Blacks And Whites

BLACKS AND WHITES living today are remarkably vulnerable to their race's historical reputations and stereotypes. An unacknowledged dilemma for Americans of racial goodwill is that we can all be shamed by the same sad racial history that we work to overcome.The main stereotypes are that whites are racist and blacks are inferior. A white or black child born in America today, utterly fresh to the world, will grow up under either the first Kafkaesque accusation or the second. They will not necessarily believe what history accuses them of -- stereotypes are internalized as self-doubt rather than as belief.

Maryland National Bank, the state's largest bank, grants mortgages to blacks at about the same rate as it does to whites in Baltimore, according to an analysis by the Maryland Alliance for Responsible Investment, a group pressing for bank investments in the city.The finding released yesterday was in contrast to a recent Federal Reserve study that found that blacks in the Baltimore area were rejected twice as often as whites for bank loans -- 15.6 percent compared with 7.5 percent. For the nation, the Federal Reserve found black applicants for non-government loans were rejected 33.9 percent of the time last year, while whites were rejected at a rate of 14.4 percent.

Thanks to advances against certain diseases that disproportionately affect African-Americans, such as HIV/AIDS, the life-expectancy gap between blacks and whites has narrowed. But there is still a gap, with heart disease as a key factor. Ensuring that more minority men and women have health insurance and sustained access to quality health care is essential to eliminating disparities. And Maryland has shown that targeted community involvement can also make a difference. From 1993 to 2003, researchers at McGill University in Montreal found that the average life expectancy of blacks in the U.S. increased from 69.2 to 72.7 years, while it rose from 76.3 to 78 years for whites.

Most Americans view the riots in Los Angeles as a "warning" about the state of race relations, and say it is time for a new emphasis on the problems of minorities and the cities, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.The new survey, conducted last Wednesday through Friday, found the public in a shaken, worried mood, and more likely to see the unrest as a symptom of festering social needs than as a simple issue of law and order.Majorities of both whites and blacks said that investing in jobs and job training programs was a better way of preventing future turmoil than was strengthening police forces.

PRESIDENT Clinton wanted a national discussion of race. He is getting a fight over affirmative action. We're trading down.The president has now dutifully met with a group of political conservatives to hear them out on affirmative action. He more or less had to after his race panel declined to take testimony from them.The panel was trying to keep its mission on course, not let it get bogged down in policy arguments, but the decision was naive. It produced predictable gasps from throats that had been just waiting to cry foul.

NEW ORLEANS -- Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton waded into the seas of racial politics yesterday with an appeal to blacks and whites to accept responsibility for racial divisions and to take action to cure them.Borrowing Thomas Jefferson's warning about slavery to call the Los Angeles riots a "fire bell in the night," Mr. Clinton said that Americans "must face our fears and stop running from them. There is no place to hide."In an emotional speech to the Democratic Leadership Council, the Arkansas governor criticized both Republican neglect and Democratic unwillingness to face "the hard truth" about urban violence.

Lulu Hardesty, who died recently at the age of 91, was one of the quiet civil rights warriors.She was not a militant, nor was she especially political. Yet simply by her example, this well-loved Annapolis school teacher did a great deal more to improve relations between blacks and whites in Anne Arundel County than all but a handful of other activists.Mrs. Hardesty's life was a virtual road map of civil rights history. She got her first job teaching at a dilapidated one-room, all-black elementary school in South County.

Lulu Hardesty, who died recently at the age of 91, was one of the quiet civil rights warriors. She was not a militant, nor was she very political. Yet simply by her example, this Annapolis school teacher did more to improve relations between blacks and whites in Anne Arundel County than all but a handful of other activists.Mrs. Hardesty's life was a virtual road map of civil rights history. She got her first job teaching at a dilapidated one-room, all-black elementary in South County. Then, in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, she became the first black to teach in a white school.

THE REMARKABLE gathering of black men in Washington yesterday is best seen not as a reprise of the 1963 march on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I have a dream" speech. That was a traditional exercise of the constitutional right peaceably to assemble in order to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Yesterday's tens of thousands on the Mall surely have grievances with their government, as many speakers made clear, but the theme that ran through so many of the speakers' addresses was the great need for black men themselves to overcome the grievous problems of so many black communities.

WASHINGTON -- Americans generally are living longer than ever, but the life expectancy of blacks is continuing to shorten alarmingly, the Department of Health and Human Services reports.In its annual compilation of statistics on the population's well-being, the department said that while life expectancy among the nation as a whole rose to a record 75.2 years last year, that for blacks fell to 69.2 years.It also confirmed that the rate of infant mortality nationwide dropped sharply last year from 9.7 deaths for every 1,000 live births in 1989 to 9.1 deaths -- the lowest rate ever -- but that of blacks remained at levels more than twice as high as for whites.