Racism in America

I can remember well a trip I made through the American South in 1964. This was during the era when new laws and so forth were just beginning to ameliorate the discrimination and segregation in the South; and at the time the South and Southerners were not very willing to change their very long standing ways.

Some of the things I saw: In a small town in Arkansas, just across the border from Missouri, the local movie theater required blacks to sit in the balcony. And when visiting the Black section of the town I saw that it had dirt streets. In Memphis, a big city, a restaurant had a sign over one door, "Colored Entrance."

It's certain things have changed, but one might ask, "How much?" Today African Americans can be doctors, lawyers, college professors. But I have a feeling they are under-represented in these and many other professions.

Here is an interesting fact: Middle-class African American women complain that they have trouble finding suitable mates. (We will disregard the issue of whether they do or must or even should look only within their own race.) In other words, there is a relative lack of middle-class African American men.

The implication of this is that it's been easier for African American women to move up into the middle class. It's easier for African American women to get good jobs. And African American men are more likely to be effectively limited to lesser-paying jobs.

Okay, now we must wonder why. And to do that I have to talk about a subject that is unpopular and virtually never confronted. One lingering, and maybe tough, part of racism is that White people are afraid of African American men. When walking in an African American neighborhood, would anybody be afraid if approached by an African American woman? No. Not so in the case of an African American man.

I'm confident it would be extremely hard to find anyone who would admit to this. But part of a stereotypical, racist image of African American men that perhaps has still not completely gone away is that at best they are looked on as thuggy, brutal, wild. I could go on with other very negative, racist adjectives and images but even I am reluctant to do that.

But this is my explanation for the gender difference noted above: people are not afraid of African American women, but they may be of African American men. At least there is more of a certain wariness we have of African American, which holds them back in the job market.

Of course there are other sorts of evidence that the lot of African Americans in America is still not equal; but I'm going to let those things lie outside the scope of this blog posting.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Richard Stein