Tracey L. Rogers: Being Black is very bad for your health in America

Martin Luther King Jr., ravaged by white racism

Via OtherWords.org

After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, on April 4, 1968, his autopsy report revealed that at the young age of 39, he had “the heart of a 60-year-old.”

Doctors concluded that King’s heart had aged due to the stress and pressure endured throughout his 13-year civil-rights career.

A 13-year tribulation sounds more fitting. Along with the victories he won through his long career preaching while organizing marches, boycotts and sit-ins, King also suffered from severe bouts of depression, received multiple threats on his life and the safety of his family, and was repeatedly arrested.

In fact, near the end of his life, as reported in Time magazine, Dr. King “confronted the uncertainty of his moral vision. He had underestimated how deeply the belief that white people matter more than others was ingrained in the habits of American life.”

There’s a reason why novelist and activist James Baldwin said in 1961, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time,” a rage that weathers our bodies and psyches.

“It isn’t only what’s happening to you,” Baldwin explained. “It’s what’s happening all around you and all of the time in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, indifference of most white people in this country and their ignorance.”

As a Black woman and activist, I can say that my rage weathers me, too.

It can feel as subtle as the frustration I feel after receiving an e-mail from a white man accusing me of being a Marxist simply because I supported the Black Lives Matter movement (true story).

Or it can be as anguishing as the pain I feel simply thinking about Jacob Blake being shot in the back seven times at point-blank range by police in Kenosha, Wis.. Or the anger I feel about the president of the United States openly fomenting violence in the shooting’s aftermath, praising the 17-year-old white militia member who killed two protesters.

If Dr. King had the heart of a 60-year-old when he died, it’s easy to see how his fight for racial justice might have weathered him. But one might argue that its weathering began the moment he was born in the era of Jim Crow, just 64-years after the formal emancipation of enslaved people.

The all-around weathering of Black America is as big a part of our legacy as slavery, voting rights, and our commitment to freedom. It’s a weathering we experience every day, agitated by what’s been diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) passed on from generation to generation.

A few years ago, an article published in Teen Vogue explained how it was possible for Black people to inherit PTSD from our ancestors. It highlighted the “extensive research into epigenetics and the intergenerational transmission of trauma” by Dr. Rachel Yehuda, who found that “when people experience trauma, it changes their genes in a very specific and noticeable way.”

Sociologist Dr. Joy DeGruy coined the phrase “post-traumatic slave disorder” to describe the specific stress suffered by Black descendants of enslaved people, identifying the ways in which racialized trauma has had an emotional, physical, and psychological impact.

More recently, the Huffington Post reported that racial trauma increases the stress hormone cortisol in Black Americans, causing fatigue, depression and anxiety. Cities throughout the country have even issued declarations that racism is a public-health issue.

They’re right.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, many chronic illnesses are far more prevalent within the Black community. And there’s a growing consensus that these illnesses are a byproduct of everyday racism. “For Black people in particular,” said psychologist Dr. Lilian Comas-Diaz, “racial stress is something that happens throughout their life course.”

Whether it’s death by “weathering,” COVID-19, or inhumane policing, evidence shows that Black lives still don’t matter. And that’s why so many of us have taken to the streets — our hearts can’t take it anymore.

Tracey L. Rogers is an entrepreneur and activist in Philadelphia.

Chris Powell: Their lives will matter when they live next door

Old Town Hall in Hebron, Conn.

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Will the "black lives matter" clamor echoing among Connecticut's white elected officials and white suburban residents ever mean anything? Or will it remain the usual pious posturing that makes its participants feel righteous while disguising their irrelevance?

A good place for divining the future may be Hebron, population 9,500, a lovely rural town in eastern Connecticut that claims "historic charm with a vision for the future." Last weekend the Democratic Town Committee there held a rally to protest police brutality and racism.

Announcing the rally, committee Chair Tiffany Thiele said, "This is just one part of the problem. We also have to address our country's socio-economic system, which is designed to disenfranchise individuals of color from the opportunities afforded to others."

"Designed to disenfranchise," eh? So how about starting with the opportunity to live in Hebron itself?

Opportunity in Hebron is almost entirely limited to white households with incomes above $100,000. Ninety-six percent of townspeople are white, fewer than a half percent black. Ninety-five percent of Hebron's housing is owner-occupied, the median house value nearly $300,000. The town has little inexpensive housing and so has little poverty.

Those are great demographics and they make it easy to oppose police brutality, since, having little poverty, the town has little crime and needs just a few police officers.

