America's evolving racism

During the Civil Rights movement, racism was blatant and obvious.

Unfortunately, a new breed of ignorance has emerged from the dark, shameful pit of insecurity from which the Ku Klux Klan once sprung. Racism has lately evolved, becoming a new breed of covert hatred.

Nowadays, the majority of white people are more than willing to decry the KKK. However, these same people will often turn a blind eye to the institutional racism that has infected our country.

Racism, you see, is more than just shouting racial slurs and charging minorities with offensive stereotypes. Racism is far more institutional in nature, far more mechanical in substance.

In 2008, Devah Pager, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, conducted a study in which he submitted job applications to hundreds of employers.

These applications were the same in every aspect.The only difference was that one application was submitted by a white man, the other by a black man.

Pager discovered the white applicant was more than twice as likely to get a callback for the job as his equally qualified black counterpart. Disturbingly, Pager also found that a white applicant with a drug-related felony listed on his application was equally or more likely than a black candidate with no criminal record to get a callback.

In 1963, blacks were 2.2 times as likely to be unemployed as whites. In 2012, that number has barely changed, with blacks being 2.1 times as likely to be unemployed.

What this new breed of covert racism feeds off most is ignorance. White Americans are uncomfortable talking about race and would rather remain ignorant.

We aren’t addressing racism properly. We tell children that color doesn’t matter and that we’re all the same. This might seem like a happy, accepting statement, but it isn’t.

This tells children that race plays absolutely no part in how people are treated. And that’s a bold-faced lie. Because race does have a large part in how you’re treated in this country. And when you tell children it doesn’t, it blinds them to the actuality of how race affects people of color.

It conforms them to believe that people aren’t discriminated against, that the unfortunate truths of society aren’t about race, but just reality.

People of color in this country are being oppressed and robbed of the opportunity that America prides itself on giving to all people.

It’s time we face up to our covert racism and treat this infection, before we’re irreparably damaged as a nation.

­— ajguenth@indiana.edu
Follow columnist Andrew Guenther on Twitter @GuentherAndrew.