Perceptions About Black Americans

The data sources used in Social Indicators, 1976 are more restricted and interpretation more restrained than in earlier reports by the Census or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Available data that measure how institutions established for dealing with racial injustice are working have not been incorporated in the report. Black Americans continue to have less of the society's most valued characteristics and conditions and more of those that are disvalued and stigmatized, or are evidence of discrimination and neglect. At the root of blacks' disfavored position is a combination of interacting forces. These include the cumulative effects on American institutions of generations of blatantly overt racial discrimination in every area of life; the continuing subtle practices of racial and economic discrimination ; and the absence of a national will or commitment to undertake those pragmatic political, social, and economic policies necessary to erase discrimination, and to enforce those policies forthrightly.