CHARLOTTE C's List: Race and Ethnicity Research

• University of Texas Law School Professor Lino Graglia triggered a firestorm of  criticism for his remarks that "Blacks and Mexican-Americans are not  academically competitive with whites in selective institutions. It is the result  primarily of cultural effects. They have a culture that seems not to encourage  achievement. Failure is not looked upon with disgrace."
• It has been said that race is the plague of civilization.

  • Interesting statement. Could be useful to expand upon

• However, American society has always been enriched by its waves of  immigrants. John Kennedy observed how Alexis de Tocqueville saw the United  States as "a society of immigrants, each of whom had begun life anew, on an  equal footing. This was the secret of America: a nation of people with the fresh  memory of old traditions who dared to explore new frontiers ..." In 2004, the  Census Bureau predicted that in the year 2050 minority groups would comprise  one-half of the total American population of 420 million.  Hispanics will  comprise roughly one-quarter of the population, blacks 15%, and Asians 8%.  

  • Good statistics

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• the United States is undergoing the most significant socio-demographic change  since the huge wave of immigrants in the early 20th century.

• Racial and ethnic minorities accounted for 83 percent of our population  growth this last decade. We are well on the way to becoming a majority-minority  society.

• Race plays a significant role in creating and maintaining fragmented  metropolitan regions through urban sprawl and racialized concentrated  poverty
• The federal government alone has spent  over a trillion dollars through sprawl subsidies to create and  support the jurisdictional segregation that is now the norm in  our metropolitan landscape. While the government paid for and  subsidized white flight from central cities through FHA and VA  mortgage insurance, tax policies and highway and other infrastructure  investments, it also divested the inner cities of their resources  and the people of color in those cities of their opportunities.
• it is necessary to look at the historical forces  behind the racial dynamics in America. At the turn of the century  black Americans comprised 12% (almost nine million) of the American  population, and 90% (almost eight million) of black Americans  still lived in the old Confederate South.
• In short, blacks were not politically, economically  or socially equal to whites; they remained less than full citizens.
• World War II. So the  North began to hire blacks from the South. It was during this  time that blacks started moving to Northern cities in record numbers.
• During the height of the Great Migration, the trickle of blacks  from the rural South to the urban North became a torrent, as five  million blacks moved to the North after 1940.

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