Whether out of hostility, indifference or simple lack of knowledge, large numbers of white Americans incorrectly believe that blacks are as well off as whites in terms of their jobs, incomes, schooling and health care, according to a national survey by The Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University.
...These misperceptions have consequences, the survey suggests. Among whites, the pervasiveness of incorrect views seems to explain, at least in part, white resistance to even the least intrusive types of affirmative action. And more broadly, these mistaken beliefs represent formidable obstacles to any government effort to equalize the social and economic standing of the races.
...it simply is convenient for some whites to claim that blacks and whites are equal. Such beliefs eliminate the need for whites to take action on problems that disproportionally face the black community. "There remains an unwillingness to acknowledge reality and an unwillingness to move forward on the difficult question of race,"

• Proportionately Fewer Black Teenagers

Use Drugs than do Whites or Hispanics
• Powerful evidence suggests racism determines

where the war on drugs is waged most vigorously

Governor Pete Wilson vetoed a bill simply to study the effects of the law. Wilson probably knew what the study would conclude: while three- strikes laws sound great to the public, they aren't working. A growing number of states and private groups have scrutinized these and other "mandatory - minimum laws," the generic name for statutes forcing judges to impose designated terms. The studies are finding that the laws cost enormous amounts of money, ...

How much are we spending? Put it this way: mandatory minimums are the reason so many prisons are booming in otherwise impoverished rural counties across America. The U.S. inmate population has more than doubled (to nearly 2 million) since the mid-'80s, when mandatory sentencing became the hot new intoxicant for politicians. New York (the first state to enact mandatory minimums) has sloshed $600 million into prison construction since 1988; not coincidentally, in the same period it has sliced $700 million from higher education. Americans will have to spend even more in the future to house and treat all the aging inmates. California has already filled its 114,000 prison beds, and double-bunks 46,000 additional inmates.

More important, mandatory minimums for nonviolent (and arguably victimless) drug crimes insult justice.

President Bush's choice of John Walters for drug czar is a giant step backwards.
...Walters wrote that research showing that the criminal justice system is imprisoning too many people for drug possession, unjustly punishes Black men and imposes long and harsh sentencing as "... the three greatest myths of our time." 
His position runs counter to the facts: ...

Middle- and upper-income parents send their sons and daughters to college in almost equal proportions (with the exception of well-off African American families, whose sons still lag considerably behind in the number of years of schooling completed). But that gender balance disappears as family income declines: Men become far less likely than women to go to college, or to stay in school once they get there.

This appears to be true especially for low-income white men, who enter college at even lower rates than low-income blacks or Hispanics.

"The story is about income and race, not gender," says Susan Choy, a consultant to the Department of Education on post-secondary schooling.

Political scientist Cathy Schneider of American University offers a surprising answer in the latest Political Science Quarterly. She claims that America's war on drugs is largely responsible for the fact that the AIDS epidemic has disproportionately ravaged the inner cities.

  Black and Hispanic patients infected with the HIV virus are less likely than whites to participate in clinical studies of new treatments or to receive experimental drugs, according to the first study that has used nationally representative data to examine such disparities. ...
  "These differences were robust," Gifford said. "They were present even when patients were at equal levels of education, equal stages of disease . . . and [lived] at equal distances from clinical trial centers."

AGAINST THE trend of falling voter turnout in the United States, record numbers of black men and Hispanics cast ballots for president ... .In the case of black men, the sharp increase appears to be linked to the Million Man March organized by the black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan. 

The racial intimidation faced by the Smiths resulted in charges, not by local police, but by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. ...

While many cases brought by HUD involve discrimination by landlords, Cuomo said the agency frequently brings charges in cases of neighbor-on-neighbor discrimination.

Her study has revealed patterns in the lies that whites and blacks tell about each other. Seven in 10 hoaxes involve a white person falsely implicating a black in a crime. Far fewer -- about one in six -- involve a black "victim" and a white target, she reports in her new book, "The Color of Crime."

If the Supreme Court this year agrees to consider the constitutionality of affirmative action in state university admissions, accepting cases from Michigan's college and law school, all eyes will be on Texas.

The numbers are down even though both campuses got more minority applications, with stronger academic credentials, than in previous years. ...

Berkeley officials said they had to turn away more than 800 black, Hispanic and other minority applicants who had perfect 4.0 high school grade point averages and who had SAT scores of at least 1,200 -- which is exceptionally high -simply because the school had other applicants with even better credentials.

