My name is Alina Ashrapova. I am a 3d year student in Moscow State University.
Together with my group mates we created this web-site dedicated to racism in United
States nowadays. As long as we specialize in area studies and international relations
of North America, we are sure this issue is of vital importance. We tried to examine
it as detailed as it was possible. If you have any questions or comments on racism
towards Hispanics in the United States, you are welcome to contact me by e-mail. My
address is alinaa@hotbox.ru. Hope you will enjoy visiting our site!
Introduction
Many well-meaning white people in the U.S. think that racism is an ugly part of Americas history that was essentially dealt with by the civil rights movement of the 1960s. They see they now have black mayors and police chiefs of Chinese origin in some of largest cities. They see they now have black corporate executives. They see the phenomenal success of prominent African-American athletes and entertainers. They see people of Asian and Hispanic descent rising to prominence in business, sports, and many other spheres of life. They want to believe that people with black or brown skin now have equal opportunities and are treated fairly. But in fact, they are deeply mistaken. People of color experience life differently in this country. Whites do not understand the enormous inequalities that characterize the way people of color are often treated by police, courts and other public organizations in the United States. This work will concentrate on the Hispanics life in the United States.
Hispanics comprise the fastest growing minority sub-group in the USA. They are expected to be the largest minority sub-group by 2020. The term Hispanic was first used by governmental agencies to identify people residing in the USA whose main language was Spanish. Spanish speaking immigrants do not identify themselves as Hispanics when they first arrive. They prefer to be identified by their country of origin. There are 36 Spanish speaking countries worldwide. Hispanic derives from the original name of Spain, Hispania. The Hispanic identification is adopted as an ethnic unifier by most, once they become aware of its political significance. The name Latino became the politically correct term used during the civil rights movement in an effort to include Brazilians who are part of Latin America but speak Portuguese, since they were first colonized by Portugal. Latino comes from Latin, the language from which Spanish derived. The Latin language gave place to other languages such as Italian and French, but people from those countries in the USA are not called Latinos. There are 200 million Spanish-speaking people in the world, and 150 million Portuguese speaking.
Hispanics are not members of a monolithic group. They come from four major geographical areas: Spain, Central America/Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean basin (Cuba, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico). Puerto Rico is a commonwealth of the USA; therefore, Puerto Ricans are citizens of the USA from birth. The largest sub-group of Hispanics in the USA emigrated from Mexico. Hispanics inhabited USA before the Anglo-Saxons arrived. The descendents of the original Hispanics in the USA now populate the Southwest.
As long as Hispanics represent quite a large part of United States population, all the problems they face in connection with racism are of great importance. Let us look at the most significant ones.
Racism against Hispanics
Years of stereotyping Hispanics as fruit pickers, maids and welfare recipients have ensconced a racial profile in many whites. Each wave of immigrants is seen by those previous to it as undesirables. By American standards Hispanics should be celebrated. They''re hardworking and family-oriented - everything Americans pride themselves on being. The biggest cause of racism towards Hispanics is language. Its not clear why, but many Americans are upset to hear people speaking a foreign language. In Europe, you''re considered cultivated and educated if you speak two languages. In the USA it''s just wrong. Another big misperception is Latinos don''t want to learn English. Hispanics desperately want to learn the language! The first thing they do is put their children in school to learn it. They know the whole family will do better if they speak English. It''s typical the bigger the minority population gets, the more threatened the majority feels. But it''s something they better get used to, because Hispanics are going to get much larger.
It is painful for anyone who appreciates the goals of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s to understand just how deeply racial disparities still affect the lives of people of color in the USA. When one has been taught to believe the nations promises "liberty and justice for all," when one wants to see the US to become a land of equal opportunity, it can be hard to grasp just how unfairly people of color are treated. But despite the efforts and prayers of many people to remedy the injustices, it remains the case that the vast majority of people of color endure not only unequal treatment before the law today, but many other forms of discrimination and injustice, including greatly diminished job opportunities, and far deeper and more intractable levels of poverty.
According to the survey, conducted by John Robbins, Hispanics lack access to opportunities that many white households take for granted, Hispanics are rejected for home mortgages twice as often as whites, regardless of income, the poverty rate for Hispanics is 2.5 times greater than for whites, and the median financial wealth for Hispanics is zero. So if this is not racism, then what is it? Yes, there has been some progress. The most blatant expressions of racism have lost legitimacy. Public lynching and cross burnings are no longer tolerated. You won''t often hear words like "nigger" or "spic" in public speech. There are laws now that forbid acts of conspicuous racial hatred. But there are other forms of injustice that are not often acknowledged by the mainstream white community, but that are insidiously destructive to the lives and spirits of people of color. People of color often face severe obstacles to health and healing that are invisible to most white Americans.
