It is all still institutionalized racism. The police. The social services that the Poor receives. There is still institutionalized racism.
I worked in Newark, New Jersey for five years or so. There was a police organization of Black Officers. They way they handled themselves and addressed each other and the community was no different in 'style' than any Black man in the city or on the street. They didn't clash, they blended. They blended so well it was scary at times. That was before Cory was Mayor.
They tried. They wanted the community to be as good as it could be. There were separated from the community looking at them through a gun site. They walked the same walk and talked the same talk. They were men, I never saw a woman at any of those meetings.
They had no aspirations, except, to bring an understanding to the people they were on their side. I don't think Caucasian officers could do the same thing, although they tried. Every police officer in Newark that I had met along the way was dedicated to their jobs and the people they served.
The police force wasn't perfect, there was corruption and it was found and prosecuted. That didn't matter. The officers I knew simply saw that as a problem to explain to the community to be sure they understood all of them were not involved and mostly naive to it's existence. Corruption existed and didn't taint every member of the police force.
It wasn't reverse racism, it is just that the Caucasian officers weren't in that space. The Black officers met on a regular basis to support each other and trade information. That was in the 1990s.
There is still institutional racism. It has to stop. When minority communities state they don't believe life is better, there is a reason why. They need to vote, but, they also have to have candidates that matter.
November 14, 2014
By Jamelle Bouie
...The grievances haven’t gone away, (click here) and in era of slow growth and stagnant wages, they’ve likely gotten worse. It’s why, in the 2012 presidential election, Republican nominee Mitt Romney ran a series of ads—concentrated in the white working-class areas of Ohio and Pennsylvania—attacking President Obama for “gutting welfare” and “cutting checks” to people who wouldn’t work. For as much as this was plainly racial—welfare is still associated with blacks in the public mind—it also reflected a genuine frustration with the shape of the world.
Working-class whites are physically closer to the poor. And to them, as Kevin Drumnotes, the poor are often “folks next door who don’t do a lick of work but somehow keep getting government checks paid for by their tax dollars.” It doesn’t matter that working-class tax rates are relatively low, and that anti-poverty programs are a small part of the federal budget. What matters is that they pay taxes but don’t get the same kind of benefits. Again, here’s Drum:...
