IV. On Racial Discrimination

Forty years have elapsed since late civil rights leader Martin Luther King made the famous speech "I Have a Dream", yet the equalrights pursued by the American blacks and minority ethnic groups remained an unattainable dream today.

Racial discrimination in the United States has a long history with age-old malpractice. It has been permeated into every aspectsof society. According to an investigative report released by the United Nations, the blacks and colored people received twice or three times more severe penalties than the whites for the crimes of the same kind; the number of black people who received death penalty for killing white people was four times that of the white people for killing black people. In state prisons nationwide, about 47 percent of the inmates were black people, and the 16 percent were people of Latin American ancestry. The blacks accounted for 13 percent of the total US population, yet 35 percent of the people arrested for drug abuse crimes were blacks and 53 percent of the people that were convicted for drug abuse crimes were blacks.

At present, more than 750,000 black inmates were in US jails, or over 35 percent of the total number of inmates in the country; approximately 2 million black people were disciplined or put undervarious forms of surveillance; 22 percent of black males in the 30-34 age group had jail records, while the white inmates only make up three percent; 36 of 1,000 black females have possibilities of being jailed in their lives, while only five of 1,000 white females have such a possibility.

The poverty rate and joblessness rate of the US blacks remained high. According to statistics of the US Department of Labor, the white people's unemployment rate in the U.S. was 5.2 percent in November 2003, while the rate was as high as 10.2 percent for the blacks, almost twice that of the whites (Employment Status of the Civilian Population by Race, Sex, and Age, www.bls.gov/news.release/empgit.to2.htm, 05/12/2003).

According to statistics of the US Census Bureau, poverty rate among the blacks reached 24.1 percent in 2002, up 1.4 percentage points over the 22.7 percent rate in the previous year; 20.2 percent of the blacks were without health insurance; average annual income of median black families was 40 percent less than the ordinary median US families (see USA Today on Oct. 3, 2003).

Racial discrimination exists on the US real estate market, too.In 2002, the US federal government received a total of 25,246 discrimination accusations on housing market, 72 percent of which were from the families of black people, disabled people or those families with children, according to a report released by the National Fair Housing Alliance in April 2003. Discrimination over the birth place nationality of house purchasers rose from 10 percent in 2001 to 12 percent in 2002 (see the Sun newspaper, USA on Aug. 17, 2003). Black people usually spend more money than white people on housing purchase, but their houses are not as goodas those of white people and they have to accept loans with higherinterests. The market value of houses bought by black people with same amount of money is only 82 percent of those of white people, and houses with high mortgage interest rate in black people communities are five times more than those in white people communities, the Sun newspaper quoted the US Department of Housing and Urban Development as saying in on July 3, 2003.