美英报刊阅读教程Lesson1课文
【Lesson 1 Good News about Racial Progress
黄瓜怎么炒好吃The remaining divisions in American society should
not blind us to a half-century of dramatic change
By Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom
In the Perrywood community of Upper Marlboro, Md.1, near Washington, D.C., homes cost between $160,000 and $400,000. The lawns are green and the amenities appealing—including a basketball court.
Low-income teen-agers from Washington started coming there. The teens were black, and they were not welcomed. The homeowners? association hired off-duty police as curity, and they would ask the ballplayers whether they “belonged” in the area. The association? s newsletter noted the “eyesore” at the basketball court.
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球类图片But the story has a surprising twist: many of the homeowners were black t oo. “We started having problems with the young men, and unfortunately they are our people,” one resident told a re porter from the Washington Post. “But what can you do?”
The homeowners didn?t care about the race of the basketball players. They were outsiders—in truders. As another resident remarked, “People who don?t live here might not care about things the way we do. Seeing all the new hous going up, someone might be tempted.”
It?s a t elling story. Lots of Americans think that almost all blacks live in inner cities. Not true. Today many blacks own homes in suburban neighborhoods—not just around Washington, but outside Atlanta, Denver and other cities as well.
That?s not the only common misconception Americans have ab out race. For some of the misinformation, the media are to blame. A reporter in The Wall Street Journal, for instance, writes that the economic gap between whites and blacks has widened. He offers no evidence. The picture drawn of racial relations is even bleaker. In one poll, for in
stance, 85 percent of blacks, but only 34 percent of whites, agreed with the verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial. That racially divided respon made headline news. Blacks and whites, media accounts would have us believe, are still parate and hostile. Division is a constant theme, racism another.
To be sure, racism has not disappeared, and race relations could —and probably will —improve. But the rious inequality that remains is less a function of racism than of the racial gap in levels of educational attainment, single parenthood and crime. The bad news has been exaggerated, and the good news neglected. Consider the three trends:
中国少年先锋队入队申请书A black middle class has arrived. Andrew Young recalls the day he was mistaken for a valet at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. It was an infuriating ca of mistaken identity for a man who was then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
But it wasn?t so long ago that most blacks were rvants—or their equivalent. On the eve of电子实习报告
World War II, a trivial five percent of black men were engaged in white-collar work of any kind, and six out of ten African-American women were employed as domestics.
15英文怎么读In 1940 there were only 1,000 practicing African-American lawyers; by 1995 there were over 32,000, about four percent of all attorneys.
Today almost three-quarters of African-American families have incomes above the government poverty line. Many are in the middle class, according to one uful index—earning double the government poverty level; in 1995 this was $30,910 for a two-parent family with two children and $40,728 for a two-parent family with four children. Only one black family in 100 enjoyed a middle-class income in 1940; by 1995 it was 49 in 100. And more than 40 percent of black houholds also own their homes. That? s a huge change.
The typical white family still earns a lot more than the black family becau it is more likely to collect two paychecks. But if we look only at married couples—much of the middle class—the white-black income gap shrinks to 13 percent. Much of that gap can be explained by the smaller percentage of blacks with college degrees, which boost wages,
and the greater concentration of blacks in the South, where wages tend to be lower.孤鸟水果
rom中的信息是
Blacks are moving to the suburbs. Following the urban riots of the mid-1960s, the presiden-tial Kerner Commission14 concluded that the nation? s future was menaced by “accelerating grega-tion”—black central cities and whites outside the core. That gregation might well blow the country apart, it said.
It? s true that whites have continued to leave inner cities for the suburbs, but so, too, have blacks. The number of black suburban dwellers in the last generation has almost tripled to 10.6 million. In 1970 metropolitan Atlanta, for example, 27 percent of blacks lived in the suburbs with 85 percent of whites. By 1990, 64 percent of blacks and 94 percent of whites resided there.
This is not phony integration, with blacks moving from one all-black neighborhood into another. Most of the movement has brought African-Americans into neighborhoods much less black15 than tho they left behind, thus increasing integration. By 1994 six in ten whites reported that they lived in neighborhoods with blacks.
