Racial Inequality Over Time

Categories: Equality And Inequality Inequality

Essay, Pages 7 (1554 words)

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As discovered in an Economic Policy Institute report done just two years ago, the wage gap in-between African-Americans and Caucasians has grown since the 1970s. In 1979, for instance, African-American men earned 22 percent less than Caucasian men did. By the year 2015, African-American males earned over 30 percent less. The study's authors noted that in 1979, black women's wages achieved near-parity with white women's wages, but that by 2015, the gap had already risen to 19 percent (americanprogress.org). For many African-Americans, the cumulative consequence of nicety has had a distinctly negative impact on their lives.

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In the year 1934, the United States voted through the National Housing Act: in doing so creating the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The main goal in this was to protect mortgage lending. Despite these policies, it is unclear whether employers, when drunk with observably like African American and white applicants, are employing based on merit. The FHA adopted the Home Owners' Loan Corporation's rating system, given as redlining, around stated areas they believe to be risky and therefore where lenders would not prolong lending ('Systematic Inequality').

Redlining affected African-American families into higher-rate loans, if they could get them in the first place, would force these families to remain in certain areas within the community and in many instances interfere with them acquiring a home at all. It wasn't until 1968, with the passage of the Fair Housing Act, that redlining was made illegal (americanprogress.org).

The Federal Housing Administration made an additional recommendation at this time, being the idea and application of housing establishments that were 'racially restrictive'.

These (now obviously racist and discriminative) covenants would continue to exist even after they were finally made to be illegal. Four-in-ten African-Americans say their lineage has made it harder for them to succeed in life. Roughly half (51%) say their ethnicity hasn't made a dispute in their overall succession, and a small 8% say being African-American has made things easier (americanprogress.org).

Racial and caste discrimination continues to be invading civilization throughout mankind. It is extremely difficult for researchers to distinguish these agents of nicety, as those doing the discrimination-such as employers may be able to judge candidates based on characteristics which are not observable to researchers (Bertrand).

At the time of the Great Depression, a 'two-tier approach to housing policy' was put into action. In doing so, African-Americans' residentiary mobility was hugely impacted in the way of forcing them to live in separate communities (americanprogress.org). The vigor of the designation' 'blackness' or 'whiteness' was established by examining public areas in Chicago. Studies have also shown that the gap in income between races has spread to female education levels. Not only this, but the gap seems to deteriorate for women as they climb to higher levels of the educational ladder. Others seem to be convinced that discrimination is a simply a thing of the past, destroyed by some combination of employer epiphany, affirmative action training and the advantage-maximum benefit. Bertrand et al. discovered the average white applicants take 36 percent more calls back than African-American applicants with similar qualifications (povertyactionlab.org). Though the idea of racism during hiring is now very much illegal, the traces of this racism in transformed shape is very much alive currently. There are multiple possible reasons to attribute African-Americans' experiencing higher rates of joblessness and earning lower pay than Caucasians. As a result of this discrimination, just employment rules/laws have been since put into place.

The EPI is an self-directing, nonprofit organization that researches the impact of economic effort and policies on functioning people in the United States. In 1983, over 30 percent of African-American workers were union members. By 2015, that count shrunk to 14.2 percent. Granted, it is probable that differences in employment may indeed be misinterpreted because they do not account for the ample multitude of African-Americans who have been negatively impacted by a criminal justice system that has aggressively and persistently targeted communities of color. A Washington Post analysis shared in 2016 states that 'if incarcerated individuals were included in the official unemployment rate, the black male unemployment rate would spike from 11 percent-where it was at the time the article was published-to 19 percent' and when comparing 'factoring in the white male incarcerated population into the white unemployment numbers would raise the rate by less than 1.5 percentage' (americanprogress.org). Black males, for instance, are about 600% more likely to be put in prison than white men. This is the consequence of laws that have one way, or another 'encouraged mass incarceration and over criminalization in communities of color'-meaning that they are more probable to encounter barriers to employment as a result (Americanprogress.org).

