The Gary Null Blog

A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay that got me a much larger truckload of hate mail than usual. The piece concerned the persistent problem of denialism in parts of White America when it comes to race. I lamented how, despite media and political insinuations that whites have become an oppressed group, it is people of color -- and in particular, African Americans -- who remain the real casualties of discrimination:"The truth," writes Sirota,"Is that some liberals may be holding President Obama "to a higher standard" than previous Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton -- not because they are racist, but because the times have so momentously changed. With the Wall Street collapse and the economic emergency -- combined with Obama's FDR-like rhetoric and much bigger margin of victory and electoral mandate than Clinton -- many were rightly expecting a more FDR-ish posture from the new president, especially because he himself had explicitly promised that kind of posture on the campaign."(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

You can see [this racism] in black unemployment rates, which are twice as high as white unemployment rates -- a disparity that persists even when controlling for education levels. You can see it in a 2004 MIT study showing that job-seekers with "white names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews" than job seekers with comparable resumes and "African-American-sounding names." And you can see it in a news media that looks like an all-white country club and a U.S. Senate that includes no black legislators.