As our nation faces a new president and the realities of politics in a post-Obama world, the big issue that stops conversations cold, is still the question of race in America. Since the recent victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 U.S Presidential elections, racial tensions in the United States have been anything but united. Despite the many accomplishment made by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s, African Americans are still finding that equality is still an obstacle, especially in the area of economic progress. Slogans like “Make America Great Again” rang throughout Trump’s political campaign, and according to Michael Reigh, a professor of Political …show more content…
Webster’s Dictionary states that racism is the discrimination and prejudice toward people based on their race and or ethnicity. It is an ideology that is based on the principle that human beings can be subdivided and ranked into categories as being inferior or superior. It is also defined as the violation of basic rights and liberties, based on the color of one’s skin. Racism in the United States has existed since the founding of this country. In a recent poll taken by Gallup in 2016, it showed that most people see racism as something to do with race relation between whites and blacks, only. It’s worth mentioning that in recent years the concept of racism has changed. Racism in the post-racial twenty-first century is now marked by subtlety. Subtle forms of racism that discriminates against individuals through unnoticeable or seemingly passive methods. Although overt racism has decreased since the 1960s, it has been supplemented by what is called colorblind racism,” which refers to “contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics” (Bonilla-Silva, 2010, p. 2). The color-blind theory refers to racial neutrality. According to this view, the color of one’s skin does not matter because we live in a post-racial society; that is, a society that has moved beyond race. The color-blind theory of race denies the racialized …show more content…
Unemployment rates for African-American are among the worst when the economy declines and the least when the economy grows. This pattern was repeated in the late 2000s and early 2010s during the “Great Recession”. An article written on the black middle class in the National Urban League’s “State of Black America 2012″ report contains details, concluding that “almost all of the economic gains of the last 30 years have been lost” since late 2007, and worse, “the ladders of opportunity for reaching the black middle class are disappearing.”
In 2010, the median household income for African Americans was 30 percent less than the median income of white households 30 years ago. African-American household income fell more than 2.5 times farther than white household income during the Great Recession, 7.7 percent versus 2.9 percent. Home ownership rates also fell for African Americans at roughly double the rates of whites, essentially wiping out the gains in home ownership since 2000. Today, more than a quarter of African Americans live below the poverty line, compared to about 10 percent of white people (Heath,