While congress seemed to be rooting for both owning homes and living in nice suburban neighborhoods in regard to whites, it certainly worsened inequality in more 'urban' cities through slum clearance and the construction of public shelter, originally constructed as temporary middle-class housing and later a permanent shelter resolution for low-profit people of color (americanprogress.org). In other words, the racial gaps in both pay and work-force participation, cannot be shown with measurable qualities such as marital status, education, age, or location (Bertrand). It is no coincidence that the EPI and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco tell the reader that the immeasurable agents that can be blamed for the income gap between the races may include 'employment discrimination, weak enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, or racial differences in unobserved skill levels-as opposed to measurable factors such as educational attainment or work experience'(Bertrand). In addition, a study from researchers at Northwestern and Harvard universities and the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research have recently stated that rate of racial prejudice in the process of hiring has changed an insignificant amount over time. About two-thirds of African-American (65%) say they strongly or slightly nurture the advancement, compared with 40% of whites and 32% of Hispanics (Americanprogress.org).

Professors Mullainathan and Bertrand debate the level of racial acuteness in the labor market by using a randomized expansion experiment. As the EPI stated, African-Americans contend with labor market discrimination, which is not smoothly measured. The responses of prospect employers were measured accordingly to a hypothetical résumé's ability to receive a call back or e-mail request for an interview. In 1980, black women who had been to college, as well as having more work experience indeed made a somewhat higher income than college-educated Caucasian women who have the same achievements. An additional 42 percent of African-Americans view that the country will eventually cause the change needed for minorities to have even rights with Caucasians, and approximately 8 percent say the country has already made the necessary changes (Bertrand).

Résumés included in the study were diverse in quality, with higher tier résumés having flashy items such as summertime-work experience, school-year work, volunteering experience, additional computer dexterity, special honors, or military experience. Names were chosen randomly in relationship to crowd data obtained from birth certificates of Massachusetts origin from 1974 and 1979 (Bertrand).

In 2010, during the after stages of the Great Recession, African-American joblessness reached 16 percent. This is at the same time as while white unemployment peaked at under 9%. Even as black unemployment reached its lowest rate in years, it remains at approximately twice the white joblessness rate (pewresearch.org). Recent examination into the topic shows the reader that there exist strong gaps in labor market outcomes between the two races. Angela Hanks tells states that 'Similar to the Federal Reserve Bank study, the Federal Reserve Board staff attribute this gap largely to unobservable factors'. African-American workers are also at increased risk to the business cycle and thus are more way impacted by negative economic events. Within the years of 1996 and 2000's the economy nearly reached full employment rates, the income gap between the races shrank. When the Great Recession hit in 2007-09, African-Americans were more 'negatively disposed' and fought harder for a longer period of time to repay to their prerecession payment and associated costs during the time. In addition, African-American families have been more intensely affected by the decline in union density (Bertrand).

An overwhelming majority of blacks state that America must continue to manufacture progress for African-Americans to have equal rights to Caucasians, but 43% are unsure whether or not this will occur. As history begins to repeat itself, the gap between college-educated African-American and white men in 1980 was under 10 percent, and was able to reach 20 percent by 2014 ('Systematic Inequality'). Researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco tell us that the wage separation truly is expanding again, and that this can be blamed heavily on 'unmeasurable change' (nytimes.com).

In my opinion, civil rights relating to race are among the top priority in America today. These rights (or lack of) have changed greatly over the lifetime of our nation, but continue to venture in the wrong direction today. According to a report done by the Economic Policy Institute in 2016, the wage gap between African-Americans and Caucasians has increased since the 1970s. From 1979 to 2015 for example, African-American men went from earning 22 percent less than white men, to over 30 percent ('Systematic Inequality'). When applying for jobs, Caucasians receive over 30 percent more callbacks or interviews than African-Americans, even though the process of doing so intentionally is now illegal. It is due to these facts, and all others previously listed that there continues to be a need to advance, reshape, and reform civil rights laws related to race and discrimination.