I remember a "study" about about employers being less likely to hire someone when they have a typically black name that came out over a decade ago. Yet I'm sure the same is true today. "Raising awareness" does little when it comes to ingrained prejudice.

I'm tired of the ineffectualness of these studies. I'm frustrated that study after study comes out, yet little changes. I wish there were some more direct way to convert studies - which ostensibly supply us with some facts - into policy.

I worked as a Congressional Intern when I was in high school, and I used to pick up yellow "info packs" from the Library of Congress for the Congressperson I worked for. The "info" in them was so out of date! I was getting better information from my high school textbooks!

Perhaps this is the role of "think tanks" - to compile these studies so they can collectively inform policy. I just wish I could see more of the impact...or perhaps even more of the "chain of custody" so that I could see the facts generated by studies leading to good policies and social change.

having a hand in the fact they blacks and minorities are where they are today because they gutted the Civil Rights Act and invalidated a key part of the Voting Rights Act.

It's infuriating that a handful of unelected officials are ruining perfectly great laws.

Thanks for the OP, I had missed both columns. K&R

This is what certain folks on our side don't seem to get: Racism doesn't just hurt People of Color, nor does it "benefit" white people as a whole(and neither has ever been true, at any point in this nation's history), it hurts everyone, in some way, somehow.

Whether it be structural or intrapersonal, racism has(like other bigotries, and even prejudice in general!), more than anything else, been used a method of social control, and to divide and conquer. There are many examples of this throughout this nation's history. Perhaps the most notorious of them all was Jim Crow, and how it reigned free over the South for almost three quarters of a century. While a few (white) elites were living high off the hog, many of the rest(white or otherwise!) lived in terrible poverty and squalor; there never was much of a middle class, not until the Fifties anyhow, outside of a select few areas. And much of that was indeed due, in no small part to that particular brand of racism; it's not something we hear about in school much, but it's very true.

and only because whites don't want to "get it". Period. I'm truly getting "sick and tired of being sick and tired" of the ignorance and willful stupidity of a large number of people afraid of losing their self perceived supremacy and privilege. It's a deplorable situation and has been getting worse every year since Reagan let the genie out the bottle. A brown man in the white house has sent a lot of 'privileged' people over the edge.

even in the past year or two. Is it my imagination? I heard so many people call protestors in Ferguson "animals" and I can't help thinking that even fairly recently very few people would have said that out loud. Maybe people are just more outspoken? Either I'm noticing it more or it's worse.

Study after shows inequality and yet it never really changes.
I call this willfull ignorance.

because it doesn't want to be lost. Pretty simple to me.

They feel threatened somehow by even suggesting reality to them.
They have their clouded reality where every criminal is guilty and we are all equal because we elected a black man.

And their crimes are so horrendous and victimize so many, that one evil hedge fund manager or bankster could easily outweigh every single non-violent offender in this nation: black, white, red, yellow....whatever!

The justice system is screwed up against black people in many ways. From being more likely to be arrested, watched more by police, not believed in their testimony, in poverty disproportionately due to discrimination.

Not hard to see that.

From the first link:

smokers. Seems like only blacks are stopped and searched or swatted at their homes for this.

in my Sociology class 35 years ago in college.

I'm white, I have a really good but precarious job, a family....What can I do in my everyday life to change any of this besides voting for candidates that will erase the privileges I have unwittingly benefited from all these years?