Holy Post - Race in America

we need to talk about race why are people protesting why are people angry slavery ended 150 years ago the civil rights movement was 60 years ago racial discrimination is illegal now heck we even had a black president so why are people still upset we're gonna go through history and we're gonna look at some data and we're gonna go quickly so this video doesn't get too long so hang on these are two households in America one is black the other is white today the average black household has 60% of the income of the average white household but only one-tenth of the household wealth why does that matter well household wealth help send kids to school helps launch small businesses stabilizes loss of income and helps families survive catastrophic events like divorce or unemployment what's amazing about this numbers that there are lots of extremely wealthy African Americans movie stars pop stars 75% of the NBA 70% of the NFL Oprah Tyler Perry ben Carson Morgan Freeman and there are a lot of extremely poor white families think of Appalachia and other parts of rural America but even when we factor all that in the average black household still has only 1/10 the wealth of the average white household how did that happen well here we go what happened after we freed the slaves after the Civil War ended 9 states enacted vagrancy laws making it a crime to not have a job the law was applied only to black men eight of those states then allowed prisoners the black men who just been arrested for not having a job to be hired out to plantation owners with little or no pay going to the prisoners themselves so that's right men who had been freed from the plantations found themselves right back on the plantations additional laws prohibited mischief and insulting gestures which allowed more black men to be arrested and created a huge market for convict leasing working conditions for these leased convicts could be worse than slavery because the plantation owner leasing the black prisoner had no long-term interest in his well-being by the turn of the 20th century every state in the South had mandated racial segregation by law Jim Crow laws which supported a social ostracism for blacks that extended to schools churches housing jobs restrooms hotels and restaurants hospitals prisons Funeral Homes morgues and cemeteries white politicians competed with each other to be more strict and specific on segregation for example a law prohibiting blacks and whites from playing chess together know interracial chess playing that might lead to lawn darts in 1896 the Supreme Court ruled that these Jim Crow laws were perfectly legal because they quote reflected customs and traditions and quote preserved public peace and good order these laws stayed in place until 1954 when the idea of separate but equal was struck down in the ruling known as Brown versus Board of Education so what happened next after Brown well in 1956 the southern manifesto was signed by one hundred and one out of a hundred and twenty eight Congress members from the South pledging to maintain Jim Crow by all means possible five states passed nearly 50 new Jim Crow laws after 1954 private White's only schools dubbed segregation academies popped up all across the South many of them Christian but now widespread civil rights protests combined with anti-war protests that were occasionally becoming violent inspired the political rise of law and order rhetoric Richard Nixon became the first candidate to campaign specifically on a platform of law and order in 1968 81% of Americans agreed that law and order had broken down in this country and the majority blamed Communists and Negroes who start riots let's go back to household wealth the average black household has one-tenth the wealth of the average white household why is that because the number one source of energy racial wealth in America is home ownership and from the 1930s to well into the 1960s the federal government enacted policies to actively encourage white families to own homes and discourage black families from doing the same in 1934 the Federal Housing Administration created a risk rating system to determine which neighborhoods were safe investment for federally backed mortgages black neighborhoods were deemed too risky marked off in maps with red ink in a practice now known as redlining after World War two a boom of new suburban housing was built all over the country much of it restricted by deed to whites only in 1948 40% of new housing developments in Minneapolis for example had covenants prohibiting purchase by African Americans so blacks couldn't live in white neighborhoods and couldn't get federally insured loans for black neighborhoods until 1950 the realtor's code of ethics specifically prohibited selling a house in a white neighborhood to a non-white family you could lose your realtor's license if you helped a black family buy a home in a white neighborhood in the 1930s the FHA's underwriting manual said quote incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities the FHA went on to recommend that highways would be a great way to separate black neighborhoods from white neighborhoods the FHA funded huge white only suburban housing developments leaving blacks behind in inner cities after World War Two the GI bill provided subsidized mortgages to help millions of men returning from war to buy their first home while technically eligible for the GI Bill the way it was administered left 1 million black veterans largely on the outside looking in in New York and New Jersey the GI Bill ensured more than 67,000 new mortgages fewer than 100 of those went for homes purchased by non-whites in 1947 there were 3,200 mortgages in Mississippi guaranteed by the government for returning veterans of the 3,200 only two went to black veterans as a result white families after the war were able to build home equity growing wealth for retirement inheritance and college education for their kids one historian has stated that there was no greater instrument for widening an already huge racial gap in post-war America than the GI Bill and then came the war drugs inner-city blacks were extremely vulnerable economically the overwhelming majority of African Americans 1970 lacked college degrees and had grown up in fully segregated schools in the second half of the 20th century factories and manufacturing jobs moved to the suburbs black workers struggled to follow the jobs they couldn't live in many of the new suburban developments and as late as 1970 only 28% of black fathers had access to a car when a white man in Cicero Illinois just outside Chicago sublet an apartment to a black family the white community rioted setting fire to the apartment building and smashing windows until the National Guard had to intervene the result of all of this in 1970 70 percent of African American men had good blue-collar jobs by 1987 only 28% did as unemployment skyrocketed in African American communities so did drug use as drug use increased so did crime a dynamic today that we see playing out in white rural communities hit hard by unemployment and opioid addiction throughout the 1970s white America became increasingly concerned by images of black violence shown on TV and in magazines drugs were the problem drug dealers and drug users were the enemy