POPULATION-US: Learn History of Racial Oppression, Americans Told

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Sep 19 1998 (IPS) - President Bill Clinton’s Advisory Board on Race has called on U.S. citizens to learn the history of racial oppression and fight racial stereotypes in their country.

The United States was largely built on a “history of white privilege” that has only been partially overcome in recent decades, the Board, which attracted only sporadic media attention during its 15 months’ work, concluded in a report submitted to Clinton Friday.

Moreover, whites remained largely ignorant of the nature of discrimination, persistent more than 130 years after the U.S. Constitution was amended to guarantee equal rights for all citizens regardless of race.

“Evidence presented to the Board makes it clear that many whites, in general, are unaware of how colour is a disadvantage to most members of other groups,” said the 121-page report.

“To understand fully the legacy of race and colour with which we are grappling, we as a nation need to understand that whites tend to benefit, either unknowingly or consciously, from this country’s history of white privilege,” it stated.

Receiving the report, Clinton, currently beset by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, agreed with the importance of using a historical perspective to understand racial problems.

“For more than two centuries,” he said, “we have been committed to the ideas of freedom and equality, but much of our history has been defined by our struggle to overcome our steadfast denial of those ideals and, instead, start to live by them.”

Released with the report was a 74-page study by Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, on recent economic and social trends affecting minority groups. It concluded that “race and ethnicity continue to be salient predictors of well-being in American society.”

“On average,” the Council study said, “non-Hispanic whites and Asians experience advantages in health, education, and economic status relative to blacks, Hispanics and American Indians.”

The study found that during the second half of the 20th century, black citizens – historically the most disadvantaged group in the U.S., next to American Indians – have made “substantial progress” relative to whites in many areas.

However, “this progress generally slowed, or even reversed, between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s,” according to the report.

Moreover, the relative economic status of Hispanics – soon to displace blacks as the country’s largest ethnic minority – generally declined over the past 25 years.

The Hispanic population more than doubled in size over the past 18 years, due largely to an influx of immigrants whose lack of education and skills apparently contributed to the overall economic decline.

Asian and Pacific Islanders, on the other hand, were nearly as well-off as non-Hispanic whites, according to most economic and social indicators.

Yet, there were wide differences between specific communities in each general classification. For example, Cuban Americans had a much higher median family income than Dominican Americans; while median family income for Japanese Americans was more than twice that of Cambodian and Laotian Americans.

The study also found that the Western part of the United States was by far the country’s most diverse region. Some 36 percent of its inhabitants were members of minority groups, of whom more than half were Hispanic.

The least diverse region – only about 15 percent of whose inhabitants were minorities – was the farm belt of the Midwest.

The reports, which marked the culmination of Clinton’s “Initiative on Race,” were likely to be mostly overlooked in the current political climate, in which the Lewinsky scandal continued to monopolise the news.

The initiative, which featured town hall meetings in communities around the country, had been criticised as poorly organised, unfocussed, and biassed against more conservative viewpoints.

Nonetheless, the tone of the documents remained generally hopeful and conciliatory, stressing that racial attitudes had improved since the civil rights movement was launched in the 1950s.

For example, the proportion of whites who said they would move to a new neighbourhood if large numbers of blacks moved into theirs, had declined from 80 percent in 1958 to fewer than 20 percent today.

“It is fair to say that there is a deep-rooted national consensus to the ideals of racial equality and integration, even if that consensus falters on the best means to achieve those ideals,” the Board said.

At the same time, however, it stressed that much more remained to be done to overcome prejudice and discrimination. What’s more, progress would remain difficult to achieve until white citizens came to understand and confront the role race has played in “our collective history”, the Board argued.

“A critical component for a constructive and honest national dialogue about race and racism is a great public awareness of the history of oppression, conquest, and private and government- sanctioned discrimination and their present-day consequences,” it said.

“The path toward racial progress has had a difficult, sometimes bloody history: Our early treatment of American Indians and Alaska Natives, followed by the enslavement and subsequent segregation of African Americans and then the conquest and legal oppression of Mexican Americans and other Hispanics, the forced labour of Chinese Americans, the internment (during World War Two) of Japanese Americans, and the harassment of religious minorities is a history of which many Americans are not fully aware and no American should be proud.”

Special responsibility for undoing stereotypes which underpin discrimination lay with the mass media, according to the report. “While the media has certainly improved the number of minority reporters, newscasters, producers, and filmmakers since then, a major problem still remains regarding the representation, coverage, and portrayal of minorities on the news, on television, in film, and in other forms of media,” it said.