Last year, I was fortunate enough to volunteer for the Tennessee Justice Center, a non-profit organization advocating for policies to reduce racial disparities and provide equal opportunities for everyone. The full report is about sixty pages long, but here is a brief look of how it starts. The works cited page at the end contains all of the citations I collected for the entire report (not just the section you see here). I decided to leave the whole page in to show how seriously I took this project and how much information I have included.
Introduction
James Chaney was a civil rights activist whose lifeless body was found buried in Mississippi in the summer of 1964, along with activists Michael Shwerner and Andrew Goodman. After an official autopsy, observed by the FBI, concluded that there was no bodily injury to any of the three men, pathologist Dr. David Spain from New York decided to take a look himself. He did not know of the incident of the three men until his friend and physician Charles Goodrich called him for help. Goodrich and Alfred Kogon, two Black doctors from the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR), were turned away from the University of Mississippi Medical Center for the official autopsy. By now, Michael and Andrew’s bodies had been sent home, leaving only James’ corpse for another look.
“[James Chaney’s] lower jaw was completely shattered, split vertically, from some tremendous force,” Dr. Spain reported in awe, “the bones in the right shoulder were crushed – again, from some strong and direct blow…. I could barely believe the destruction to these frail young bones. In my twenty-five years as a pathologist and medical examiner, I have never seen bones so severely shattered, except in tremendously high speed accidents or airplane crashes. It was obvious to any first-year medical student that this boy had been beaten to a pulp” (Dittmer).
We may never know exactly what happened the night James died, although one investigator theorized that he “broke away from the group of men that were holding him captive. Shortly after he made the break, he was shot at several times by several different people, but was struck by only three bullets, each of which was alleged to have been fired from a different firearm” (Dittmer). This may be one of, if not the most, heartbreaking stories of the Civil Rights Movement that I have ever read. It is easy to forget that for each hero whose name appears in our history books, there are at least ten, twenty, perhaps a hundred more who are unheard and forgotten. We should consider ourselves lucky that, due to the brave actions of people like James, Michael, and Andrew, and the persistence of Dr. Goodrich and Dr. Spain, our modern-day world represents one of greater equality and prosperity for all.
Right?
Talented academics long before me have written extensively about the unfair treatment of African Americans, not only in the form of historic tragedies like the case of James Chaney, but much more recent injustices as well. I would like to bring a new perspective to the table regarding the health status of African Americans in the U.S. We will see that, on average, they tend to have the worst health outcomes in almost every area compared to every other racial or ethnic group in this country. A large proportion of this can be traced back to historical injustices enforced by the government, and that while our legal system has significantly improved in its goals of “equal protection” under the law, the damage it has caused in the past still accompanies us to this day. On paper, we are a country devoted to the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In practice, however, we are still lagging behind and must make serious changes to align our actions with our words.
Equally important, however, is our own attitudes and actions towards this problem. While the political and legal systems have played a significant role leading to the economic and social inequalities we see today, many of us forget that we are susceptible to the same errors in thinking as politicians were in the last two centuries and beyond. If we genuinely want to understand the problems of disparities in health care and how to solve them, then we must learn to recognize the flaws in our own ways of thinking on a personal level.
The Color of Law
Living and Breathing
The American author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates authored a bone-chilling article entitled The Case for Reparations, in which he illustrated an utterly depressing picture of African Americans in the last century. As part of the article, Coates interviewed Clyde Ross, a man who was denied many opportunities offered to his white peers throughout his life. At one point in the article, Coates describes how Ross bought a home “on contract” in North Lawndale, a suburb of Chicago, in 1961:
“Three months after Clyde Ross moved into his house, the boiler blew out. This would normally be a homeowner’s responsibility, but in fact, Ross was not really a homeowner. His payments were made to the seller, not the bank. And Ross had not signed a normal mortgage. He’d bought ‘on contract’: a predatory agreement that combined all the responsibilities of homeownership with all the disadvantages of renting—while offering the benefits of neither. Ross had bought his house for $27,500. The seller, not the previous homeowner but a new kind of middleman, had bought it for only $12,000 six months before selling it to Ross. In a contract sale, the seller kept the deed until the contract was paid in full—and, unlike with a normal mortgage, Ross would acquire no equity in the meantime. If he missed a single payment, he would immediately forfeit his $1,000 down payment, all his monthly payments, and the property itself” (Coates).
The fact that Coates was able to talk to somebody, in person, living and breathing in front of him, who has suffered directly from these racist policies, shows how recently this nation’s efforts to achieve legal equality began. Unfortunately, our transition to economic equality remains even more incomplete. The Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress stated that, compared to White Americans, Black Americans have higher unemployment rates (even among college graduates), higher poverty rates, lower incomes, less wealth, less education (high school and college graduates), higher incarceration rates, and are more hurt by the decline in unions (Beyer). Considering the experience of people like Clyde Ross, who have been financially strained and restricted from pursuing economic opportunities due only to their race, we can see that they, their children, and their grandchildren will have an uphill battle.
