Published on Mar 8, 2013
Despite platitudes about living in a race-blind society, a new study from Brandeis University shows that the wealth gap between Whites and Blacks tripled in the last 25 years. The study surveyed 1,700 households of working age between 1984 and 2009. There’s no better to see how wealth and race meet face-to-face than Washington, DC. RT producer Gavino Garay sits down with Maurice Jackson, Professor of African American Studies at Georgetown University, to understand why, after so many years of racial ‘equality,’ Blacks are nowhere near the same socioeconomic status as Whites.
D’Angelo Barksdale: Now you think Ronald McDonald gonna go down to the basement and say, “Hey Mr. Nugget—you the bomb. We sellin’ chicken faster than you can tear the bone out. So I’m gonna write my clowny ass name on this fat-ass check for you.”
Shit. Man, the nigga who invented them things? Still working in the basement for regular wage, thinking of some shit to make the fries taste better or some shit like that. Believe.
Since white settlers arrived in the American heartland of Nebraska in the 19th century, less than one per cent of the original tall grass prairie has survived an onslaught of plowing and grazing.
The prairie is home to some rare species endangered birds, flowers, and butterflies, that do not flourish anywhere else.
Nebraska’s Nine-Mile Prairie was preserved by the Cold War, its borders which were once nuclear weapon bunkers.
The prairie is now preserved by the University of Nebraska.
Al Jazeera’s John Hendren reports from Lincoln, Nebraska.
“There are people starving in the world and I drive an Infiniti. That’s really evil. There are people who just starve to death–that’s all they ever did. There’s people who are born and go like ‘aw, I’m hungry,’ then they just die.”
If this film was designed to stimulate thought, it succeeds. We follow the lives of three small town high school buddies; “Gil Ames” who is rich and happy; “Dave Benton” who is poor and doomed; and “Ted Eastwood,” who is middle class and doomed. Gil is sent to an Ivy League school (where he meets “men of his own kind”), returns home wearing a bow tie, and takes over his father’s very profitable business. Dave gets married, has lots of kids, and winds up working in a gas station. Ted wants to be an artist, but he falls in love with “Mary” and becomes a white collar bookkeeper.
Mary, however, wants a man with a bigger bank account, so she dumps Ted, who then decides to move to Manhattan and “make something” of himself. After many years of hard work as an advertising artist and art director, Ted lands a painfully dull white collar job in an advertising agency and gets to play golf with rich men. This is “vertical mobility,” the narrator explains, “particularly characteristic of the United States.” Ted returns home wearing a snappy hat, but Mary has married Gil, and both really don’t want anything to do with him.
This film was produced to explain basic concepts of sociology, but ends up presenting a rather dark view of social class and mobility in America.
Producer: Knickerbocker Productions
Sponsor: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc.
As the debate over cutting government spending rages on, billions of dollars of taxpayer money are wasted each year on junk food. Between 1995 and 2010, over 250 billion dollars was spent on subsidizing foods that are making Americans fat. The health effects are devastating. 75 percent of Americans are now considered overweight. One in five kids in the U.S. are obese. RT’s Liz Wahl takes a look at why some politicians feed into the Obesity Industrial Complex.
