| Number 459 | July 26, 2010 |
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This Week: Racism in Minnesota (And Beyond), Part II
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Greetings, This issue contains the last few pieces of my series on racial disparities in Minnesota and the United States. There's no particular reason to end it here, as I could say a lot more. But there are other things to say, on other subjects, so I'll be moving on. I may publish a little list of resources for further reading in next week's edition. No room this week. The statistics I've been publishing talk a lot more about African American realities than those of Indigenous, Latino, or other identifiable racial or ethnic/national minorities. That's mostly due to the way the statistics appeared in a number of the studies I looked at. In some cases, as with state-by-state comparisons, the people doing the studies claim that there are insufficient numbers of some minority groups to yield meaningful results. Maybe. It's still a big failing, yet I didn't want the lack of data to prevent my publishing what I could get my hands on. NOTE THE NEW MAILING ADDRESS FOR THE NOTES: Happy Summer! Nygaard |
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"Quote" of the Week:
"What would it mean to hold ourselves accountable?"
"As a community, we are facing tough questions. What do Minnesota's documented and stark racial disparities in such important indicators as health, economic status and education say about us, our values and our institutions? What do our state's demographic changes mean for not just Minnesotans of color who will represent 22.5 percent of the population in 2030 but for all of us? What would it mean to hold ourselves accountable to promoting equity and opportunity as a core value, an imperative and a real possibility for Minnesota?" Read the Report Card for yourself here. |
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Racial disparities in health and health care in the United States are well-known and well-documented. Let's start with a list. The following list comes from The Kaiser Family Foundation's 2009 update on "Key Health and Health Care Indicators by Race/Ethnicity and State." This list gives statistics first for the nation as a whole, then for my state of Minnesota: The national INFANT MORTALITY RATE per 1,000 white people is 5.7. For
black people it's 13.6. For white people, the national DIABETES MORTALITY RATE per 100,000
people is 22.5. For black people, it's 47. 6.7 out of 100,000 white people in the U.S. have AIDS. 60.1 of every
100,000 black people do. 12.2 percent of white people in the U.S. are UNINSURED. 20.9 percent
of black people. And, at the root of it all, 12 percent of white people nationally are
OFFICIALLY LIVING IN POVERTY. For black people, it's 33 percent. 33
PERCENT! Just this past spring (March 2010) the National Conference on State Legislatures quoted the Director General of the World Health Organization, who says that "Health inequity really is a matter of life and death." Some facts about the U.S. bear this out. Says the NCSL: * "African American infants are especially at risk for death in the first year of life... They have mortality rates that range from 2 to more than 3 times that of white infants. Similarly, American Indian and Alaska Native infants die at 2 to 3 times the rate of white infants from SIDS, unintentional injuries and homicides, and more than 4.5 times the rate of white infants from pneumonia." * "African Americans continue to suffer the greatest burden for each of the most common types of cancer." The federal Centers for Disease Control just released, in May, their report called "Deaths: Final Data for 2007". They reported that "Differences in mortality between the black and white populations persisted. The age-adjusted death rate was 1.3 times greater, infant mortality rate 2.4 times greater, and maternal mortality rate 2.7 times greater for the black population than for the white population." End of Life Care The lifelong burden of inequitable treatment by the health system is followed, at the end of life, by inequitable treatment in nursing home care. The Commonwealth Fund released a report in November of 2008 called "Racial Disparities in Access to Long-Term Care: The Illusive Pursuit of Equity." (I think they mean "Elusive," and the grammar is wrong, but we get the idea.) Reading the report, we learn that: * "African Americans tend to reside in lower-quality nursing homes compared with whites, who have increasingly turned toward private-pay, assisted-living facilities." * "In 2000, African Americans were more likely than whites to be in nursing homes cited for deficiencies, including those causing harm or immediate jeopardy, and in homes terminated from Medicare and Medicaid." * "African Americans were less likely to be in nursing homes with the highest staffing level of direct-care providers and the highest ratio of registered nurses to all nursing staff. They were more likely to be in understaffed facilities and in facilities housing predominantly Medicaid residents." Minnesota, once again, stands out from the crowd, as Commonwealth reports: "The five states with the highest racial disparities in quality of care were Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Indiana, and Minnesota." The report concludes that "Achieving greater racial equity will require the U.S. to address the increasing economic fragmentation of its health system... and the further division along income and racial lines." |