The De Facto Myth
Not many people would disagree that, historically, the United States has had truly horrific treatment of African Americans (and this is an understatement). What we sometimes forget is how recently this sort of treatment has been supported and enforced by the government. Even if we assume (for the sake of argument) that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended all legal and individual instances of racial discrimination, it would be delusional to suggest that we have or could have moved on from our unequal treatment in the past without serious compensation. For the benefit of those unconvinced by the severity of our “separate but equal” history, let us consult an expert on the subject.
A member of the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow of the Thurgood Marshall Institute, Richard Rothstein, makes the distinction between de facto and de jure segregation in his book The Color of Law. As Rothstein puts it, acts of de facto segregation “result from private practices, not from law or government policy…. Segregation by intentional government action is not de facto. Rather, it is what courts call de jure: segregation by law and public policy” (Rothstein). To take some examples, an act of de facto segregation might include refusing to hire someone based on their race. De jure segregation would include the Jim Crow laws in the twentieth century, such as forbidding black people from living in specific neighborhoods. What Rothstein points out is that many of us today, including political liberals and conservatives, have fallen for the “de facto segregation myth” – that is, the belief that most of our current-day racial inequalities are caused by acts of private individuals, rather than governmental activity. The Color of Law is, in large part, a rebuttal to this myth that has been popularized since the 1970s. The truth is that unequal treatments in housing, schooling, recreational facilities, urban neighborhoods, rent and home equity, government program assistance, hospitals, police protection, and countless other sectors of life have directly contributed to the racial disparities we have today. And all of these were enforced by local, state, and federal governments.
As we will see in more detail later, the government’s neighborhood divisions among racial lines are unambiguously responsible for the differences in health outcomes. For now, suffice it to say that the quality of a person’s neighborhood has strong impacts on their health status. If someone lives in a place that has fewer economic opportunities, worse schools for children, higher crime rates, more pollution, and less access to health care services, they are at a much higher risk for a variety of diseases and injuries. Since the government forced African Americans into such neighborhoods for decades, it is fair to say that it is largely responsible for their comparatively worse health statistics. De jure, not de facto, segregation is the cause of this.
Let’s take a few examples. One common explanation for the twentieth-century segregation of white middle-class communities and isolated African American communities is that the latter tends to have less money. Therefore, they could not afford to live in more expensive communities, but they would once enough of them improved their educations and moved out of high-poverty neighborhoods. However, as Rothstein explains, “we cannot understand the income and wealth gap that persists between African Americans and whites without examining governmental policies that purposely kept black incomes low throughout most of the twentieth century…. If government purposely depressed the incomes of African Americans, with the result that they were priced out of mainstream housing markets, then these economic policies are also important parts of the architecture of de jure segregation” (Rothstein). This is an intuitive suggestion; perhaps it is fair to blame some employees for not “working hard enough” to earn higher wages, but surely this is a mistaken sentiment if the authorities prevented them from being able to receive those wages. Dreadfully, it isn’t much of a challenge to find instances of this happening to African Americans in our history. After the Civil War, the sharecropping system appeared in the South. This was a system of indentured servitude where farmers (almost always former slaves) would work on plantations, supposedly in exchange for wages. Although, as the costs of food and living arrangements accumulated, oftentimes the sharecroppers became the ones who owed the plantation owners money! Local law enforcement approved of this system and often arrested African Americans for petty offenses, thus slowing the pace at which they could match their wages.
Later in the 1930s, President Roosevelt could only gain the support he needed for his New Deal programs by appealing to southern Democrats who, as one might expect, were white supremacists. “In consequence,” says Rothstein, “Social Security, minimum wage protection, and the recognition of labor unions all excluded from coverage occupations in which African Americans predominated: agriculture and domestic service” (Rothstein). If new government programs accepted African American workers, then they would almost certainly be placed in less skilled jobs than their white colleagues. As such, they would receive lower wages and fewer worker benefits. Such programs included the NRA, the TVA, and the CCC. Why wasn’t there a law that prohibited this unfair treatment? There could have been one in 1935, when Senator Robert Wagner of New York proposed a bill that would prohibit “government certification of unions that did not grant African Americans membership and workplace rights”. Unfortunately, “The American Federation of Labor (AFL) lobbied Wagner to remove the clause, and he did so” (Rothstein). Thus, the “Wagner Act” allowed the government to protect the bargaining rights of unions that denied African Americans membership, segregated them into lower-paid jobs, or even forced the company to fire them.