Hebron's demographics are so good because, by excluding inexpensive, high-density housing, the town's land-use policy, like that of most Connecticut towns outside the inner suburbs, also excludes not just welfare households but many self-supporting people of all races. This is why Hebron is 99 percent nonblack and why "black lives matter" is, at the moment, a merely theoretical concept there.

So will the Democratic committee soon hold a rally in support of, say, building multifamily housing in town or expanding school regionalism so that nonwhite students might go to Hebron's schools? Will black lives ever matter that much to Hebron's Democrats?

While Hebron's Democrats, like many suburban and rural Democrats, may be hypocritical about exclusive zoning, such zoning is meant far more as economic policy than as racial policy and it dates to Connecticut's earliest colonial times. Back then to move into a town people had to gain the approval of the people already living there, had to become "admitted inhabitants," a procedure seeking to ensure that newcomers would be self-supporting and not impose expense on their neighbors. There was nothing racial about it.

Today society is far more prosperous but broadening a town's demographics still risks imposing expense and lowering living conditions. That's because decades of mistaken welfare policy have turned Connecticut's cities into crime-ridden poverty factories with an underclass of fatherless households, making education and general advancement terribly difficult if not impossible there.

People are entitled to want to escape that, and in recent years many people have escaped it into Connecticut's inner suburbs, which increasingly are integrated racially and economically. But state government shows no interest in changing its welfare policy and does not realize that economic and racial integration might be achieved not just by hurling the unassimilable underclass into resentful suburbs but also by making the cities habitable for the middle class again.

Black lives won't really matter in Connecticut until state government stops manufacturing the poverty that no one wants to live near.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Angel B. Perez: Race, class and 'uncomfortable learning'

Colleges and universities have a significant role to play in shaping the future of race and class relations in America. As exhibited in this year’s presidential election, race and class continue to divide us. Black Lives Matter movements, campus protests and police shootings are just a few examples of the proliferation of intolerance. It seems like we understand each other less each day. Higher education has a moral imperative to become the training ground for issues that students will face throughout their lives. Given the increasing diversity of higher education, there has never been a greater opportunity to address race and class.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 20.5 million students are expected to attend college this year. These students will be entering a postsecondary landscape unlike any other; 14.5% of students in college are Black and 16.5% Hispanic. While low-income students still enroll at lower rates, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that 46% of America’s traditional college-age people who are low-income are now enrolled in college. Colleges are beginning to reflect America’s diversity and this presents an opportunity for cultivating understanding.

Universities are microcosms of the world we inhabit. However, campus interactions can be more intense than those outside academia. For many, stepping through the doors of higher education could be the first time they are confronted with engaging difference. Low-income students will now be eating, working, living and playing with wealthy students. Students who grew up in predominantly white communities will now live in residence halls with students from all over the globe. While it’s an incredible opportunity for exchange, it’s also easy for misunderstandings to lead to conflict.

The first thing higher education must do is help students understand that life in college is challenging. What’s often lost in conversations about safe spaces and trigger points is the acknowledgement that college is where students go to leave their comfort zones. Being uncomfortable actually helps them grow. In fact, former Williams College Prof.  Robert Gaudino, a political scientist and experiential educationalist, dedicated most of his career to helping students engage “uncomfortable learning.” He believed that putting students in uncomfortable situations and forced to confront their own beliefs, values and “habits of mind” was the key to their growth and success.

Confronting race and class in college is hard, but the results can be transformative. Recently, I hired a young African-American student as a research assistant. She told me about a powerful experience she had in college when called the “N” word by a white peer. Her outrage was evident, but given the small size of our institution, she ironically ended up in a class about race with this student. Through intentional class discussions and heated debates, the two have now reconciled and are friends. The young man acknowledged his own ignorance and has been transformed by the experience. While their journey was unpleasant, both students were forced to deal with the implications. The structure that college provided them created a space for them to turn anger, and bias into learning and mutual understanding.

Administration plays a significant role in setting the stage for dialogue. In fact, much of their work impacts issues of race and class each day. They can use the admissions and financial aid process to socially engineer a campus that represents the diversity of the nation. They can create orientation programs that cultivate cross-cultural interactions and engage students in conversations that challenge beliefs. The way colleges construct everything from their residential life policies to extracurricular activities, can have an impact on how students engage difference.

I recall my own experience as a first-generation low-income student who was placed in a dorm room with a wealthy, white male (the first I had ever met). We spent a year engaged in interactions about our differences. We both made so many assumptions about each other, (often wrongly so), but we learned so much because of the way the college provided a platform and support for us to do so.

