Sarah Carroll

Teen flips the bird. Car stops. There’s a scuffle. Six stabs to the heart. One dead, one arrested for murder. 
 
My junior year, I left homeschool for a public high school. I resolved to not be naïve and refused to admit that the change was socially difficult. I learned obscene words and the smell of cannabis. I began to see horrific structural inequality, one that suppresses racial minorities while elevating whites. 
 
My Advanced Placement classes almost universally comprised affluent or middle class whites. Poor blacks and Hispanics got the lowest tier of classes. I passed the detention room every day. It was the same, sad, segregated story. Students were treated based on their skin color and income level as stupid criminals. Life closed its doors on them before they had the chance to knock. 
 
On the bus, the white bus driver saved me—the only white girl—a seat at the front. He called me “a good kid.” The rest got insults and ruthless castigation. If you talked back to him, you walked home. A bigot stabbed to death one of the boys from my bus behind a Brewster’s because he (who was black) “disrespected” him (a privileged white person) with an expression of defiance. I had been so blind. 
 
My house was last on the bus route, so I saw the ecological distinction in wealth between whites and blacks and Hispanics. In some neighborhoods, every other house seemed to have an eviction sign. Men in barely more than rags would vacantly stare as we passed by. The sense of relief to be back in my white picket-fence neighborhood was mixed with guilt. I was reminded daily of the poverty in my town, from safely behind my glass window. Though a grim reality dawned just beyond my doorstep, I had lived for years in tranquil ignorance. 
 
My town is not extraordinary. 

A recent New York Times article analyzed the wealth gap in the resort town of Aspen, Colorado. There are virtually no affordable homes for the working class. Those who work in low-paying jobs are forced to commute from—in some cases—50 miles away or more. For the wealthy in these cities, their interactions with the poor are minimal, which discourages action. In a city of luxury, the scales of ignorance are less easily rattled. 
 
The article provides a troubling figure: from 2009 to 2012, inflation-adjusted income for the top 1% of U.S. households increased by 31%, compared to everyone else’s increase of just 0.4%. The geographical divide helps explain this disturbing difference. This problem is especially acute in the West, where “vast tracts of public land and sheer mountain faces prevent the easy development of suburbs to house workers,” according to the AP. 
 
A subtle, subconscious kind of racism  
 
The kind of racism I observed in my school is not always so blaringly evident. Nicholas Kristof, a writer for the New York Times, wrote a five part series on racial biases in American society called “When Whites Just Don’t Get It.” “The greatest problem is not with flat-out white racists, but rather with the far larger number of Americans who believe intellectually in racial equality but are quietly oblivious to injustice around them,”Kristof writes. 
 
It explains how Americans can celebrate Martin Luther King Day with gusto, yet still are more prone to shoot a black person in a video game or lock car doors as a black man passes by. Whites, whether consciously or not, harshly punish blacks and Hispanics for failing at a system they created for these minorities, or as Kristof described it: “We fail those kids before they fail us, and then we, too, look for others to blame.” American society induces crime, drug use and joblessness among black youths by labeling them as criminals. 
 
Kristof points out a common retort to the accusation that America is still very racist: “But we have a black president!” The fact that we have a black president does show significant progress, but it’s a pat answer to a bigger, more complex issue. We cannot ignore numbers that say the average white household in the United States is nearly 20 times the value of the average black household, according to 2011 census data. One black president cannot counterweigh such a disparity. 
 
The way we treat blacks in our public schools (black students are suspended three times more frequently than white students, according to Kristof) helps explain how nearly 70% of middle-aged black men who do not graduate from high school are imprisoned at some point in their lives. It’s a cruel cycle that can be traced to centuries of slavery. Black history is read about in high school textbooks yet the scars that remain today are placidly ignored. 
 
 Even if a black youth can get out of that cycle by taking “personal responsibility” (an ignorant and insulting solution that is so often quickly provided), he or she is more likely to be an outlier than a pattern setter. 
 
As The Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations,” put it, “Some black people always will be twice as good. But they generally find white predation to be thrice as fast.” 
 
As a society that shouts from the rooftops the importance of retaining our freedoms, we have a duty to face these statistics and then to do even one damn thing about them. But what? I don’t know . . . yet. But I am going to find out.