The Importance Of Racial Adversity

Throughout the past one hundred and fifty years, race relations have progressed markedly, emanating from the demise of legalized slavery and segregation in America. African Americans today have many rights that their ancestors were denied, such as the right to vote, being paid for their work, and being allowed to use the same restrooms and drinking fountains as white people. However, despite the many strides we have taken toward racial inequality as a country, there are still many ways in which African Americans and other minorities are unfairly treated today. For all the civil rights breakthroughs of the past several decades, racial adversity still materializes through numerous and often times far more insidious methods. It pervades in nearly

In an article for The Atlantic titled “The Workforce is Even More Divided by Race Than You Think,” Derek Thomson looks at workforce participation and wages by sex and race. He finds that regardless of sex or participation in the workforce, race takes precedence in determining how much workers make: "White men and women out-earn black men and women, who themselves out-earn Hispanic men and women, among full-time workers—even though Hispanic men have the highest participation rate" (Thomson). The reason for this, Thomson explains, is the accessibility to higher wage jobs, with whites and Asians having a much denser presence in jobs such as construction managers, CEO’s, physicians, surgeons, and software developers, whereas blacks are more likely to work as security guards or bus drivers, and Hispanics are more likely to work as maids, house cleaners, or in landscaping jobs. A central dynamic behind this is the difference in level of education between races: “Blacks and Hispanics, who make up about one-quarter of the workforce, represent 44 percent of the country’s high school dropouts and just 15 percent of its bachelor’s earners.” In her article “The Abandoned Promise of Civil Rights,” Zulema Valdez investigates racial disparity and finds that compared against whites, people of color are no better off than they were during the Civil Rights Era. She finds a plethora of reasons behind this, including a lack of resources to attain skills to acquire better jobs, as well as the “development of a color-blind perspective,” among