In regard to living arrangements, the government also gave more assistance to white suburbs than black communities throughout the twentieth century. For instance, Charles Vatterott was a 1940s area builder in the St Louis area who created two separate housing projects: St. Ann for whites and De Porres for African Americans. However, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans Administration (VA) only provided financing for St. Ann, not De Porres. “As a result,” says Rothstein, “the construction was shoddier and the house design skimpier than it had been in St. Ann. Because potential buyers were denied FHA or VA mortgages, many of the homes were rented…. The De Porres development for African Americans also lacked the community facilities – parks and playgrounds – that Vatterott had built into the St. Ann subdivision” (Rothstein). Vatterott’s story is not unique; the FHA and VA insured half of all new mortgages nationwide after World War II (guess which half). When William Levitt planned to build his infamous Levittowns, the FHA only approved preconstruction plans if the neighborhood committed only to sell to whites. Even if Vatterott and Levitt did not themselves hold racist attitudes, they had little power to help people who wanted homes but were denied government assistance. Keep that point in mind; even if some people did not personally have racist beliefs, they still lived in a society that reinforced unequal and unfair outcomes based on race.
If White neighborhoods were so much better, then why didn’t African Americans move into them once they were built? Some tried, but this simply caused White residents to leave (known as white flight). Other times, the new, shall we say, “diverse” residents were met with violence. Take, for instance, Bill and Daisy Myers, an African American family who bought a home in Levittown in 1957. Bill Myers was a World War II veteran and worked as a lab technician, and Daisy was a college graduate. On paper, they were American heroes and a model family, but this was not enough. “When no bank would provide a mortgage because the Myers family was black,” Rothstein writes, “a New York City philanthropist offered to give them a private mortgage, and Bill and Daisy Myers, with their three children, occupied their new home” (Rothstein). Within a few days, “As many as 600 white demonstrators assembled in front of the house and pelted the family and its house with rocks” (Rothstein). Unfortunately for the Myers family, local law enforcement did not provide them with protection, allowing white supremacists and Ku Klux Klan members to terrorize them for four years – four years! - until they agreed to sell their home and move to a different town. Rothstein’s bold analysis of this awful situation would put anyone else’s to shame:
“Certainly, we cannot hold the government accountable for every action of racially biased police officers. Yet if these officers’ superiors were aware of racially discriminatory activities conducted under color of law, as they surely were, and either encouraged these activities or took inadequate steps to restrain them, then these were no longer merely rogue actions but expressed state policy that violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of due process and equal protection” (Rothstein).
As time went on and the government finally began to enact and enforce policies that prohibited racial discrimination, racists adopted a new strategy. Rather than mention explicitly that “Black people” or minorities were not allowed to live in certain areas, they said that people of certain other categories, like those who lived in apartment buildings (already statistically higher among African Americans than Whites) could not live in single-family neighborhoods. “In a 1970 Oklahoma case,” says Rothstein, “the segregated town of Lawton refused to permit a multiunit development in an all-white neighborhood after residents circulated a petition in opposition. They used racial appeals to urge citizens to sign, although the language of the petition itself did not mention race” (Rothstein). A good number of these “race-neutral” policies that harm some racial groups more severely than others are still around, and despite the motivations behind their creation, they can be difficult to remove or change without a clear, referenced target.
Still, it is worth reciting the words of one federal appeals court who said, “If proof of a civil rights violation depends on an open statement by an official of an intent to discriminate, the Fourteenth Amendment offers little solace to those seeking its protection” (Rothstein). On an individual level, a person does not demonstrate that they aren’t racist simply by stating it literally. This is the problem with the notorious, “I’m not racist, but…” Rather, they must speak and act in ways that are consistent with “anti-racist” values. It seems odd, then, that we should not have the same attitude towards the law as well.
Individual Action Versus Law
The evidence is clear that race and socioeconomic status are directly correlated with health outcomes. One study published in the National Institute of Health states that, “On average, Whites…have better health and more socioeconomic resources than Blacks. Whites have lower BMIs, better self-rated health, and higher levels of educational attainment, annual income, and annual wealth than Black respondents” (Boen). We will explain this in more detail later, but first I want to stress the significance of the government’s involvement in these disparities. Contrary to the de facto myth that current-day economic inequalities are caused mainly by the actions of private individuals, the economic standing today of the African American population is unambiguously and heavily caused by the decisions of powerful public officials. We can say all day long that a person “should have” done this instead of that, made choice B instead of choice A; but, when the options of where to live, work, send your kids to school, and raise a family are cut short by the people in charge, it hardly seems fair to hold those who make “bad decisions” to the same moral standards as their luckier peers with access to plenty of opportunities. Individual action is certainly important, but that can only take a person so far when the law itself is working against them.
James Chaney, Michael Shwerner, and Andrew Goodman did not donate their time, risk their safety and their lives solely because individual white supremacists refused to sell their houses to African Americans. They did so because the same legal and political procedures who defended white citizens – police officers, judges, governors, and representatives who were supposed to protect everyone – created and enforced policies that targeted people like them. They were targeted due to a characteristic that they had no control over, and which provided as little indication to their moral and ethical character as their height. In cases where the written law did protect them, it was reasonable to suspect that it might be ignored. They died at the hands of ordinary citizens, but only because those citizens were confident that their actions would be supported or at least, not heavily punished enough to deter them.
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