so we decided to treat the drug epidemic not as a health crisis but as a crisis of criminality and we militarized our response during the Reagan Bush years from 1981 to 1991 how we invested money in anti-drug allocation completely changed the anti-drug budget for the Department of Defense went from 33 million dollars in 1981 to more than 1 billion dollars in 1991 the drug enforcement agency's budget to fight criminality and drug use went from 86 million dollars to more than a billion dollars then we came to the 1986 anti-drug Abuse Act which carried mandatory minimum sentences much harsher for the distribution of crack cocaine which was associated with blacks than powder cocaine which was associated with whites mandated evictions from public housing for any tenant who permit a drug-related criminal activity to occur on or near premises it eliminated many government benefits including student loans for anyone convicted of a drug crime the 1988 revision set a five-year minimum sentence for possessing any amount of crack cocaine even if there was no intent to distribute previously had been a one-year maximum sentence for possessing any amount of any drug without the intent to distribute now it might seem like we're picking on Republicans so now it's time to pick on some Democrats during the Clinton presidency the funding for public housing was cut by seventeen billion dollars at the same time the funding for Prisons increased by 19 billion dollars the number of Americans imprisoned for drug crimes exploded in 1980 there were 41 thousand Americans imprisoned for drug crimes today there are more than a half million more than the entire 1980 prison population most arrests are for possession in 2005 eighty percent of the arrests were for possessing drugs not selling drugs in a bizarre twist we also militarized our police forces between 1997 and 1999 the Pentagon handled 3.4 million orders for military equipment from more than 11,000 police agencies including 253 aircraft including Blackhawk and Huey helicopters 7800 M 16 rifles a hundred and eighty-one grenade launchers grenade launchers for the police 8000 bulletproof helmets 1200 night-vision goggles we also changed policing tactics a no-knock entry is when a SWAT team literally breaks down your door or smashes in through the windows like an et when the cops come flying in from every direction looking for et so back to Minneapolis in 1986 Minneapolis SWAT teams performed no knock entries 35 times 10 years later in 1996 they performed no knock entries 700 times that's two every day there were financial incentives for arresting more drug users federal grants to local police departments were tied to the number of drug arrests research suggests the huge surge in arrests from increased drug enforcement was do more to budget incentives than to actual increases in drug use so what was the result an explosion of our prison population in 25 years the US prison population went from 350,000 to over 2.3 million the United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world we imprison a higher percentage of our black population than South Africa ever did during apartheid data shows that the increased prison population was driven primarily by changes in sentencing policy there was no visible connection between higher incarceration rates and higher violent crime rates if you are a drug felon you are barred from public housing you are ineligible for food stamps you're forced to check the box on employment applications marking yourself as a convicted felon a criminal record has been shown to reduce the likelihood of getting a call back or job offer by as much as 50% the negative impact of a criminal record for an African American job applicant is twice as large as for a white applicant in 2006 one in 106 white men was behind bars for black men it was 1 in 14 for black men between the age of 20 and 35 the age where families are built it's 1 in 9 overall African Americans and white Americans use drugs at roughly the same rate but the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug charges is almost six times that of whites it may be true that there isn't explicit racism in our legal system anymore but it doesn't mean justice is blind a study a law in Georgia permitted prosecutors to seek life imprisonment for a second drug offense over the period of the study this law was used against one percent of white second time offenders and 16 percent of black second time offenders as a result 98 percent of prisoners serving life sentences under this law were black study african-american youth in the US make up 16% of all youth but 28% of all juvenile arrests 35% of youth sent to adult court instead of juvenile court and 58 percent of youth admitted to adult state prison a study blacks on the New Jersey Turnpike make up 15% of all drivers but 42% of all stops by police and 73 percent of all arrests among all drivers stopped white drivers were 2 times more likely than black drivers to be carrying drugs study Volusia County Florida 5% of drivers were black or Latino but 80% of drivers stopped were black or Latino study Oakland California black drivers are twice as likely as white drivers to be stopped and three times more likely to be searched in Minneapolis falando Castile had been pulled over 49 times in 13 years mostly for minor infractions the 49th time he was pulled over he was shot by the officer while sitting inside his car he'd been pulled over for a broken taillight Chuck Colson's organization Prison Fellowship recently organized a manifesto that was signed by evangelical leaders asserting that our over reliance on incarceration fails to make us safer or restore the people in communities who have been harmed unconscious bias seeps into schools - as white teachers often assume black students are less intelligent than they actually are a gifted student usually has to be recommended by a teacher to move to a gifted track when a teacher is black an equally gifted white and black student have comparable chances of being recommended when the teacher is white the black students odds of being recommended are cut in half our white teachers racist no are they affected by bias yes and it affects black students every day so where are we the average black household has 1/10 the wealth of the average white household this didn't happen by accident it happened by policy we the majority culture told them where they could live and where they couldn't then we moved most of the jobs to the places we told them they couldn't live when the predictable explosion of unemployment and poverty resulted in a predictable increase in drug use and crime we criminalized the problem we built nineteen billion dollars of new jails and sold grenade launchers to the police as a result a white boy born in America today has a 1 in 23 chance of going to prison in his lifetime for a black boy it's 1 in 4 and that is why people are angry many people care deeply about these issues many have suggested solutions some of those have been tested with results ranging from moderate success to abject failure I'm not here to tell you what the right solutions are because I don't know I'm just here to ask you to do one thing it is the thing that begins every journey to a solution for every problem what am I asking you to do care you

