I’m all for treating everyone with dignity and respect. But to simply turn a blind eye to race in America is to be willfully blind to the ugliest aspects of our nation’s history and to its living legacy, which includes some really stark patterns of inequality of treatment and inequality of opportunity. There’s conscious or unconscious racial profiling by the police, for one thing–the widespread phenomenon of traffic stops and searches for “driving while black” being just the mildest form of it, but the sorts of incidents pizzagirl describes, and worse, are all too common.
There are deep racial disparities at every stage of the criminal justice system. Statistically, blacks are more likely than whites to be arrested rather than warned for minor offenses or borderline behavior; more likely to be required to post bail rather than released on personal recognizance; more likely to have bail set at a higher dollar figure for the same offense, and consequently more likely to serve jail time for failure to make bail; more likely to be charged with a more serious offense for the same underlying act; less likely to have charges dropped or reduced or to get off on a plea bargain or pretrial diversion; more likely to be sentenced to incarceration rather than probation when convicted of the same offense; and more likely to get a longer sentence when convicted of the same offense.
http://www.nccdglobal.org/sites/default/files/publication_pdf/created-equal.pdf
http://www.civilrights.org/publications/justice-on-trial/?referrer=https://www.google.com/
Then there’s the ongoing phenomenon of racially segregated housing patterns, partly the legacy of past discrimination in ways that are now illegal, partly perpetuated by ongoing racial “steering” in the real estate industry. Real estate agents steer white prospective home buyers to predominantly white neighborhoods, while steering equally credit-worthy black and Latino home buyers to predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods–practices that are illegal under the Fair Housing Act but nonetheless widely prevalent, according to reputable studies. The problem with this, of course, is that predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods have, on average, less access to health case, less access to quality schools, and fewer employment opportunities.
http://socpro.oxfordjournals.org/content/socpro/56/1/49.full.pdf
Pretending that race just doesn’t matter in America may be a pretty and comforting thought if you’re not part of the group that systematically gets the short end of the stick. But it’s delusional.