Sept. 1, 2014
A Level Playing Field
Rev. Jesse L. Jackson
(TriceEdneyWire.com) - All of Chicago turned out to celebrate the US Little League Champions, the 11 and 12 year olds of Jackie Robinson West. The parade began at home plate at their field in Chicago’s south side and extended all the way Millennium Park in the city’s downtown. People of all color, race and religion turned out to applaud the young men who did so much to left the spirits of a city too often scarred by violence.
How could an all Black team of kids from low-income families in South Chicago win a national championship? First and foremost, everyone played by the same set of rules. They competed on a level playing field. They had good coaching, and family and community support. It was their families that taught them to compete, win and lose with grace. In that context, their natural talents were honed into championship caliber.
Their triumph stands in stark contrast with the reality that was so harshly exposed in Ferguson, Missouri, in the shooting of Michael Brown. In America, we still do not have a level playing field. African-Americans, once enslaved and unequal, are now free, but still unequal. And that pervasive inequality in fact undermines formal equality under law.
Most poor people are not Black, but African-Americans are disproportionately poor. We suffer twice the unemployment rate as whites – in good times as well as bad.
Twenty percent of children in America -- one in five -- are raised in poverty. Among African-Americans, nearly 40 percent are in poverty. The median family wealth for Whites in America is about $113,000 (2009 figures); for African-Americans, it is $5,677. The gap has been growing over the last 30 years. Six decades after Brown v. Board of Education outlawed school segregation, our children go to schools that are increasingly segregated and unequal.
Our nation is more diverse, but our communities are still mostly separate. A recent poll revealed that three-fourths of White Americans admit that they have no minority friends.
This inequality in fact undermines equality under the law. That is why the horror of Michael Brown’s shooting haunts every African-American parent. Our children – particularly our male children – are at risk. African- Americans are more likely to be stopped on the street. If stopped, we are more likely to be detained. If detained, we are more likely to be charged. If charged, we are more likely to do time. That’s routine, and it leads to too frequent horrors, like the shooting of Michael Brown.
America has come a long way on racial divides. The election of Barack Obama as president is testament to that. The young are much more comfortable with diversity than older generations. Overt racism is no longer acceptable in most of America. But our racial stereotypes, our preconceptions, our conscious and subconscious biases still do real damage to African-Americans, but also to our nation.
And we still do not provide a level playing field, where the rules are clear. For example, virtually every industrial nation provides more public resources to schools in low wage neighborhoods.
Everyone understands that poor children need more help, not less to overcome the shackles of their poverty. But in America, the public schools of the affluent are lavishly funded and the schools of the poor impoverished, often lacking modern textbooks, decent schoolhouses, and full curricula. They too often are left with the worst teachers. Would this be true if the students in poor, urban schools were overwhelmingly White rather than people of color?
We have no plan to revive the poor neighborhoods of our cities. Public transportation is expensive, and often doesn’t link the people who need jobs with the suburbs where the jobs increasingly are. Poor neighborhoods suffer a shortage of hospitals, of good grocery stores, of public parks and gyms. Our tax and trade policies favor moving jobs abroad to moving them into our own cities.
The triumph of Jackie Robinson West gives us all delight. The horrors of Ferguson shock all of good conscience. But rather than recoil, we should move in action. Let’s provide a level playing field for all children from the start. We’ll see many more champions develop and we’ll all benefit from it.