Unit 8: Social Problems in the United States

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Racial Problems

Early Immigrants Arrviving in the New World

Unlike most other peoples, Americans are primarily a nation of immigrants. The citizens or their ancestors immigrated from many parts of the globe—some as refugees from religious and political persecution, some as adventurers from the Old World seeking a better life, some as captives brought to America against their own will to be sold into slavery. Though people all share a common American culture, the nation contains many racial and ethnic subcultures with their own distinctive characteristics. These differences might seem trivial or irrelevant to outside observers, but they have contributed to racial conflicts that have been a persistent social problem to American society.

 

The Slave Trade Routes

The white Anglo-Saxon Puritans

The United States was founded on the principle of human equality, but in practice the nation has fallen far short of that ideal. American society is a stratified one, in which power, wealth, and prestige are unequally distributed among the population. This inequality is not simply a matter of distinctions between social classes; it tends to follow racial and ethnic lines as well, with the result that class divisions often parallel racial divisions. The first settlers from "Anglo-Saxon" northern Europe quickly took control of economic assets and political power in the United States, and they have maintained this control, to a greater or lesser degree, ever since. Successive waves of immigrants from other parts of Europe and elsewhere in the world have had to struggle long and hard to become assimilated into the mainstream of American life. Some have succeeded and have shared in the "American dream"; others notably those whose ethnic or racial characteristics differ most markedly from those of the dominant groups have been excluded by formal and informal barriers from full participation in American life . The result of this discrimination has been a severe and continuing racial tension in the United States that has periodically erupted into outright violence. Particularly since the civil rights demonstrations, ghetto riots, and other unrest in the 1960s, race and ethnic relations have been a major preoccupation of social scientists, politicians and the general public.

In the United States, any group other than the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority is a minority group in American society. These racial and ethnic minorities mainly refer to the blacks, Native Americans or American Indians, the Hispanics, and Asian Americans. The social and economic conditions of Native Americans are probably worse than those of any other minority groups. All these racial groups including Asian Americans are still suffering from racial discrimination and injustice. But here we look more closely at one of them whose problems have attracted the most public attention: the blacks or Afro-Americans.

The largest of the racial and ethnic minorities in the United States is the blacks, who number over 25.2 million, or 11.7% of the population. Their history in the United States has been one of sustained oppression, discrimination, and denial of basic civil rights and liberties.

The first blacks were brought to North America in 1619. Within a few decades the demand for their cheap labor led to a massive slave trade that ultimately transported some 400 000 Africans to this continent. Captured by neighboring tribes in their native villages and then sold to white traders, the slaves were shipped in wretchedly crowded conditions to the Caribbean and then to the United States, where they were sold like cattle at auctions. The myth of their racial inferiority—their irresponsibility, promiscuity, laziness and lower intelligence as assiduously propagated as a justification for their continued subjugation. The whip or the lynch mob served to assert social control over slaves who challenged the established order.

The Northern states had all outlawed slavery by 1830, but the Southern states, in which slaves had become the backbone of the economy, maintained the institution until it was finally ended by the Civil War, Lincoln's emancipation of slaves in 1863, and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. But even after the abolition of slavery, wholesale discrimination was practiced against black Americans. Many states passed segregation laws to keep the races apart in schools, housing, restaurants, and other public facilities, and institutionalized discrimination kept blacks in the lowest-paid jobs. A variety of methods, such as rigged "literacy" tests, were used to keep blacks off the voters' rolls and thus prevent them from exercising their political rights. Segregation laws continued to be enforced in Southern states until the 1950s; in the North informal methods were used—often just as effectively.

Black pride

The 1960s saw the great civil rights movement whose goals were to end segregation laws completely and fight for the equal rights for the colored people. Many American blacks began to have a new mood. They had feelings of pride; they declared that "black is beautiful"; and the black community showed signs of unprecedented self-confidence. Equally important, many black leaders began to disclaim full integration into the American mainstream as the goal of the black minority. Instead, they argued, blacks ought to coexist with other groups in a plural society containing different and distinctive communities living in mutual respect.

The current status of black Americans presents a mixed picture. The elimination of legal barriers to their advancement has been a major gain, but institutionalized discrimination is still rife. Housing in particular, remains highly segregated: the great majority of blacks continue to live in neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly black, and most whites live in neighborhoods that are overwhelmingly white. Busing and other programs aimed at integrating the schools have had some impact in inner-city areas but have made virtually no difference to the segregation that exists between predominantly black urban centers and the predominantly white suburbs and small towns that surround them. Blacks have achieved considerable educational gains; black enrollment in colleges rose spectacularly between

Black Student Association on Campus

1966, when 4.6% of college students were black, and 1976, when 10.7% were black. Median family income of blacks rose from $3230 in 1960 to $10142 in 1977, but the median income of white families rose at least as fast, and the income gap between the two groups has widened in recent years. A major source of this differential is the fact that blacks tend to be barred from positions of authority over other workers, and are restricted instead to lower-paying jobs further down the work-place hierarchy. This factor alone accounts for about a third of the total black-white income gap. The political influence of blacks is increasing, both in the South, where they are voting in unprecedented numbers, and in the major cities of the North, Midwest, and West, where they are a major voting bloc and, in some cases, a majority.

Race relations between black and white still leave much to be desired, although there is unmistakable evidence of some improvements in attitudes. However, there is a sharp divergence between the races on the question of how much progress has been made in ending discrimination. The majority of whites believe that there has been a lot of progress in getting rid of discrimination, but more than half of the blacks felt that there has not been much real change. Only less than 20% of the whites believe that many blacks miss out on jobs and promotion in their city because of discrimination. Many blacks are still pessimistic about progress in race relations.

One reason for the difference in the perceptions of the two groups may be that blacks are more acutely aware that a great many of their members have failed to share in the more general gains made by blacks since the 1960s. Over the past decade many blacks, perhaps as many as a third, have worked their way into the middle class, in the process often moving from the ghetto to the suburbs or to better housing within the cities. But other blacks have been left behind, and urban ghettos now contain a permanently impoverished "underclass" of habitually unemployed or underemployed black people. Many members of this "underclass" are young and unskilled. They live in cities where the unemployment rate for teenage black workers runs as high as 50%, or about 8 times the rate for the American work force as a whole. This "underclass" could continue to persist, even in the absence of racial discrimination, in much the same way as other pockets of poverty persist—that is, for reasons of social-class inequality. In any event, such progress as has been made in the past decade has brought no benefit whatever to the black "underclass." Living in an environment of poverty, decay, crime, drug addiction, joblessness, and hopelessness, this ghetto underclass offers an explosive potential for the future.

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