Entrenched racism drives down SC child-well-being scores

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Two facts about children and poverty are especially disturbing: children make up about 1/3 of people in the U.S. in poverty, but raising children expands those in poverty to 43%.

For South Carolina, children and poverty present a particularly challenging reality, captured by the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 2015 Kids Count data book.

Our state has long suffered in the bottom quartile of impoverished states in the U.S., but SC’s 2015 Kids Count profile reveals a grim picture with the state ranking 42^nd in the nation in terms of child well-being:

• SC children’s economic status has mostly worsened from 2008 to 2013 with 290,000 children in poverty, 376,000 children with parents lacking secure employment, and 349, 000 children in households with burdensome housing costs.
• SC children’s educational opportunities remain inequitable. The percentage of children attending preschool has worsened, and so-called proficiency levels in math and reading have mixed results while high school graduation remains, although improved overall, elusive to those young people most in need of education.
• Healthcare for SC’s children has improved, but 73,000 children remain without healthcare in the state.
• SC’s children also face harsh community challenges. 420,000 children live in single-parent homes, an increase from 2008 to 2013, and more children, 161,000, live in high-poverty communities now than a few years ago.

The summer of 2015 has brought an intense spotlight on SC with the racist shooting of nine black citizens gathered in their church. Along with that tragedy, many in the state have continued to claim that we as a people embrace heritage and not hate.

However, political leaders and the public rarely identify the exact and real conditions behind claims of “heritage” and “tradition.” In SC and all across the South, our heritage includes crippling economic inequity and entrenched racism—both of which condemn our children to their ZIP codes, not the content of their character, being their destiny.

In the U.S., despite lingering and false stereotypes of “welfare queens,” 80% of people in poverty are from vulnerable populations: children, the elderly, the disabled, students, and the working poor.

As well, despite educational attainment, racial inequity remains powerful. Even with the same level of education, whites earn more than Hispanics and blacks. And blacks with some college have the same probability of employment as white high school dropouts.

Congressman James E. Clyburn has called for SC both to appreciate the symbolism of removing the Confederate battle flag from state grounds and to commit to substantive policy addressing the great weight of poverty and racism that our state still carries, a weight that is particularly harmful to our children.

Clyburn identifies healthcare and voting rights as policy SC must address, but there are many commitments to the lives of our children we could make to give substance to refrains of “heritage”:

• Insure, as Clyburn notes, that all children in SC have healthcare from conception until their early 20s.
• Seek public policy that supports all families with children, focusing on ensuring that having children doesn’t push any family into poverty.
• Abandon the fruitless education accountability process and replace our school reform efforts with a focus on equity of opportunity: equitable K-12 and higher education funding across the state, equitable teacher assignments for all students, access to high-quality courses for all students, and quality alternatives for anyone to complete high school and college degrees despite age or background with substantial financial support.
• Create stable and well-paying work for the people of SC that reinforces everyone’s access to healthcare and retirement/savings.
• Confront directly and comprehensively the reality in SC that the state has enough money, but that our problem is the inequitable distribution of that capital. The infamous Corridor of Shame was not created by our school system, but the education inequity that it reveals is a reflection of the larger socioeconomic injustice across our state.

American novelist and public intellectual James Baldwin confronted Noble Prize winning author William Faulkner in the early years of the civil rights struggle in the U.S. because Faulkner called for patience among blacks in the South.

Baldwin responded with words that should resonate today in SC: “There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.”