跌倒有关种族歧视(英文)

The terrible toll of racism in the U.S.

By Sharon Smith | March 19, 2004 | Page 7

HALF OF all Black men in New York City can’t find a job, while Black teenage

unemployment stands at 37 percent nationwide. These statistics show a crisis among

Black Americans that should be setting off alarm bells in election year 2004.

Yet even John Kerry, the candidate whose party’s voting base includes the vast majority

of Blacks, has issued barely a sound bite. This should come as no surprise, since Black

lives, Black votes and Black rights have been devalued since the Founding Fathers.

The original U.S. Constitution permitted slavery and counted Black slaves as three-fifths

of white persons in determining both Congressional representation and taxation,

embedding racism in the very foundation of U.S. society. The institution of slavery was

abolished only through Civil War, a bloody second American Revolution that cost at least

600,000 lives.

But racism outlived slavery and flourished for the next 100 years in the form of Jim Crow

segregation, in which the majority of states, from North Dakota to Texas to California,

made it a crime for Blacks to intermingle with whites in all walks of life-- from hospitals to

cemeteries, lunch counters to phone booths, military service to marriage.

Jim Crow segregation laws were challenged and finally struck down only because of a

massive civil rights struggle stretching over more than two decades, from the 1955

Montgomery bus boycott to the fight to enforce court-ordered school desegregation in the

1970s. But de facto segregation continued, North and South, while accusations of

establishment, injecting racism with new life in the post-civil rights era.

Politicians from both the Democratic and Republican Parties scrambled to appear

on crime,

between 1980 and 1995. Two-thirds of those who entered the prison system during that

period were Black, Latino or poor, and the vast majority of them were nonviolent drug

offenders.

Today, with the prison population swollen to more than 2 million, African Americans make

up just 12 percent of the U.S. population and only 13 percent of drug users, yet account

for 35 percent of drug arrests and 53 percent of drug convictions. Blacks are also 43

percent of those on death row.

Last year, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that 30 percent of 12 year- old

Black boys will spend time in jail in their lifetimes--far more than will attend college. And

because many states have laws denying present and former inmates the right to vote, an

estimated 13 percent of all Black men--including one in every three in Alabama and

Florida--have been disenfranchised.

Racism, not criminal records, explains the high unemployment rate for Black men today. A

recent Wall Street Journal report showed that in the city of Milwaukee, a white job

applicant with a criminal record has a better chance of being called for an interview than a

Black man with no criminal record.

driver is equivalent to forcing a white man to carry an 18-month prison record on his back,

concluded reporter David Wessel. And only racism can explain these statistics:

-- Segregation in public schools, which decreased continuously from the 1950s to the late

1980s, has now returned to levels not seen in three decades.

-- Black infants are almost two-and-a-half times more likely than white infants to die before

the age of one, a wider gap than in 1970.

-- In 2002, 79 percent of Blacks aged 25 and older were high school graduates, compared

with 30 percent in 1968. Yet the typical Black household had a net worth of just $$19,000,

compared with $$121,000 for whites.

More than 200 years since slavery was written into the U.S. constitution, its racist legacy

remains--and the words of abolitionist Frederick Douglass remain true:

there can be no progress.

end racism

Racial discrimination

，

or

，

the color problem

，

refers mainly to Negroes in the United

States

，

as they constitute one tenth of the total population. The term

people descended or partly descended from slaves transported from Africa long ago. It is

now avoided by many white Americans for fear of offending their

The old term

，

and is altogether avoided in

decent usage. In official statistics the term

，

and in ordinary situations

it is acceptable to call non-white people

，

although this term was once also

somewhat insulting.

??

种族歧视或肤色问题，在美国主 要指与黑人有关的问题，因为他们占美国总人口的十

分之一。尼格罗（

< br>Negro

）这一词，是指很久前从非洲运来的黑人奴隶的后裔或混血后裔。

现在许多美国白种人避免使用尼格罗这一名称，以免引起

兄弟们的不快。旧的称呼

< br>黑崽（

nigger

）如今被认为是污蔑黑人的用语，在 正规的习惯用语中已完全摒而不用。在官

方统计中用的是

非白种

一词，

在通常 情况下，

把非白种人称为黑种人

（

bl ack

）

是行得通的，

虽然该词一度也 带有几分侮辱的意思。

Without some reference to historical back- ground

，

the Negro position today couldn't

be understood. The black population is about 20 million. Their ancestors were brought to

America as slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nearly all their

descendants were kept in legal slavery in the South until 1865. The southern states were

defeated in the Civil War and were forced to abolish slavery and set the slaves free. But

the southerners were determined to keep the Negroes from becoming equal in anything

but constitutional law.

??

不掌握些历史背景方面的材料， 就无从了解黑人今天的地位问题。目前美国的黑人人

口略多于三千万，

< br>其中百分九十的人，

祖先是在十七和十八世纪被作为奴隶引进美洲的。

们的后裔，

直到一八六五年在美国南方还全部处 于法定的奴隶地位。

在南北战争中。

南方诸

州战败，被迫废除奴隶制，释放了奴隶。但是南方人决心，除了在宪法上（意思是指仅在一

< br>纸虚文上），任何方面都不让黑人得到平等待遇。

The Federal Government has

，

gradually compelled the white majority in the South to

allow Negroes to enjoy civic rights. But legal protection has been slow to develop and has

not yet solved the social problem of inequality in voting

，

education

，

employment and

housing.

??

联邦 政府逐渐地迫使在南方占多数的白人允许黑人享有公民权利。但是有关的法律保

障进展缓 慢，至今未能解决在选举、教育、就业和住房方面不平等的社会问题。

The masses of the unemployed black and the mounting wrath against social injustice

constitute an active volcano in society and are attracting more and more serious public

concern. Those who worry about the future of the country have been seeking a way to the

solution of the problem. So in 1954

，

the Supreme Court decided that the whole system

of separate education in the South was denying the constitutional right of equal treatment

to the Negroes. It ordered that the southern educational authorities should integrate their

schools for the white with the schools for the black. In 1964 President Johnson signed the

Civil Rights Acts

，

banning discrimination in public place based upon race or color. But if

the Federal Government has been making some effort for a program of providing equal

education opportunity to all minority people

，

the progress has been slow and difficult.

??黑人失业群众以及社会不公平引起的日益增长的愤慨，

构成 了隐藏在社会里的一个活

火山，

愈来愈引起公众密切的关注。< /p>

担心国家前途的人士一直在寻求解决问题的途径。

于是