The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in 1948, proclaims in Article 1: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” and in Article 7: “All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law.” However, the US establishment is not following the suit of international law as its Afro-American citizens are facing severe racial discrimination in the country.
A black man was shot by a white US police officer on December 15, 2014. Sergeant Robert McCarthy shot Cedric Bartee while he had his hands up after McCarthy located a stolen car at an apartment complex in Orlando, Florida. According to initial media reports, the black man had raised his hands before he was shot. Severe protests erupted following the incident. Though the county sheriff urged people to remain calm, protests spread across the state of Florida.
Earlier in July, New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo shot to death Eric Garner but was acquitted by the court. Likewise, a St Louis grand jury also decided last month not to indict white police officer Darren Wilson in the August shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Thousands of demonstrators nationwide are protesting these fatal shootings of unarmed black men by police. They are chanting, “I cannot breathe!” “Hands up; do not shoot!” The protesters are stressing change in the criminal justice system and the lessening of police powers.
The US has been, time and again, criticised by Amnesty International and human rights activists for its human rights violations, police violence and abuse against Afro-Americans. Racism continues to be reflected in socioeconomic inequality in the US. Though everyone knows that inequality is growing in the US, a new Pew Research Centre report shows how stark that divide is by race and ethnicity. According to the report, the median household headed by a white person has a net worth 13 times greater than the median household headed by a black person. This gap is tenfold for whites and Hispanics. In both cases, those gaps are growing. Pew used data from the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances, released every three years, to create this report and it shows some staggering gaps in wealth. Unfortunately, the racial and ethnic wealth gaps exist regardless of education.
The five biggest components in the growing gap between whites and blacks include years of homeownership, income, unemployment, college education and inheritance. Though the report focuses only on blacks and whites without separating Asians, Afro-Americans and native US citizens, it at least provides a window into how whole races or ethnic groups can end up with such huge wealth disparities.
The report asserts that there are major racial differences in access to healthcare and in the quality of healthcare provided to blacks and whites. A study published in the American Journal of Public Health estimated: “Over 886,000 deaths could have been prevented from 1991 to 2000 if African-Americans had received the same care as whites.” The key differences they cited were lack of insurance policies for blacks, poor service and reluctance to seek care. Inequalities in healthcare may also reflect a systemic bias in the way medical procedures and treatments are prescribed for different ethnic groups.
The 2009 congressional testimony shares that African-Americans comprise 13 percent of the US population. However, they are 37 percent of the people arrested for drug offences. The US Sentencing Commission (USSC) reported in March 2010 that in the federal system, black offenders receive sentences that are 10 percent longer than white offenders for the same crimes. A July 2009 report by the Sentencing Project (SP) found that two-thirds of the people in the US with life sentences are non-white.
Racial discrimination is against the values associated with democracy and capitalism. The US, which often asserts protection of human rights beyond its own borders, should focus on its own internal social and institutional discrepancies. Moreover, in the vacuum left by the absence of government, the western media has to take up the role of uncovering such discrimination with the same enthusiasm as it uncovers gender, ethnic and religiously discriminatory acts of other societies.
The writer is a freelance columnist