An Endless Cycle

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Z9V6t3PeAtk3Td8XyPdP2UmwPY0YG1V06dOYwelFgoA/edit?usp=sharing

There is a saying, “History is written by the victors.” In short, it means that stories are told by those who have the power. Which in turn means that the voices of those who are struggling often go unheard. America is branded as a country where anyone can succeed if they work hard enough. However, the people telling those success stories are more often than not white. More specifically, they are typically older white men. They are the exact people who this country’s Constitution was written to support. And as time goes on, it is becoming more apparent that the “American Dream” is a privilege that is much more easily achieved by white Americans. Many Americans perceive poor Black Americans as lazy or criminal. Many white Americans believe that it is only Black Americans’ own fault that they are struggling and that if they worked harder they would not be living in poverty.  However, Black Americans’  struggle to rise out of poverty is actually due to the lasting effects of America’s bigoted past. 

Growing up in my little town in Queens, I had the opportunity to be around many diverse different groups and learn about their cultures. While I grew up rather fortunate, especially in comparison to those around me, many of the people in my town did not have much money. They lived in small apartments off of government assistance. Many needed food stamps and most of the children at my school received free lunch. While many more privileged people might dismiss my town as “ghetto” and accuse the folks living there of being “lazy” or “mooching off their tax dollars,” they don’t acknowledge why  Black Americans are living below the poverty line in disproportionate amounts.  20.8% of Black Americans are below the poverty line as opposed to only 8.1% of white Americans being below the poverty line (Winship,). 

This is a fact that won’t surprise most Americans. However, many Americans are misled as to why this is. Americans are misled because instead of listening to the poor Black Americans explain why they are struggling, they instead listen to the explanations of well off white folks, white folks who have never dealt with the plight of being judged by their skin color. Often, these white folks will claim they have the authority to speak on behalf of all people experiencing poverty because they themselves worked their way up from poverty to  success and wealth. However, they are neglecting the struggles that can be caused by one’s race, and which would make it harder to rise up economically.

While rising out of poverty is an astounding accomplishment for anyone, it is significantly harder for people of color. To understand the true plight of Black Americans, one must begin from the beginning. Black Americans have been fighting for their rights since they were freed from slavery, and they are still fighting today. They have been expected to just catch up to white Americans when they have started miles behind, when they have had so many things pitted against them. Although many white Americans dismiss those hardships because they view them as too long ago, they don’t realize racism existed in our recent history and effects still linger now.   Things certainly did immediately get better for Black Americans after the Emancipation Proclamation in the late 19th century. However as stated in the article “A Brief History of Civil Rights for Blacks”  after the Black Americans were freed they still didn’t have any rights. Racist state governments kept the newly freed slaves from voting by requiring regulations that were impossible to meet. These regulations included “grandfather clauses”, which meant you could only vote if your grandfather could, obviously no former slave’s grandfather could vote, literacy tests, which the slaves would fail because they had never received a proper education, and  poll taxes which required a fee they could not pay because they had no money. The inability to vote made it very hard for Black American to change the racist policies being made against them. In 1896, Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson ruled that segregation was legally allowed and coined the term “separate but equal,” which meant it was okay to keep Black and white Americans segregated  as long as they were equal. However, they were not equal. Black bathrooms were often smaller and less well kept than the white ones, Black schools were underfunded and only received books that the white schools didn’t want or need, white seats were at the front of the bus and trains while Blacks were required to stand in the back, and the list goes on. This segregation went on for decades and well into the mid 20th century. In a photo captured by Elliot Erwitt titled “Segregated Water Fountains,” two water fountains are depicted. The one on the left is rather large. It has a nice white top that looks somewhat like a sink, and it is resting on a big black box with a logo and three stripes down the side. Above this water fountain there is a label that reads “white.” The nice water fountain has a pipe coming out of it that leads to another much less decorative water fountain. The water fountain on the right looks plain white and kind of like a toilet bowl. The sign above this one reads “colored.” There is a young man of color drinking casually from it. That was the norm when this photo was taken in 1950, to discriminate based off of skin color and to give people of color a poorer quality of life. Though the 1950s  may seem like a long time ago, one must keep in mind that some of the people who were young then are still alive now, both the people who discriminated and the people who experienced the discrimination. The 1950s is  when most schools began to integrate. Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka was the Supreme Court ruling, in 1954, that banned segregation in schools. This meant for the first time in history that all young Black Americans were going to be legally allowed to get the same quality of education as their white counterparts. However, some prejudiced whites, specifically in the South, did everything they could to discourage African Americans from coming to their school. One prime 

example of this is the Little Rock Nine. The Little Rock Nine were the first ever black students to attend and integrate the public high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. They were met with immense amounts of hate from their white schoolmates’ and their families. White schoolmates, families, and even the state’s national guard stood on the field in the front of the school their first day to stop them from coming in. This encounter is captured in a picture taken by photographer Will Counts. The photo is of Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine. She is simply walking with her school books as the school girls around her yell and stare. One girl, later identified as Hazel Bryan, is behind Eckford with her mouth wide open, screaming at her. Two girls on the right side of the photo ( left side of Eckford) stare at Eckford, while the one closer to her nudges her friend in the opposite direction. Despite most of the people in the photo being other school-age girls none of them want anything to do with her. The only thing that differentiates her from everyone else is her skin color, which shows how much the color of her skin mattered to them. They didn’t know anything about her, but they hated her just because she was black. The reason this image is so important is because it serves as a reminder of America’s racist past. It is a reminder that things didn’t just immediately get better for Black Americans after slavery ended. It is a reminder that most of America’s white population wanted to keep Black Americans from rising up and gaining power. Bigoted whites wanted to keep Black Americans from receiving the same quality of education as  whites, in fear that if they had an even playing ground then Black Americans could be just as successful as white Americans.  It is a reminder that in our semi-recent history, racism was commonplace in most of America. It was so common that a state government sent soldiers, people whose job is to protect and serve the citizens, to stop black students, black citizens,  from going to school with white students. Both Elizabeth Eckford and the screaming girl, Hazel Bryan, are still alive, meaning people with the same ideologies and beliefs Hazel once had are still alive and still raising children and families to potentially think and act in the heinous ways they did. 