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The Organizing Apprenticeship Project, in their MN Legislative Report Card on Racial Equity for 2009, states that "a persistent gap in opportunity and access to quality and experienced teachers exists among students of color, American Indian students and white classmates. A statewide policy commitment to target deep and persistent racial disparities is required so we will not reinforce them." In January 2010 the Minnesota Minority Education Partnership (MMEP) released a short paper called "Comments on Race to the Top Funds" that included a few facts about racial disparities in education in Minnesota. They said: "White students have an 80 percent high school completion rate compared to 41 percent of Latinos, 41 percent of African-Americans, and 41 percent of American Indians." "Minnesota has one of the largest gaps in the nation between whites and persons of color and Indians when it comes to degrees awarded per 100 college students." And "only 8 states are worse than Minnesota in the reading performance of African-American students." [Emphasis in original] An earlier MMEP report called "2009 State of Students of Color and American Indian Students Report," says that "Minnesota is a national leader in providing a good education to a majority of its White students but not to a majority of its Students of Color and American Indian Students." In the introductory comments of this 2009 Report, MMEP makes a powerful statement: "History tells us that Minnesotans are hesitant to acknowledge the racist nature of educational outcomes; rather the problem has been treated as a race neutral or personal responsibility issue. While race inequalities are indeed enabled by individual actions they are most powerfully perpetuated by systemic actions. This report focuses on systemic causes, because bad systems can thwart even the best efforts of individuals exercising personal responsibility to rise above racism." |
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The previous article noted that "Minnesotans are hesitant to acknowledge the racist nature of educational outcomes." But it's not just educational outcomes. In the last Notes I talked about a study by the Economic Policy Institute which showed that, when it comes to the disparity in unemployment between white people and black people, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul is by far the worst metropolitan area in the United States. What follows is a close reading of a recent editorial on this study in my region's Newspaper of Record, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. It reveals some of the thinking behind the "hesitancy" of White people to see and speak about racism. I'm not picking on the Star Trib, in fact I chose this editorial because I think the thinking in it represents the liberal mainstream of this state quite well. The editorial appeared ten days after the Star Trib relegated their report on the actual study to the Business pages. The headline made me uneasy right off the bat: "This Is One List We'd Rather Not Top; Racial Disparities Are Putting this Region's Prosperity at Risk." Unfortunately the body of the editorial revealed the same racist bias as the headline. Get the Message? There are a couple of very disturbing messages embedded in the language of the editorial. One message, revealed by the headline, is that there is something known as "this region" that, apparently, doesn't include people of color. After all, as I report elsewhere in this issue, 41.2 percent of black Minnesotans are officially living in poverty. So the "prosperity" that they say is "at risk" is only "prosperity" for white people. It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine the headline-writer taking it upon herself to change the headline to read "Racial Disparities Are Putting Prosperity of Region's White People at Risk." The experiment continues when we try to imagine if anyone would be embarrassed by such a headline. Who might be? Why? The other message in this editorial has to do with what it is about this news that makes it a "problem." I was looking for some wording in the editorial having to do with the morality of the issue. That is, I was looking for a comment indicating that such a disparity is simply wrong in principle, and cannot be tolerated. The editors do point out that the racial unemployment gap "is disturbingly consistent with other key racial disparities found in the state" from "K-12 education to health care to housing," and that this latest news "should be alarming enough to provoke action." The problem comes when the editors tell us what it is that they consider so alarming about this study: "As minority populations grow," they say, "the state cannot afford to have so many of its residents unhealthy, undereducated and unemployed." There's the second message: That the problem would be "affordable" if only the state had fewer people who are too sick or ignorant to work. The impression that this gap is only a problem if it affects the majority was reinforced by the editorialists' comment that "such disparities weaken the state's economic competitiveness." Well, yes, I suppose they do. The problem, for me, comes from the lack of any hint of what I consider to be the fundamental problem: It's not right that many people in Minnesota are excluded from economic opportunity due to factors beyond their control. Nowhere in the editorial do we see the word "shame," for instance. "Ethics" were never mentioned, nor were "morals." There was no mention of "cruelty" or "racism." The editorial concluded with this sentence: "People of all races will suffer if society fails to address the kinds of racial disparities that are holding back the Twin Cities and Minnesota." This little Nygaard Notes series is attempting to call attention not only to the unemployment gap that is the subject of this Star Tribune editorial, but to the overall pattern that is as well-documented as any subject I've ever studied. Don't take my word for it; just Google "racial disparities and Minnesota" and read a few of the 27,000 items you'll see. One wonders if the Star Tribune editors—and the unknown number of Minnesotans whom they undoubtedly represent—are aware that this well-documented pattern is telling us that there is a "problem" here, and that it is already affecting "people of all races." It's a moral problem, or perhaps a spiritual problem. As I look at this issue through the eyes of a "White" person, here's what I see: Whether consciously suffering from our knowledge of this racist reality, or unconsciously suffering from the numbness and/or blindness that the maintenance of white privilege requires, White people are suffering under the current system, and will continue to suffer until we get this turned around. |