BOSTON -- Almost 50 years after state-sponsored school segregation was outlawed, public schools are becoming increasingly divided by race, even as minority populations increase nationwide, according to a new report. ...

The report's authors say the "resegregation" trend is a result of recent court rulings that dismantled race-based desegregation laws, and also reflects discouragement over stalled integration efforts. 

An intensive and expensive all-day kindergarten program in Montgomery County has produced significant gains for poor children and helped them begin to catch up with higher-performing peers, a new study to be released today shows.
...
 Weast said his report addresses middle-class parents' worries that their children will suffer academically at higher-poverty schools. The report found that such children scored on par with middle- and upper-middle-class students throughout the county.

"The nice thing about the changes we made is, you don't have to leave those schools now," Weast said, referring to middle-class flight that has affected some schools in the county's more diverse eastern side. "This ought to give comfort to those parents to stay with us."
 

"The wealth data expose far deeper inequalities [than the income gap]," Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro wrote in the essay that was the basis for discussion at the Urban League's recent convention in Philadelphia. "Half of all white households have at least $6,999 in a [net financial assets (NFA)] nest egg, whereas nearly two-thirds of all black households have zero or negative NFA."

• Court Strikes Down Georgia Admissions Policy
• Federal Appeals Panel Finds University's Race-Based 'Point' System Unconstitutional

As Affirmative Action for blacks to reverse the legacy of white supremacy is reversed under the specious charge of reverse racism at Historically White Colleges and Universities(HWCUs), reverse Affirmative Action for whites moves white supremacy forward under perverse diversity programs at Historically Black Colleges and Universities(HBCUs).

• Miss. Desegregation Suit Settled for $500 Million Mississippi Settlement Ends Lengthy Battle
• Distorting The Affirmative Action Debate
• School "Choice" and Other White Lies

  George W. Bush is all for diversity ... but he doesn't care for the way they do it at the University of Michigan...If our President had the slightest sense of irony, he might have paused to ask himself, "Wait a minute. How did I get into Yale?" It wasn't because of any academic achievement: ... They may not have had an explicit point system at Yale in 1964, but Bush clearly got in because of affirmative action. ... George W. Bush, in fact, may be the most spectacular affirmative-action success story of all time. 

  Ask a fish what water is and you'll get no answer. ... Fish take it for granted....So too with this thing we hear so much about, "racial preference." ... While many whites seem to think the notion originated with affirmative action programs, intended to expand opportunities for historically marginalized people of color, racial preference has actually had a long and very white history. ...
  President Bush, himself a lifelong recipient of affirmative action - the kind set aside for the mediocre rich - recently proclaimed that the school's policies were examples of unfair racial preference. Yet in doing so he not only showed a profound ignorance of the Michigan policy, but made clear the inability of yet another white person to grasp the magnitude of white privilege still in operation.

Beyond financial woes, some black colleges are simply victims of the times. Founded in segregation, state-supported black universities turned out generations of black teachers, doctors, lawyers and other professionals with only a fraction of the funding enjoyed by majority white institutions.

Efforts to boost funding in recent decades, however, often have been accompanied by increasing legal pressure to desegregate. Several of the schools are now predominantly white, including Bluefield State in West Virginia, West Virginia State College and Lincoln University in Missouri. Others, including Maryland's Bowie State University and North Carolina Central University's law school, now have substantial white enrollments.

 By the time of our survey, black male graduates who had entered selective schools in 1976 were earning ... 82 percent more than other black male college graduates nationwide. Their black female classmates earned 73 percent more than all black women with bachelor's degrees. Not only has the marketplace valued the work of these graduates highly, but the premium associated with attending one of these selective institutions was substantial. Overall, we found that among blacks with similar test scores, the more selective the college they attended, the more likely they were to graduate, earn advanced degrees and receive high salaries. ...

Despite their high salaries, the blacks in our study were not just concerned with their own advancement. In virtually every type of civic activity, from social service organizations to parent-teacher associations, black men were more likely than their white classmates to hold leadership positions. Much the same pattern holds for women. These findings should reassure black intellectuals who have worried that blacks--especially black men--would ignore their social responsibilities once they achieved financial success.

