"we face relentless discrimination: wage inequality, substandard schools, overpoliced neighborhoods, and inequities in healthcare"
Let's address the difference between perception and reality.
Wage Inequality: Many "uncontrolled" studies put the racial wage gap at 13%. But once you control for not racial factors, the difference in pay that cannot be explained by "captured" factors is around 2%. Moreover, it seems unlikely that even that 2% is due to skin color, since the same study shows Asian earning 2% more than whites. It is hard to imagine in a culture where whites are discriminating that they would choose to pay Asians more than themselves. It is equally hard to believe Asians are in control of compensation in this country and paying themselves 2% more. So, the "pay gap" is not between Blacks and Whites is not based on race. And we need to get that message out there to end the perception that it is.
https://www.payscale.com/research-and-insights/racial-wage-gap-for-men/
Substandard Schools: There are two reasons for "substandard schools". The first is funding. In some parts of the country where funding is based on local tax revenues, poor communities have inadequate funding. That is true of white, black, and Hispanic community schools. But often the reason for substandard schools is due to the parents. Unless our educational system is prepared to expel children who are behavioral problems from schools and confine them to online learning from home, then public schools with too high a percentage of children that come from homes where parents don't care about their child's education are going to translate into poor results for nearly every child forced to attend the school.
My brother founded a charter school in Jersey City called Beloved. 75% of children come from homes living below the poverty line. Yet 100% of the senior class graduated high school last year and 94% were accepted into college. Children are not "selected" based on merit, but simply because their parents put them into a lottery system to be selected. However, behavioral problems can be expelled.
The take home message from this is that if we want poor children to have access to a good education, we have to recognize that teachers cannot teach in a school with serious behavioral issues among the student population are not addressed.
It is too easy to blame funding, when in most cases that is not the problem and most public-school teachers teaching in underperforming schools will tell you that.
Over-policed neighborhoods: Interesting again the difference in perception vs reality. 81% of inner-city blacks support the same or more police presence in their communities (the highest percentage among all racial groups). Again prior to founding his charter school, my brother was the mayor of Jersey City.
He won as a Republican by promising a greater police presence. As he was quick to point out, most blacks want the same things we all want, safer neighborhoods for their children to grow up in. The occasional rogue police officer, who commits an act of racist violence is rare and most blacks living in poor neighborhoods realize that. But it makes for great media and so the "exceptions" are front page news and police officers risking their lives are confined to the back of the newspaper if covered at all.
The black police commissioner eliminated race from the profiling software his department uses in Camden, N.J. when determining where best to deploy police resources to reduce crime. They ended up in black neighborhoods because sadly poverty drives crime, and many poor neighborhoods are disproportionately black.
https://reason.com/2020/08/06/81-percent-of-black-americans-want-the-same-level-or-more-of-police-presence-gallup/
Inequalities in health care: blacks do have worse health outcomes for many reasons, but skin color is not a primary reason. Instead, it is based more on where they live, the health care coverage they have, diet, health factors, etc. I do not doubt that there are some racist providers in this country, but it is worth noting that Asians far better than whites, which if the system was "pro white", that should not happen.
I wish studies similar to the payroll studies noted above were conducted on the health care system. My bet having worked in the health care system for most of my career is that "health care" access is the primary driver of worse outcomes and access is more related to economic status than skin color. But do the degree such a study established that discrimination was behind the worse outcomes, then that needs to be addressed.
My family is very integrated. About one third black, one third white, and one third Asian. We are the product of a generation who believed MLK when he told us to judge people by their character and not skin color. But for that to happen we need to address perception issues in America. There are ways to isolate the impact of skin color from other factors that produce different outcomes. I don't believe whites are better golfers (or how do you explain Tiger Woods). I don't believe blacks are better at basketball (or how do you explain Larry Bird). Instead, there other factors at play and separating those other factors from race, will help us understand what it is really going on.
