Being repulsed by the Charleston shootings is the easy part
It was heartening to hear Gov. Pat McCrory say that North Carolina should stop issuing license plates with the Confederate battle flag. It would be a tiny step, to be sure. And, of course, he followed the declaration by saying he wouldn’t actually do anything. Still, when you’re accustomed to a forced march backward, even a stumble in the right direction triggers welcome surprise.
When President Obama spoke movingly of an American reservoir of goodness in Charleston, he urged the removal of the battle flag from the South Carolina Capitol grounds. “But,” he added, “I don’t think God wants us to stop there.” For too long, he argued, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices shape the present.
In North Carolina, more than twice as many African-Americans (27 percent) live in poverty as whites (12 percent). The differential is even starker for kids. Forty percent of black children here live below the federal poverty threshold, while about 15 percent of white kids do.
Two and a half times as many black Tar Heels are unemployed as whites. They experience much higher rates of hunger and are far more frequently uninsured than whites. Three times as many African-Americans’ home mortgages are underwater.
Racial income and poverty disparities are intense. But they pale compared with
Most of our counties experiencing brutal child poverty rates – Northampton (48.3 percent), Chowan (47.9 percent), Scotland (46.8 percent),Vance (44 percent) and Edgecombe (43 percent) – have high percentages of African-Americans. The same is true of our 10 federally designated persistent poverty counties.
Our black children attend, very disproportionately, North Carolina’s high-poverty public schools. Under the state’s new A-F grading system, 80 percent of schools where 4 out of 5 kids qualify for free and reduced-price lunches received a D or F. Over 90 percent of schools with fewer than 20 percent low income students secured an A or B.
About twice as many white Tar Heels have a college degree as blacks. Empirical studies indicate potent continuing discrimination against black North Carolinians in employment, housing and access to credit.
A UNC-CH review of 1.3 million Charlotte traffic stops, over a 12-year period, found that although blacks make up less than a third of the driving-age population, more of them (in raw numbers) are pulled over, they received more tickets and they were 77 percent more likely to be searched than white drivers.
The North Carolina Department of Correction reports a prison population of about 40,000. A startling 57 percent of inmates are African-American, though 22 percent of our population is black. Thirty-five percent of the prison cohort is white, though whites make up over 70 percent of the populace. We incarcerate 357 whites per 100,000 and 1,665 blacks. A large portion of imprisoning convictions are based on drug offenses, hugely slanted toward blacks, though research indicates blacks and whites use and sell drugs at roughly the same rate.
The judicial determinations made under the Racial Justice Act found our death penalty adjudication process so riven with racism that the legislature repealed the statute.
These listed facts, I know, are tiresome and annoying to many. I relate them to make a simple point.
Martin Luther King Jr. gave a powerful speech at Stanford in 1967. Frustrated at dwindling support from white liberals as protests moved north, King complained that many who supported him in Birmingham and Selma “were really (just) outraged about extremist behavior from Bull Connor and Jim Clark, rather than believing in genuine equality for Negroes.”
It is one thing to be repulsed by terror and assassination. It is another, apparently, to be horrified and moved to engagement by an overarching, long-accepted regime of racial subordination.
Our governor, the leaders of our General Assembly and a distressing number of Democrats believe that the continuing subjugation of massive numbers of black North Carolinians triggers no obligations of racial equity. That is true even when the privations trace, in unbroken lineage, to the vestiges of slavery and Jim Crow. It is true even when the burdens imposed block full dignity and membership. It is even true, today, as steps are taken, in the name of rough and tumble politics, to suppress black voter participation and repeal essential antidiscrimination tools.
We are repulsed by atrocity. We’re comfortable with subordination.
Gene Nichol is Boyd Tinsley Distinguished Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill.
This story was originally published July 11, 2015 at 2:14 PM with the headline "Being repulsed by the Charleston shootings is the easy part."