Apartheid in America?

Submitted by Eternity on Thu, 07/02/2009 - 12:05.

Max Eternity - Has America prematurely come to the conclusion that because we now have a biracial President, anti-Black bias has been overcome--banished from this nation?  Some may like to think so, and to a limited extent, at least symbolically, that might be true. However there are many indicators that say otherwise, suggesting that a more sanitized version of apartheid has now replaced our defunct Jim Crow laws.

In an article written by former and current presidents of the NAACP, citing a study done by Princeton University, they recently wrote in The New Republic "when white and minority youth were charged with the same criminal offenses, African-American youth with no prior admissions were six times more likely to be incarcerated than white youth with the same background...we could list volumes of statistics that reveal a nation still racked with discrimination and disparity."  

CNN/Money wrote about this same Princeton study in 2005, with a lead in for that article saying that "black job applicants without criminal records are equally likely to be hired as their white counterparts who have served time in prison, according to a recent Princeton University study." CNN interviewed one of the authors of the study, Devah Pager, who said ""A lot of people are skeptical that African Americans still face discrimination in the job market...but even in a diverse city like New York, the evidence of discrimination is unmistakable."  Read more.