Channel: Phil Vischer

Views: 1,325,830

Rating: 4.8014946 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: AGUwcs9qJXY

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Belgian_Bitch]

Damn. This guy went all out and said all the things that we would all love to mention but can't. Huge respect to him for putting in real effort to tell people about these terrible, sadly sometimes forgotten, histories and present.

[u/Me_Like_Wine]

As someone who was raised Christian and grew up watching Veggietales, this was special to watch.

I really hope this helps shine a light on the situation to those who might not be fully bought in. I personally know too many moderates/christians that are eerily silent right now.

[u/CitricBase]

• Me, reading title: "Oh geez, that religious cartoon? Why is a video like this getting upvotes on reddit?"

• Me, after watching: "Holy cow, what an astoundingly good video. Rapid-fire facts that fluently articulate such a complicated issue into a fast and digestible summary."

Religion has nothing to do with this video, but it's fantastic that this competent, level-headed, and well-informed take is going to be heard by exactly the demographic that needs to hear it the most.

[u/T_Peg]

I used to love Veggie Tales as a kid I don't even think my dumbass or my family's dumb ass even realized it was supposed to be a religious leaning show. I just liked the funny talking cucumber.

[u/Fi3br]

I was waiting for the hot-take from the VeggieTales guy before I made up my mind.

[u/SulliverVittles]

This is a solid, unbiased look at the problem.

Not enough singing cucumbers tho.

[u/notajock]

That was depressing..

[u/LukesFather]

I shared this on Facebook the other day and genuinely wish everyone will watch it. I had no idea the guy was behind veggie tales.

[u/mindbleach]

Some chucklefuck recently tried claiming police brutality had no racial bias because, "if your race interacts with police more often..."

Like that's not the police's fault.

Like that's not racial bias, laid bare.

If the god-dang VeggieTales guy can figure out the problem is systemic, what's your excuse?