Would you rather be a black man in New Orleans or a citizen of North Korea? Setting aside the lack of rights and the whole God/president/supreme nut job thing, the two groups live, on average, just as long.That was one of several conclusions drawn by “A Portrait of Louisiana,” an American Human Development Project of the Social Science Research Council released last week.Among new statewide, parish-by-parish statistics about life expectancy, income and educational attainment, the survey highlights disturbing new numbers about ever-present realities of the “state of the state.” The authors use a Human Development Index (HD), a figure dependent on statistics about health, education and wealth, provided by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.Top-ranked Connecticut has an HD Index score of 6.37, while Louisiana scored a 3.85, which is where the whole country was in 1990. Simply put, citizens of Louisiana as a whole are as well-off as the typical American was nearly two decades ago, according to the report. This shouldn’t shock any of you. In almost every typical measure of people in every state, in categories ranging from obesity to education to teen pregnancy, Louisiana is second to last in pretty much all of them. I’ve said it once; I’ll say it again. Thank God for Mississippi. But what the survey highlights most prominently is the racial disparities existing throughout the state in comparison to the rest of the country.  For example, on family income, “seven percent of white Louisiana families have incomes below $16,000, and nearly 25 percent have incomes of $100,000 or more. The exact opposite is the case for African Americans.” No, I didn’t gerrymander that. It’s a direct quote from the report. The categories of health, education and wealth feed directly into each other. One in three African Americans in the state has not graduated from high school. This perpetuates a cycle of decline in the standard of living because, as the report finds, “poorly educated workers have the least job security, scant savings, little social capital to draw upon in finding a first or new job and, basic skills to wanting to provide a robust foundation for retooling or higher education.” In short, lack of education leads directly to lack of income, which further leads to higher rates of crime and incarceration. It’s no surprise, then, one in 100 American adults are in prison, but one in every nine black men are locked up, according to the Pew Center on the States’ 2008 report. With talk of racism reaching a deafening pitch, swallowing every legitimate debate in the country, it’s important to note every domestic policy issue can be translated, into some form or another, as a race issue. The problem is, while racism is something most Americans share ambivalent feelings about, animosity and outright racism happen to have the loudest voices, distracting the media with needless, news-less sensationalism. President Obama said this weekend, “They can’t get enough of conflict; it’s catnip to the media right now. And so the easiest way to get 15 minutes of fame is to be rude to somebody. In that environment, I think it makes it more difficult for us to solve the problems that the American people sent us here to solve.” Trying to equate all criticism of Obama to racism is foolish and silly.  But analyzing demographics and studying different standards of living is the time-tested method of building an agenda and formulating better public policy. Racial disparities will continue to exist as long as those with power continue to pretend as if it’s only good enough to look at how far we’ve come. In Louisiana, it means the difference between where we can go and how well we develop. In New Orleans, it means wondering whether we’d be better off with Jong-Il instead of Jindal. Eric Freeman Jr. is a 22-year-old political science senior from New Orleans. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_efreeman.
 
 
 
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