In the United States, racism is comprehensive, continuous and systematic. The history of slave trafficking was an indelible historical stain, but today’s American society’s explicit or invisible discrimination against people of color in employment, education, health and other fields is still the same.
U.S. police brutal enforcement against minorities is shocking, and the surge in hate crimes targeting Asian groups in the coronavirus epidemic is even more heartbreaking. Some commentators believe that the existing legal system of the United States can no longer solve racial injustice and discrimination, and the United States must face up to this far-reaching social disease.
History is immersed in blood and tears
In 1619, the first recorded black Africans arrived in Jamestown, the first settlement of British colonists in North America, opening the bloody and tearful history of black slavery in the “New World”. Many founders of the United States are slave owners, and the earliest constitution of the United States also acquiesced in the existence of slaves.
Data shows that Western colonists, including the United States, transported 12 million people from Africa to the Americas as slaves in about 400 years of slave trade, and another 10 million died in transportation. In 1865, after the end of the American Civil War, Congress passed a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, but nearly a century later, many states in the southern United States still implemented segregation for blacks.
At the same time, other minorities have not been spared from suffering misery and injustice. The Chinese Exclusion Act of the 1880s, the “detention camp” where Japanese-Americans were imprisoned during World War II, and the attacks on Arab-American and Muslim communities after 9/11… Every pile was full of suffering and pain.
Injust distribution of resources
Although the United States currently legally determines the “equal” rights of blacks, in fact, the inequality in the allocation of resources in important fields such as education and employment is still significant.
According to data, Africans account for about 15% of high school graduates in the United States every year, while Africans account for only 8% of Ivy League freshmen at Princeton University and Cornell University. Only one-third of African descent can graduate successfully after entering college, which is half that of white people.
Compared with white classmates, African-American students are burdened with more tuition loans and have worse financial conditions, which is the main reason for them to drop out of school.
People of color are also victims of invisible racial discrimination in the workplace. A report published on the Los Angeles Times website last July said that Facebook was accused of systematic discrimination against people of African descent in hiring, compensation and promotion.
Data shows that only 1.5% of the employees in the company’s technical positions in the United States in 2019 were African-American, and only 3.1% of senior leadership were African-American. The company’s employees have increased by 400% in the past five years, but the proportion has hardly changed.
“Two judicial systems”
In recent years, violent police law enforcement has led to frequent deaths of people of African descent. In 2014, Brown, a young African-American man in Ferguson, Missouri, was shot dead by police without weapons; in 2018, Bradford, an African-American man, acted bravely in Alabama but was killed by the police as a murderer; in May 2020, Floyd, an African-American man was disabled by white police.
Enduring “kneeling” triggered large-scale protests in many parts of the United States.
Freud’s “I can’t breathe” moan speaks out the voice of African-Americans who have been unfairly treated. According to data, in 2020, U.S. policemen shot and killed 1,127 people.
Although African descent accounts for only 13% of the total population of the United States, they account for 28% of the number of people shot dead by the police, three times the probability of white people.
The vast majority of police officers suspected of violent law enforcement are white. According to statistics, from 2013 to 2020, about 98% of the police officers involved were not charged with crimes, and very few were convicted.
Many people on social media criticized the deep-rooted “white privilege” phenomenon in the United States, saying that the United States has “two judicial systems”.
Survival “black and white”
The Washington Post recently quoted a report issued by three economists as saying that the income gap between African-American and white families has been huge and shows no sign of narrowing in the past half century.
In 2016, the report said that the total asset value of 11.5 Afro-American families combined was barely equal to that of an ordinary white family, and a white person with a high school education received almost 10 times the wealth of the family of ordinary African descent.
The coronavirus epidemic further highlights the consequences of racial inequality in the United States. According to data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, African-American, Hispanic and Native Americans have nearly three times the mortality rate of COVID-19 patients in the United States than white people.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor data, the unemployment rate of African-American adults in the United States has been much higher than that of whites since the outbreak of the epidemic.
USA Today commented that far more people of color have died from the epidemic than whites, which can be attributed to the restrictions on jobs of color caused by unequal education and economic systems, housing discrimination leading to dense residential concentrations of people of color, and environmental policies at the expense of the poor.
Escalation of hate violence
Severe racial discrimination has led to a high number of hate crimes in the United States.
The FBI report shows that of the 8,302 cases of hate crimes caused by single bias reported by law enforcement in 2019, 57.6% involved racial and ethnic identity, of which up to 48.4% were African descent, 15.8% were against white, 14.1% were against Latino, and 4.3% of the needles. For Asians.
Since last year, racial discrimination and hate crimes against Asians have escalated as a small number of American politicians have used the epidemic to stigmatize Asians.
In 16 major U.S. cities, hate crimes against Asian Americans in 2020 were up 149 percent compared to 2019, according to the U.S. Center for Hate and Extremism Research.
On March 16 this year, there were three shootings in Atlanta, Georgia, killing eight people, including six Asian women, triggering strong protests across the United States against the growing violence and discrimination against Asians in the epidemic.
