Discrimination statistics still play a large role in understanding America as a whole, and as smaller regions all the way down to individual people. Whether it’s the discrimination of race, religion, gender, sexuality or age, discrimination statistics can reveal what trends there are across the country, and what worries and hurdles we face collectively as a people.
With the election of a black man as president of the United STates in November of 2008, many declared that this was a “post racial world,” meaning the struggles of blacks throughout the country’s history had all paid off, and that there was no longer cause to worry that there was any real discrimination in the United States. Though it’s clear that we’ve come a long way toward true equality, it’s equally true that discrimination statistics show that there’s much road left to travel.
Wikipedia.org has this in their entry on racial discrimination in the United States:
Racial segregation in the United States, as a general term, included the racial segregation of facilities, services, and opportunities such as housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation along racial lines. The expression refers primarily to the legally or socially enforced separation of African Americans from other races, but can more loosely refer to voluntary separation, and also to separation of other racial or ethnic minorities from the majority mainstream society and communities.
Racial segregation in the United States has meant the physical separation and provision of separate facilities (especially during the Jim Crow era), but it can also refer to other manifestations of racial discrimination such as separation of roles within an institution, such as the United States Armed Forces up to 1948 when black units were typically separated from white units but were led by white officers.
Racial segregation in the United States can be divided into de jure and de facto segregation. De jure segregation, sanctioned or enforced by force of law, was stopped by federal enforcement of a series of Supreme Court decisions after with Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954. The process of throwing off legal segregation in the United States lasted through much of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s when civil rights demonstrations resulted in public opinion turning against enforced segregation. De facto segregation ? segregation “in fact” ? persists to varying degrees without sanction of law to the present day. The contemporary racial segregation seen in America in residential neighborhoods has been shaped by public policies, mortgage discrimination and redlining among other things.
