Donald Trump’s executive order “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” is premised on racist stereotypes. Here is why:
White households own 10 times the wealth of Black households. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, Black people who apply for mortgages are three times more likely to be denied than white applicants with similar credit records. Black men are four times more likely than white men to be imprisoned and receive sentences 13.4 percent longer than white men. The high school graduation rate for white students is nine points higher than the rate for Black students (in Minnesota the difference is 15 points) and the college graduation rate is 25 points higher for white than for Black students.
What causes these disparities?
Different types of explanations exist. Systemic explanations locate causes of inequities in laws, policies and institutional practices that favor some groups over others. Trump’s order calls these types of explanations “radical indoctrination” or “discriminatory equity ideology” and seeks to eliminate them from school curricula.
But what do these systemic explanations actually say? They do not say that all white people are racist and should feel abject humiliation because of whatever privileges they enjoy. They say instead that institutionalized systems can produce unfair outcomes even though people of noble character might work within them. These outcomes are evident in many systems, including housing, education, and criminal justice.
Housing
Richard Rothstein demonstrates in “The Color of Law” that African Americans have been systematically denied home-ownership opportunities by “racially explicit government policies” that deprive Black families of the generational wealth transfers enjoyed by most white families. The development of predominantly white suburbs after World War II, for example, was no accident. The Federal Housing Administration, by policy, refused to guarantee loans to Black families, which relegated them to inner-city rentals and awarded mortgages, and equity, to their white counterparts. Red-lining and racial covenants reinforced this segregation and ensured the inheritances left to Black children would be minimal or nonexistent. Since Black families have far less inherited wealth (and wealth in general) than white families, current policies that require large lots and houses make Black ownership less likely.
Numerous government entities have worked to change policies that legalized segregation and directed money only to white families. But even if all the practices those policies encouraged were eliminated tomorrow, even if they had been eliminated decades ago, that would not undo the damage done. Short of significant reparations, the wealth deprivation inflicted upon Black families will continue into the future, as will the corresponding benefits to white families. We may want to believe the eras of racial injustice are behind us, but as Ta-nehisi Coates has shown, if you or your parents or your grandparents had a mortgage during the 1940s or ’50s or ’60s, you earned material benefits from an unjust system.
Education
Several decades ago Jonathan Kozol’s book “Savage Inequalities” profoundly influenced my understanding of myself and my education. I realized my instruction, from grade school through university, had been conducted entirely in white middle- to upper-class communities that had funds for education unavailable in other communities. During most of that time, no one talked (to me, at least) about the unearned benefits I received or the racial makeup of the different communities. But certainly race was a factor. Schools in white districts had money, books and facilities that schools in Black districts did not.
Kozol visited numerous public schools and describes some locations where students met in closets or windowless rooms and endured lavatories with leaky pipes. Their classrooms were overpopulated and they shared textbooks. At other locations, sometimes within the same district, he witnessed bright and airy spaces, comfortable rooms and an abundance of materials for student use.
Individual racial animus might have influenced these inequities, but it was not required. The segregated neighborhoods created by government housing policies, the subsidized wealth of suburban homeowners, and the use of local property taxes to fund schools combined to create a public education system that endowed white communities with better-maintained buildings, more modern equipment, and smaller class sizes than nearby Black communities.
Criminal justice
Michelle Alexander, in her award-winning book “The New Jim Crow” has shown that Black people are arrested and imprisoned more frequently than white people for drug crimes, even though they are not more likely to use or sell drugs. This is because drug raids more likely target poor than rich neighborhoods and inner-city rather than suburban schools.
“A wide variety of laws, institutions, and practices,” she writes, “ranging from racial profiling to biased sentencing policies, political disenfranchisement, and legalized employment discrimination, trapped African Americans in a virtual (and literal) cage.” Black people are five times more likely to go to prison and 12 times more likely to be wrongly convicted for drug possession than white people.
It’s not just drug policies that systematically target Black people. Black men nationwide are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. Two different studies of traffic stops demonstrated that Black drivers are more likely than white drivers to be stopped and to be searched during a stop, even though they are less likely to possess illegal contraband. When Black defendants are found guilty of the same crime as white defendants, their sentences, on average, are 20% longer.
Systemic explanations are essential
This country’s fundamental narrative is that of the triumphant individual who works hard and prospers. American individualism grounds each citizen’s fate — fortune or poverty, success or failure — in personal choices and effort. These are important factors, but they occur within an often unacknowledged context.
The repercussions of slavery resonate throughout our history. They resonate in housing policies and education funding procedures and the practice of mass incarceration. And they resonate in the ideas that because no Black people alive today were slaves, they do not experience the effects of racist systems, and because no white people alive today owned slaves, we do not participate in and benefit from racist systems that disenfranchise people of color.
But if you reject systemic explanations, you are left to say that Black people are inferior, that some characteristic renders them unable to compete with white people. That is an untenable and racist stereotype.
Through an accident of birth, I reaped benefits from these systems. And through no fault of their own, others did not. I need not feel guilt about that, because I did not create the systems. But I live within them now, and the responsibility to make them equitable belongs to me and to others who have so benefitted. Recognition of systemic racism is the first step. That recognition is precisely what Trump, with his executive order, seeks to suppress.
