what if racial barriers are the low-hanging fruit of our country's economic problems?

[dilletante]

yeah, this is simplistic and underdeveloped. it's not like anybody knows an easy button to push to make institutional racial bias go away. but i feel like there's a lot of… whatever the economic equivalent of potential energy is… there somehow, and we seem to need that right now.

(the link that spurred this thoughtat least in the simplistic view

Comments

[beah]

You might be interested in the new book _Evicted_, by Matthew Desmond. His thesis is that eviction is to black women what incarceration is to black men today. "Men are locked in, women are locked out."

[bloodstones]

I'm a few chapters into Democracy in Black and it's making me think more about the intersection of poverty and race. I've thought for years that there's this terrible chicken/egg problem where crime is higher because poverty and poverty is higher because crime, and all of this is happening in minority neighborhoods; and regardless of which came first poverty or crime, the poverty is the product of hundreds of years of intentional and unintentional (or maybe I mean unthinking or unexamined here) actions that increase the likelihood that minorities will be poor.

[flexagon]

My bleak knee-jerk reaction: if that's the lowest-hanging fruit, we're not going to space today. :-/

[laurie_robey]

I've been interested in the idea of universal basic income as part of a solution to the economic disparities that seem to be getting only worse as automation makes fewer jobs available. It's getting a lot of attention and experimentation around the world with some promising results.

A recent Freakonomics episode (http://freakonomics.com/podcast/mincome/) went over a Canadian and American experiment from a couple of decades ago. In general, it improved people's lives without detrimental side effects. It seems like it would address at least some of the economic disadvantages that many people have.

On a related note, have you seen Zootopia?

[chaggalagirl]

i'm so cynical. yes, removing racialized barriers would lead to all sorts of economic growth for people of color, absolutely. i feel like we won't get around to addressing these issues, as a nation, until we, again, as a nation, can recognize that people of color are fully human, with the same rights, emotions, desires, etc.. because that's super basic and we fail at that pretty spectacularly. and now with trump as the presumptive gop nominee and the corresponding rise in racist bullying in schools and sports teams, and probably goddamn everywhere because white people are the devil...

it's overwhelming and depressing, and because i'm white i only see it from the outside. i get locked in a cycle of cynicism and frustration. :/

[dilletante]

>removing racialized barriers would lead to all sorts of economic growth for people of color, absolutely

yeah, my thinking was it would lead to all sorts of economic growth for everybody.