Harry and Trent: A Tale of Two Gaffes

[davidbcoe]

I’ve been kind of absent from the blogosphere recently, except for my weekly Magical Words posts. The “Robin Hood” project was pretty consuming, and I just haven’t had much time to comment on politics or sports or life itself. I’m finally finished, though, and, it seems, just in time. It’s as if in the last week or so the entire world has gone

Comments

[davidbcoe]

Thanks for the good discussion, Mark.

I've heard that argument before, and I believe that there are some elected Republicans who feel this way. But facts are pesky things: Unemployment remains proportionally higher among African-Americans than whites. So do dropout rates. Poverty rates. Infant mortality rates. Incarceration rates. Homelessness. Addiction. Basically, every economic and social indicator we have tells us that we have yet to reach the important goal of equality of opportunity in this country. Add to that the fact that people of color are far more likely to be stopped, harassed, and abused by the police; that schools, medical clinics, and other social services are far more likely to be underfunded in predominantly African-American communities than in predominantly white communities (conservatives often point to the exceptions here -- the fact that NYC and DC city schools are overfunded to no effect -- and though this is true, these are the exceptions. Look elsewhere in the country, particularly in rural Southern communities, and just the opposite is true with respect to schools, and the medical care disparity is true everywhere); even that, come election time, the per capita availability of voting machines is widely disproportionate in favor of whites, and you find that we have not yet created that race-neutral society. So these measures are still necessary, in my opinion, and in missing this, elected GOP officials are either ignorant of the facts or willfully neglectful of them.

[markwise]

I guess we have come to an impass, my friend. *smile* I won't keep you from your awsome work (I want to read your next book so I don't want to keep you tied up) except to say...

You see the playing field as tilted against minorities due to racial reasons. I agree that there may still be inequalities but I think chalking them up to race is an oversimplification. I think that there are other factors at play such as economic, educational, and familial which are at play here too.

So a solution based solely upon race would not solve problems only partially rooted in race. It would need to encompass all the factors involved.