Support for affirmative action is substantial. A December 1997 poll by the New York Times showed that a majority of Americans want to retain or mend affirmative action, not abolish it. California's Prop 209 did not present the issue clearly or honestly. Purposely avoiding the term "affirmative action:' this initiative described the policy as 'preferential treatment' Its supporters also misled the voters when they promoted it as the California "Civil Rights" Initiative. Furthermore. they racialized affirmative action, covering over the fact that the primary beneficiaries of these programs have been women.

In recent times, the increasing racial disparity among the disenfranchised has been a consequence not of racist laws {!?} but of the dramatic rise in the number of African Americans being incarcerated. Since the widespread imposition of mandatory minimum sentences, "three-strikes" laws and other anti-crime measures over the past decade, the proportion of black men who are incarcerated has increased 10 times faster than for whites.

GOP Census Politics

... The census has always undercounted the population. But some Americans are missed more often than others. The Census Bureau calls this phenomenon the "differential undercount": In 1990, the census missed 12.2 percent of Native Americans living on reservations, 5 percent of Latinos and 4.4 percent of African- Americans. In contrast, only 0.7 percent of non-Latino whites went uncounted. ... 

... By opposing sampling, the House Republicans are engaging in gerrymandering of the worst kind. By maintaining the differential undercount, the GOP insures that a white middleclass voter's ballot has greater weight than that of a poor African-American or Latino voter. ...

Census Short-Count

Those who argue that it hardly matters which party enjoys the power to appoint the nation's judges received a rude shock recently when the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 decision, decided to allow the Republicans to disempower large numbers of poor and urban citizens when conducting the 2000 census. ... The result of the Court's decision will be an even greater concentration of power and influence in the hands of the country's white, wealthy and rural populations at the expense of its nonwhite, poor and urban citizens.

"Many persons in America would like to think of prejudice as a relic of the past," he said. "But our finding suggest that racial prejudice is still an important force that drives public policy." 

... "African American small businesses are doing very badly" in procurement competition, as are firms owned by women, said Rep. Albert R. Wynn (D-Md.), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus minority business task force.

... The evidence that welfare recipients are becoming clustered in big cities follows other recent findings that the program is becoming racially isolated, with African Americans and Hispanics accounting for a growing share of the families who remain on the rolls.

Black Texans, by the way, are incarcerated at a rate seven times that of whites--and at a rate 63 percent higher than the national rate for blacks. But while blacks (12 percent of the state's population) supply 44 percent of the inmates (more than half of them for nonviolent offenses), they are underrepresented in such alternative programs as drug treatment. ...

New York, with a state population roughly equal to that of Texas, offers a particularly striking contrast. Texas had the fastest-growing prison system in the 1990s, New York the third slowest. During the 1990s, Texas added more prisoners to its system (98,081) than New York's entire prison population (73,233). But the decline in crime in the latter half of the '90s was four times greater in New York than in Texas.

COLOR OF DRIVER IS KEY TO STOPS IN I-95 VIDEOS 
  Videotapes obtained by The Orlando Sentinel offer the most compelling evidence to date that Volusia County Sheriff Bob Vogel's drug squad uses skin color to decide whom to stop and search for cash on Interstate 95.
   There is the bewildered black man who stands on the roadside trying to explain to the deputies that it is the seventh time he has been stopped.
 

Racial Profiling in Maryland Defies Definition -- or Solution
Last year, Maryland state troopers searched 533 cars on Interstate 95. More than half of the drivers were black. Ten percent were Hispanic. In all, 63 percent of drivers forced out of their cars were minorities.
...Why do minorities suffer the majority of police searches?
"I don't know," Arrington said. "But it does not suggest a problem to me."
... Wilkins said:"But I'm not going to lie about the reality," - "Maryland has really been the capital of racial profiling in the United States. The disparities on I-95 in Maryland match or beat anything documented [elsewhere], and they've been going on for years and years and years. And they continued even after the settlement of a lawsuit and the involvement of a federal judge. How much worse can you get than that?"

• A computer analysis of election returns suggests there were anomalies in the Florida vote, particularly in African American areas. The more black and Democratic a precinct, the more likely it was to suffer high rates of invalidated votes.
• In the most heavily white precincts, about 1 in 14 ballots were thrown out, but in largely black precincts more than 1 in 5 ballots were spoiled--and in some black precincts it was almost one-third. (By comparison, in the District of Columbia, fewer than 1 in 50 ballots were not counted as votes for president.)
• "I'm proud of the turnout we had in Florida," said Anita Davis, the NAACP's state president. But she added, "I'm very concerned that so many of our votes were being disenfranchised. . . . In a lot of Florida counties, these [black] votes have been thrown out for years, and we had no idea about it.
• Senior GOP strategists say privately that a key reason the Bush campaign did not ask for a statewide recount was it feared that Gore would pick up more votes than Bush, because of the high rate of ballot spoilage in black precincts.