Faculty also play a pivotal role in campus conversations. Addressing issues of race and class are often delegated to sociologists, anthropologists and historians, but campuswide change happens when all faculty see race and class as an opportunity for pedagogical engagement. Race and class are omnipresent and its realities don’t go away when a student walks through a classroom door. The willingness of faculty to incorporate these issues into curriculum and navigate conversations when they arise could also change how students engage difference.

Last semester, I taught a course with a mix of students of color and majority students, as well as low-income and wealthy students. One day, they were visibly upset about the fact that some students had written “Trump 2016” in chalk around campus. This created a lot of emotion for students of color and confusion for majority students. I immediately went “off script,” and moderated a difficult conversation. I passed over the day’s planned course content, but the issue was important. There was no solution, but the greatest gift of the conversation was when students on both sides of the argument admitted they had never thought of the issue from the other’s perspective.

As the demographics of the U.S. change, that of those who walk through the doors of higher education also shifts, and we have a moral imperative to socially construct the platform for students to learn how to engage difference. The 20.5 million students in higher education will impact our future. In his book The Uses of the University, Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California, reminds us that “as society goes, so goes the university.” He believed the university has a responsibility to meet the urgent demands of society. The deliberate creation of platforms that support students through cultivation of spaces and interactions about difference can shape our nation’s future. This is no small task, but society has spoken. It’s now higher education’s turn to respond.

Angel B. Perez is vice president of enrollment and student success at Trinity College.

Mitchell Zimmerman: Be sure your name 'sounds white'

A New York Times obituary for Julian Bond, the civil-rights icon who passed away last month, described the late leader as a “persistent opponent of the stubborn remnants of white supremacy.”

Remnants? Hardly.

Notwithstanding the hard-won gains of the 1960s, race relations in 21^st-Century America are still characterized by white supremacy.

Half a century after employment discrimination was outlawed, for example, the median household income of white Americans is over 70 percent greater than for black Americans. The causes are complex, but whites are plainly advantaged.

One recent study revealed that job applicants with first names that sound “white” get called for interviews 50 percent more often than those with the same resume but names that sound “black.” Even white men convicted of felonies are more likely to get called back than young black men with no criminal records.

When they do land the job, black applicants are routinely offered positions at lower salaries than comparably qualified whites.

Discrimination in lending, meanwhile — especially before the housing crash — pushed black Americans into burdensome subprime mortgages even when they qualified for better mortgages. That made them much more likely to lose their homes in the Great Recession.

These factors help explain why the median net worth of white households is 13 times greater than the median wealth of black households.

Our educational system is part of the problem. Since housing discrimination disproportionately confines children of color to poorer neighborhoods, they’re much more likely to attend underfunded schools. Even within school districts, the whiter the school, the more experienced the teachers.

Given all these inequities, the prejudice African Americans face in the criminal justice system is grimly predictable. Indeed, the mass incarceration of black people plays a key role in maintaining the system of white advantage.

For example, white and black people use and sell illegal drugs at about the same rates. Yet African Americans are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession — and 10 times more likely to go to state prison for drug offenses.

Discriminatory practices play out through the entire criminal justice enterprise.

Police stop black people with disproportionate frequency, and these encounters aremuch more likely to be fatal than when whites are stopped — even when the victim is unarmed. Black teens are shot dead by cops at 21 times the rate of their white counterparts.

Even in mundane cases, prosecutors are more likely to let white suspects off with community service instead of criminal charges than similarly situated blacks, and whites get better plea bargains. Judges and juries sentence blacks more harshly when they have darker skin.

The result? A startling proportion of African Americans end up with criminal records that effectively remove them from the competition for good jobs. And a disturbing number end up dead.

If asked, most whites now reject the idea that African Americans are inherently inferior. And they’re less likely to be caught uttering racist epithets. But ending white supremacy will take a lot more than improving our manners.

When “circumstances” eliminate non-white contenders for decent employment, safe housing, and better schools, it’s easier for whites to maintain their historic dominance. Even if we never asked anyone to discriminate on our behalf, we whites are the silent beneficiaries.

It’s an unofficial form of affirmative action for white people. No wonder Black Lives Matter activists and other people of color are organizing to disrupt the established state of life in the United States.

If America is to “be America again,” as the black poet Langston Hughes prayed, they’d better succeed. White supremacy has no business carrying on for another century.

Mitchell Zimmerman, a lawyer, worked with Julian Bond as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. Distributed by OtherWords.org.