Another reason Black Americans struggle to rise out of poverty is that many Black children are born into poverty “Almost half of black boys and girls are in households in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, compared to just over one in ten white children” (Winship).  This can be connected to America’s bigoted past because segregation made it harder for Black Americans to live in better areas and go to better schools. The segregation of the past is the reason many towns are still so segregated today. As stated in the comical but educational segment of “Adam Ruins Everything: The Disturbing History of Suburbs,”  red lining made it impossible for Black Americans and other minorities to live in the nice suburbs. Red-lining was a tactic by the government where they labeled some communities as “green,” which meant they were “good” and would receive home loans, and labeled other communities as “red,” which meant they were “bad” and would not receive home loans. Of course the government labeled the communities with more blacks and minorities as red neighborhoods.  The federal government encouraged suburban developers  to discriminate against people of color and they did. This in turn caused 98% of home loans to go to white Americans. Eventually the green areas attracted business, which made their property values go up, which meant white families could sell their homes and pass down their wealth to their children, while the members of the red communities, who were mostly Black, were stuck in poverty. Eventually it was made illegal for developers to discriminate based on race. However, the damage had already been done. Most of the  Black Americans could not afford to move to the well off white areas.  This left many Black children being born into more impoverished areas, which continues today.  When an area has more money, their school gets better funding. This is why many of the schools in the poor, predominantly black communities have less funding, which means a lower quality of education. This can make it harder to get a job or get accepted to a college and  is why many young Black people, especially young Black men, turn to gangs and drug dealing. All of this means when they have children their children will grow up around this behavior and be more likely to succumb to it. Blacks are also much more likely to be arrested for possessing drugs than whites, despite possessing them at about the same rate. The  National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 6.6 percent of white adolescents and young adults (aged 12 to 25) sold drugs, compared to just 5.0 percent of Blacks. This excessive incarceration is not unique to drug dealing. Black neighborhoods are more heavily policed, leading to higher rates of incarceration.  These higher rates of incarceration of Black Americans are another reason Black Americans struggle to rise out of poverty. On one hand for the incarcerated person, it is harder for them to get a good job once they are released. On the other hand, this also has an effect on the incarcerated person’s family, especially if they have children. 

As a child whose father was in jail for most of her adolescent years, I have definitely felt the effect of the excessive incarceration of black men on drug charges. My mom had to work two jobs to make up for him being missing. This meant that many nights there was no one there to help me with my homework, and I had no family dinners to learn proper manners and behaviors. I taught myself many of the things I know now. I was fortunate enough to live in a nice neighborhood throughout middle school and high school and learned from the people around me. However, many poor Black children do not have the luxury. They might not have people to notice why they are struggling, and if no one notices, they often slip through the cracks. They are made to feel like it’s too much to do on their own, and they give up or turn to gangs. Their voices and struggles go unheard because they are trapped in a system that is working against them. Many white people who grew up poor and have earned their riches are also quick to judge because they believe “If I can do it, why can’t you?” However, they have not gone through that triumph as a person of color, and they have not been immediately judged based on something they can’t change. Even when Black Americans do break this cycle, for example, America’s first Black woman billionaire Oprah Winfrey, they address how hard it was to do so as a person of color. They are often immediately viewed as a criminal or as unprofessional. Unfortunately, many young Black Americans stay trapped in this endless cycle of being born into poverty and having their children born into poverty, and this is why their stories go untold.

Many Black and white Americans have tried to bring to light the modern day inequalities existing in America. For example, the Black Lives Matter movement addresses racial profiling and police brutality, even this movement has been put down by the argument that “All Lives Matter.”. However in the past, the word “all” hasn’t always included Black Americans, for example in the Declaration of Independence, when the Founding Fathers stated  that “all men are created equal,” that didn’t include the Black men they treated as property. Nevertheless, as we progress as a nation, more and more black voices are getting a platform. Furthermore, the country as a whole has  tried to level the playing field through policies such as affirmative action,which favors groups previously discriminated against when making decisions like college admissions or hiring for a job. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t have a long way to go. As a country we cannot forget the shameful things we have done in the past and how they affect the present. We must allow ourselves to be held accountable by those we have put down. Only then can we truly give everyone an equal chance at success. 

 

Works Cited 

“Black History Timeline.” Black History Month Timeline. Web. 01 Oct. 2020.

Blakemore, Erin. “The Story Behind the Famous Little Rock Nine ‘Scream Image’. History.com 01 Sept. 2017. Web. 01 Oct. 2020.

“A Brief History of Civil Rights in the United States: Introduction.” Guides. Georgetown Law Library. Web. 01 Oct. 2020.

Winship, Scott “Basic Statistics.” Web. 03 Sept. 2020.

Counts, Will. Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan. September 4th 1957. Indiana University, Little Rock.

Erwitt, Elliot. Segregated Water Fountains. 1950. North Carolina.

Ingraham, Christopher. “White People Are More Likely to Deal Drugs, but Black People Are More Likely to Get Arrested for It.” The Washington Post. WP Company, 26 Apr. 2019. Web. 01 Oct. 2020.