We Must Go Deeper

Writing in the Root, Michael Harriot discusses finding that minority and poor students received harsher discipline than whites and well-off students. Glossing over the very real issue that lower-SES students are indeed at higher risk for behavioral problems, he writes  that “the problems of racial inequality in the criminal justice system begin in the educations [sic] system.”

I would say they continue, but do not begin there. They begin in our embracing an economic system in which low-skill work is paid a poverty wage. This creates ghettos, destroys families and depletes capital (financial, emotional, cognitive, safety, health, transportation, modeling, etc.). Historically marginalized, low-capital ethnic groups will get caught in the trap of being forced into working these jobs, and thus sucked into a generational system of oppression as an underclass, as geographic isolation concentrates the effects of poverty, nowhere more so than in neighborhood schools. Dominant ethnic groups will find racism a convenient rationalization for the structural economic system which requires the dehumanization of fellow citizens in order to excuse their continued exploitation. Politicians and pundits will find that demogoguery is an effective tool to gin up support for their personal or political ambition.

The way out is simple in theory, yet difficult in practice: raising wages for this type of work, thus detaching it from ethnic marginalization and geographic segregation.  To truly dig out racism from society, we must go deeper, indeed to the root.