not a social problem. Most have no concept of the systemic and institution racism that actually exists, regardless of the reports and studies. Add to that the mythos of the USA as land of opportunity for all and the ignorance of history, and that leads to the incredible ignorance and delusion most white people have about race.