Equality:

Racism

America remains burdened by a racial chasm. The life chances and opportunities of people of color in the United States are limited as compared to whites. The legacy of historic discrimination - de jure and de facto - continues to weigh on the present; and current day discrimination persists throughout American life - in access to healthcare, educational services, employment opportunities, wage levels, capital, the criminal justice system, and media employment.

There is no more poignant indicator of America’s failure to remedy past and eliminate present discrimination than the ongoing racial differentials in infant and child health. The neonatal death rate among births to black women was 14.5 per thousand in 1995; for births among white women, the rate was 6.3. Babies of black women are two-and-a-half times more likely to die in their first year than babies born to white women. Nearly half of all African American and Latino children live in families with incomes less than 125 percent of the poverty level; the rate for white children is 24 percent.

These statistics - among the most telling of economic indicators, far more relevant in revealing the state of the nation’s health than the latest uptick or downturn in the Dow or Nasdaq, for example - are a national scandal. That they are not regularly reported is a distinct national scandal.

Many of the burdens imposed on people of color in the United States are those piled on working people, regardless of race. If the richest nation in the history of the world chose, as it could do, to eliminate poverty; if we set aside the concerns of insurance companies and installed a functioning national healthcare system that assured coverage and access to quality care for all; if all employers were required to pay a living wage to all of their workers; if all workers, including agricultural workers, were guaranteed the right to unionize without facing employer threats or coercion; if we required banks to make affordable checking accounts and other lifeline financial services available to all; if we acted to stop electricity deregulation from enabling “electricity redlining,” with inferior service delivered to lower-income consumers; if the regulatory authorities cracked down on consumer fraud that steals billions each year from working people, and banned the mortgage scams and legal loan-sharking that are rampant in poor communities; if we fostered and supported community development credit unions to meet the lending, saving and development needs of lower-income neighborhoods and others; if we invested in a mass transit system that connected all communities and enabled people to travel efficiently without cars; if we ended the failed War on Drugs, began treating drug addiction as a health problem rather than a criminal problem, and eliminated the extreme mandatory sentences for drug possession and minor drug-related crimes; if we installed community policing programs around the country; if we guaranteed adequate childcare to all; if we expanded Social Security to provide more income to the widows and widowers - then we would in the process redress many of the racial divides that now plague the nation.

But even with these race-blind policies, we would need to do more, and directly address persistent racism in America. We must also crack down on the practice of redlining - racially discriminatory lending practices that condemn minority neighborhoods to accelerating decay - and force banks and financial institutions to make credit, insurance and other financial services available in all communities. We must support affirmative action. We must adopt a new set of policies to ensure respect for Native American rights, interests and sovereignty and to return wealth stolen from Native Americans. We must ensure that predominantly minority school districts receive funding equal to white districts. We must expand health services to put an immediate end to the race-based discrimination which – as documented by the Department of Health and Human Services – consigns people of color to inferior diagnoses and treatments for diseases and ailments including pneumonia, HIV/AIDS, mini-strokes and heart attacks. We must end pervasive discrimination in the criminal justice system.