Black in White by Luke Chueh
(ATLANTA) — Despite having their first black president, Americans are no more certain than before that the country is closer to the racial equality preached by Martin Luther King Jr., a poll shows.
Seventy-seven percent of people interviewed in an AP-GfK poll say there has been significant progress toward King's dream, about the same as the 75 percent who felt that way in 2006, before Obama was elected. Just over one in five, 22 percent, say they feel there has been "no significant progress" toward that dream. "The exuberance and thrill of seeing an African American elected to the presidency has been tempered by the outrageous claims that we've heard about him," said William Jelani Cobb, a history professor at Rutgers University. ...
John Steinbeck observed that "a sad soul can kill you quicker, far quicker, than a germ."
That insight, now confirmed by epidemiological studies, is worth bearing in mind at a time of such polarizing inequality that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans possess a greater collective net worth than the bottom 90 percent.
There’s growing evidence that the toll of our stunning inequality is not just economic but also is a melancholy of the soul. The upshot appears to be high rates of violent crime, high narcotics use, high teenage birthrates and even high rates of heart disease.
That’s the argument of an important book by two distinguished British epidemiologists, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. They argue that gross inequality tears at the human psyche, creating anxiety, distrust and an array of mental and physical ailments — and they cite mountains of data to support their argument....