Most white people do not grasp the extent to which people of color suffer unequal health conditions. They may not realize that compared to a white person,
Hispanics suffer from glaring racial and ethnic disparities for a wide variety of diseases and other health threats. Latino children in Southern California are six times more likely to contract Hepatitis A than non-Latinos. The heart disease rate for Hispanic women compared to white women in the United States is double. The incidence of obesity among Mexican-American women compared to white women in the United States is 45 percent greater. The diabetes incidence among Hispanic men compared to white men in the United States is 53 percent greater.
Healthy lifestyles, including eating healthy foods and getting regular exercise, can significantly help to prevent, reverse and control these diseases. Studies have shown that people eating plant-based diets have far lower rates of heart disease, cancer, hypertension, obesity and diabetes than do meat-eaters. But current government policies are indifferent to the reality that non-Caucasian persons are suffering disproportionately from diseases caused by the standard American diet.
The federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans purport to provide nutritional advice to keep Americans healthy. Though ostensibly written for all Americans, the guidelines ignore the unique health needs and traditional food customs of African Americans and other racial minorities. The federal government currently recommends that all U.S. children drink milk every day - including the 60 percent of Hispanic Americans who are lactose intolerant.
On March 8, 1999, the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine formally launched a push to rid U.S. government diet guidelines of such racial biases. One of the organization''s physicians, Milton Mills, M.D., stated: "Although unintentional, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines as they exist are really a fundamental form of institutionalized racism in a rather destructive and insidious format."
The recent data suggests that factors apart from the free market play a role in the declining income of Hispanic families. Its not for sure if racism is one of these factors, but it certainly may be. The Los Angeles Times conducted an in-depth study on wage disparity among different ethnic groups. It found a wage disparity among the groups even when individuals in those groups had an equivalent educational background. It also found that the wage disparity for Hispanics grew as their educational level increased. In other words while an Anglo plumber and a Latino plumber may have a 10% wage disparity, this disparity is greater between Anglos and Latinos in professional fields such as engineering.
Even the difference between a costly ticket and a pain-free warning for road laws infringement is closely linked with the race, sex, and age of the driver.
On city boulevards and rural lanes, whites are far more likely than Hispanics to receive written warnings instead of tickets when stopped for identical traffic offenses, according to a Boston Globe study of newly released state records.
In January, the Globe reported that Hispanics in Massachusetts get twice as many tickets as their share of the driving-age population. Once ticketed, they were twice as likely as whites to be searched for contraband, even though searches of whites yielded drugs more often, according to two years of tickets studied b y the newspaper. Similar patterns have been found in Rhode Island and other states.
The economic impact of an officer''s discretion is considerable. If the pattern of tickets and warnings from the two-month study held true for the entire year, about 14,000 minority drivers in the state paid $6.4 million extra in fines and insurance premiums, for speeding tickets alone, because they were punished more consistently at the same speeds.
Apart from financial losses, there is another effect of racism on Hispanics. Minority groups commonly report experiences with racism and discrimination, and they consider these experiences to be stressful. Racism and discrimination adversely affect health and mental health, and they place minorities at risk for mental disorders such as depression and anxiety.
Poverty disproportionately affects racial and ethnic minorities. The overall rate of poverty in the United States, 12 percent in 1999, masks great variation. While 8 percent of whites are poor, rates are much higher among racial and ethnic minorities: 23 percent of Hispanic Americans. In fact, poverty is caused in part by a historical legacy of racism and discrimination against minorities.
Conclusion
It is obvious, that racism is subtle but still exists beneath the surface. As one of the solutions to this problem are programs that give people of all different races a chance to work together with a common goal, such as community service and volunteer programs, which will help to increase a feeling of equality and decrease racism in the future.
The United States has long been a multi-ethnic "melting pot" of different races, and has undergone racial change throughout its history - but never before at a pace and manner such as today. Within the next fifty years, whites as a share of the total population are expected to decline from 75 percent to fewer than 50 percent. In many localities already, so-called minorities are now in the majority. Few things are more important today than that people wake up together to the negative consequences of the injustice and racial disparities which still pervade our society, and be willing to take individual as well as collective action to bring lives and United States closer to ideals of equality and justice.
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