• If a disparity in the method of tabulating just 0.7 percent of the ballots cast in one state can be declared a violation of the constitutional prohibition against "unequal treatment," how can flat-out ignoring 2 percent, 3 percent, 4 percent or more of the voters in a particular state be said to pass muster?...
• If variations in counting "undervotes" violate the Constitution, how can "uncounting" people be ignored?...
• If hanging chads and dimpled chads are entitled to equal treatment under the law, then surely so too are real-live voters who will be uncounted when districts are drawn -- 

  African Americans are becoming less likely to identify themselves as Democrats, and give Republican Secretary of State Colin L. Powell a higher approval rating than civil rights icon Jesse L. Jackson, according to an opinion poll released yesterday by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
... Overall, 63 percent of survey respondents identified themselves as Democrats, down from 74 percent in a similar survey taken two years ago. Ten percent identified themselves as Republicans, up from 4 percent two years ago. 

  "We have just about maxed out with white men,"... Republican successes in the Nov. 5 elections reinforced the view that the party must significantly moderate, if not abandon, the four-decade strategy of using race and racially charged issues as wedges to boost white support.   ... As a share of the total electorate, the traditional white Republican base is declining, .... If Bush in 2004 were to match his 2000 percentage among every racial, religious, gender and ethnic group, ..., he would lose not only the popular vote but also the electoral college as well.  ... What these trends mean, one Republican strategist said, is that "the white target just keeps getting higher and higher and, without shifting other groups, it's getting out of reach."

   At year's end, thousands of poor families across America will be dropped from the welfare rolls as they approach the five-year lifetime limit for welfare assistance set by the Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996. ...  Since 1994, the nation's welfare rolls have dropped more than 50 percent, prompting many to declare welfare reform an unmitigated success. ... studies have shown Whites have been leaving welfare for work faster than African Americans and Hispanics. ...  A study by the Kellogg-Scholar Practitioner Program followed Whites, Blacks and Hispanics in Florida who left welfare for work at the same time and found there were significant racial disparities in income levels between the groups, with the income of Blacks falling significantly behind both Hispanics and Whites by the end of the period under study. ...  At a recent forum on race and welfare reform ... assembled experts discussed factors contributing to the persistent racial disparities in outcomes among welfare recipients. The session focused on a number of studies highlighting how African Americans are more likely to encounter discriminatory treatment while attempted to move from welfare to work.

   There's much to cheer about in the recent Justice Department report that shows the first slowdown in nearly three decades in the number of people imprisoned More politicians, and law enforcement officials, it seems, have finally realized that warehousing thousands of people in American prisons is no panacea for the nation's crime and drug ills. In states such as California and New York, courts are much more willing to send people to drug treatment programs rather than prison.
   The bad news is the new window of public enlightenment on crime and punishment remains tightly closed for Blacks. They now make up nearly half of the more than 2 million persons behind bars. According to the Justice Department report, 10 percent of all Black males between ages 25 and 29 are in federal and state prisons. The rate is three times greater than that for Latino males, and 10 times higher than for White males. ...  The habitual reasons given for criminalizing practically an entire generation of young Blacks is that they are poor, crime-prone, and lack family values.

• Acres of farmland owned by African Americans in 1910, in millions: 15
•  Acres owned today: 1.1
•  Percent by which African Americans have lost land faster than whites: 150%
• Acres of riverfront property in Richmond, VA, that were supposed to be turned over to slaves in 1856, but were instead taken by the white estate executor: 264
• Value of the land today, now the exclusively white Willow Oaks country club, in millions: $2.94
• Percent of Southern courthouses containing land records which were burned down since the Civil War, often deliberately to destroy evidence of illegal takings of black land: 33%

"Ours is an agrarian economy," said Mugabe, noting that Zimbabwe's whites account for less than 1 percent of the country's 13 million people, but own 70 percent of its arable farmland. To effectively combat poverty in any developing country, Mugabe said, "the land comes first, before all else."

Mugabe, 78, has repeatedly characterized his polarizing land reform policies as an effort to address a lingering colonial imbalance.