Racism is alive and well in America

Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling recently made racist comments to his mistress on the phone, telling her that it bothers him a lot that she wants to broadcast her interest in blacks on social media and bring them to his games.

Before Sterling, Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy suggested that African Americans were better off as slaves.

Blacks are much more likely to be arrested, prosecuted and convicted than whites are and the black prison population is almost four times higher than their representation in the general population.

And just last week, the United States Supreme Court voted 6-2 to uphold Michigan's ban on the use of affirmative action in university admissions, a ban Michigan voters approved in 2006 on the grounds that race-based preferences to achieve diversity were unfair and fostered resentment among white students who lost out to less qualified blacks and Hispanics.

All of this reaffirms what we already knew; you can ban actions through laws but you can't ban thought. Affirmative action laws required schools and employers to admit and hire minority group members on the grounds that if the law didn't make them, they would never do it voluntarily. I believe that argument had merit then and I believe it still does. The Supreme Court's assumption that the law is not needed any more because America has become color-blind simply isn't true. In fact, it would be hard to prove we're any more color-blind than we were a generation ago.

I'm not going to take the typical Democratic position that racism is always bad and that minorities always need to be protected and helped by the law because I understand racism. I grew up in the segregated south where racism was a way of life. I grew up in an all white town, went to an all-white school and attended an all-white university. I didn't know a black person personally until I joined the Tulsa Police Department. I belonged to a benevolent racist family who believed that although there were some "good" black people, most of them weren't.

We still live in a willful but no longer legal segregated society today. We divide ourselves into races voluntarily. Religion, for example, is the most segregated social institution in America with blacks going to church with blacks and whites going to church with whites almost exclusively. Sports teams are no different with the social groups that exist within them highly segregated.

A significant percentage of whites don't like and don't trust blacks and the same thing holds true for blacks not liking and trusting whites.

Although I'm a sociologist by profession, I'm at a loss when it comes to presenting a solution to the problem. I know that stereotypes still exist but I don't know what to do to end them. I know that some people's attitudes towards an entire race are based on perhaps just one negative experience or reaction but there's nothing that can be done about that either. When our experiences with another race are limited, we tend to expect the worst instead of the best and whatever we expect is typically what we get.

So when whites think about their biases and prejudices, they don't think about the good blacks they know or are aware of, they think about the bad. They think about the incredible number of murders in Chicago and Little Rock of blacks by blacks and extrapolate those actions into negative feelings towards the whole black population, rather than considering the positive contributions made my many blacks in the highest echelons of power in this country.

What makes a person join a gang and stay in it, sometimes into their 30's and beyond? My education and training says it's because of the weakness of the family structure in those neighborhoods that makes young men and even boys seek out love and acceptance from their peers. And the murder rate among feuding gangs is so high because the neighborhood itself doesn't trust the police and the establishment to do anything about it because of its perception that they haven't in the past. So even though they know who did the killings, they don't tell the police and the murders continue.

I think we all know negative feelings towards a group pulls us apart instead of bringing us together and, because of that, it has a negative influence on society rather than a positive one. We know that but many people don't feel that and so they wear their dislike for a certain group in society shamelessly, almost proudly.

It's a bad thing and nobody knows how to fix it.