(By David Sirota, Salon.com).In the annals of contemporary American history, the power of white denialism and the “post-racial” fallacy is not to be underestimated. As race scholar Tim Wise has recounted, in the early 1960s, most white Americans told Gallup pollsters that African-Americans had equal economic and educational opportunities to get ahead.
Those were the results, mind you, at the height of the Jim Crow era, when discrimination and white-on-black racial violence were out in the open and, in many cases, celebrated. So it’s no surprise that with that kind of overt bigotry now underground, white denialism of persistent institutional racism is alive and well, according to new national survey data analyzed by the Greenlining Institute.
As the watchdog group’s report finds:
– While many objective measures of health suggest that black Americans are in worse health overall than whites, a majority of whites believe blacks’ health is “about the same” as whites. A plurality of blacks, 53 percent, as well as 39 percent of Latinos and 50 percent of people from other racial backgrounds, believe that blacks are in worse health overall than whites.
– 67 percent of blacks and 52 percent of Latinos believe that blacks make less money than whites, a view that tracks with official statistics on income, wealth and unemployment. Only 37 percent of whites believe that blacks make less money than whites, with a narrow majority believing that blacks’ and whites’ incomes are about the same.
Read the full story at Salon.com.
