In 10 Minutes, ESPN's Bomani Jones Lays Waste To The Sterling Issue
to go around here. In my world you're not allowed to own an NBA team if you're a slumlord, either.
April 29th, 2014 at 11:19 PM ^
in recent memory.
But the lack of awareness of poverty in white America is a concern. White America is not a block of suburbanites living in Elysium with no socioeconomic problems. If anything these only highlights how little both whites and blacks know about each other. People THINK they know because they talk to members of a group or visit ana area. But they really don't.
I think all of America is in dire need of education.No one knows anythin about anyone outside of their social group.
it's outstanding as far as race is concerned.
But the lack of awareness of kittens being slain in the streets is a concern.
of racism. I was pointing out that even whites face serious socoeconomic issues. That implies tha the issue of black poverty is more complex than just racism. If even millions of whites with all their so-called privileges are living in poverty than the issue surely must be more complex than racism. Class is clearly still an issue.
The problem with this point, though, is that Jones centered his argument on the really negative effects of spatially concentrated poverty, and the role that people like Sterling play in creating and perpetuating these concentrations. Concentrated poverty is really an issue of residential segregation, and it's far, far more of a problem for blacks and Latinos than it is for whites.
As of the 2007-2011 American Community Survey, 25.7% of blacks lived in poverty, compared to 11.6% of whites. But the effect of racial residential segregation amplifies this difference when it comes to the sort of neighborhoods that people live in. Looking at Census block groups in 2000, 44.8% of metro blacks lived in neighborhoods with >20% poverty concentrations, compared to 11.6% of whites. And this isn't just an effect of higher black poverty; 70.9% of poor blacks lived in high-poverty neighborhoods, compared to 36.9% of poor whites. One way of looking at this: a poor white resident is less likely to live in concentrated poverty than is an average black resident. (see http://intl-cjres.oxfordjournals.org/content/1/1/51/T3.expansion.html; may be paywalled)
We know that living in concentrated poverty is associated with all sorts of bad outcomes and that blacks (and to a slightly lesser extent Latinos) are far and away more likely to experience such living conditions, even after controlling for income. These conditions are largely the result of residential racial segregation. Bomani's point: propping up this segregation through illegal housing discrimination is a way more grievous act than is saying shitty things to your mistress, and people who ignored the former need to step off their soapboxes with respect to the latter.
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