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Poverty and Racism

Poverty and Racism. Nate Vomocil Pio Decimo Center Tucson, AZ. Our Mission. Our Mission as VISTAs is to eliminate poverty in the United States of America. The Problem. Racism and Poverty are intricately intertwined in almost every aspect of people’s daily lives.

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Poverty and Racism

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  1. Poverty and Racism Nate Vomocil Pio Decimo Center Tucson, AZ

  2. Our Mission Our Mission as VISTAs is to eliminate poverty in the United States of America. The Problem Racism and Poverty are intricately intertwined in almost every aspect of people’s daily lives. Therefore, it becomes impossible to adequately address either of these problems without talking about both of them.

  3. Isn’t Discrimination Human Nature? • Discrimination has always existed. • Psychologists have shown that even very young children will show strong in-group/out-group preferences, even to the point of rationalizing it. HOWEVER,

  4. Isn’t Discrimination Human Nature? “The ancients did accept the institution of slavery as a fact of life; they made ethnocentric judgments of other societies;…Yet nothing comparable to the virulent color prejudice of modern time existed in the ancient world. This is the view of most scholars who have examined the evidence.” -Frank Snowden

  5. The Truth • Racism as we know it today has only existed for a brief moment in human history.

  6. The Truth • If racism was created whole cloth, it can be destroyed just as thoroughly….

  7. A Brief History ofInstitutional Racism • 1800’s: Institutional racism is born out of necessity to keep poor white sharecroppers and black slaves from co-conspiring during the Antebellum period. • 1860’s: The 13th, 14th, and 15thAmendments give many rights to the newly freed slaves. • These rights were subverted by various methods, including “grandfather clauses,” and were rarely upheld in court.

  8. A Brief History ofInstitutional Racism • 1865: Gen. Sherman gives the freed slaves in Georgia “40 acres and a mule”. • President Johnson rescinds this field order, returning the land to the former slave owners. • 1944: The G.I. Bill passed to help returning veterans buy houses and finance educations. • Overwhelmingly, minorities were not able to take full advantage of this program.

  9. A Brief History ofInstitutional Racism • 1968: The Civil Rights Act passes, ending racism forever….

  10. A Brief History ofInstitutional Racism • 1971: The “War on Drugs” begins in earnest. • Today: The “War on Drugs” disproportionately targets Blacks and Latinos, permanently disenfranchising them as felons.

  11. The Vicious Cycle

  12. The Vicious Cycle

  13. The Vicious Cycle: Education • Students with “black-sounding names” were stigmatized by their teachers as less intelligent, even compared to their own siblings. • Chronic stress leads to persistent “working memory” deficits, which esp. affects education. • Blacks and Latinos face a 50% likelihood that they will graduate on time. • Blacks with a college degree are twice as likely to be unemployed as their white counterparts.

  14. The Vicious Cycle: Jobs • There are millions of cases of blatant discrimination in housing and hiring every year. • Applicants with “white-sounding names” are twice as likely to get an interview than those with “black-sounding names”. • The lightest-skinned immigrants make, on average, 15% more than the darkest-skinned immigrants. • Major national banks deliberately lead minorities into more expensive, sub-prime loans.

  15. The Vicious Cycle: Punishment • Blacks are disproportionately arrested and incarcerated for crimes, compared to whites who actually commit crimes at a much higher rate. • Blacks are 8 times more likely than whites to be disenfranchised voters. • Black students are suspended and disciplined at rates far exceeding white students. • White job applicants with criminal records are more likely to get an interview than black applicants with no criminal history.

  16. The Vicious Cycle: Health • The cumulative effects of racism lead to drastically worse health outcomes in blacks, as well as generally lower quality of life, healthwise. • “Food deserts” overwhelmingly affect minorities, and diet has been linked as a factor in 9 of the top 10 leading causes of death in the US. • Minorities have across-the-board worse outcomes for similar health problems when compared to whites, additionally compounded by poverty.

  17. So What Do We Do? • The most important first step is that we agree on what racism IS. Needless to say, when so many people understand racism differently, it can complicate the ability to meaningfully converse about the subject, let alone to do something about it. If you think racism means one thing, while I’m convinced it means another, we’re not likely to agree as to how we might respond to it, since we aren’t seeing the same problem in the first place. -Tim Wise

  18. So What Do We Do? https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo /takeatest.html

  19. Additional Resources • http://www.timwise.org/ • web.cortland.edu/russellk/courses/hdouts/raible.htm • loveisntenough.com/2009/12/30/how-to-be-an-anti-racist-ally/ • http://www.doyourbestwork.net/2009/11/11/on-being-an-effective-white-anti-racist-ally/

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