The Hill, June 4, 2020: Underlying America’s unrest is structural racism
The senseless and horrific death of George Floyd has sparked protests and unrest across America. Some individuals have tried to undermine otherwise peaceful protests by injecting violence and thereby distracting public attention from the core issue at hand. That issue is structural racism, which goes back to slavery but remains ingrained in America’s civic fabric. It is structural racism that creates an environment in which a white police officer can put his knee for nearly 9 minutes on the neck of a black man, who is accused only of using — perhaps unknowingly — a counterfeit $20 bill, until he dies. It is structural racism that normalizes the behavior of the accompanying police officers who held George Floyd down or did nothing to stop his death.
Structural racism, which is the historical and ongoing racial discrimination and segregation of African Americans in particular, is typically instigated or sanctioned by government. It creates inequality in every aspect of life and puts black people on the lowest rung of the racial hierarchy ladder, sometimes not even considered human. It has played a fundamental role in where we live, through federal redlining and other discriminatory practices, where our children attend school, what access we have to healthy food, jobs and health care, among other things — and even whether we deserve to live or die.
The focus of the unrest in major cities gives the impression that it is largely an urban problem, but structural racism is a national phenomenon. It is just as firmly ingrained in our suburbs and smaller or rural communities. …
… With the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, housing discrimination based on race became illegal (even though it continues today), but the implications of redlining remain indelible. As the National Community Reinvestment Coalition reported in 2018, most of the neighborhoods (74 percent) that the federal government redlined eight decades earlier are low- to moderate-income communities today. They are in areas with high levels of economic inequality, and many are majority minority and within regions of hyper-segregation.
