Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, October 24, 1995                   TAG: 9510240027
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

RACE

Lots of people took note of a study, released around the time of the O.J. Simpson verdict, indicating that one in three black men in their 20s is in jail, on probation or on parole. It's a shocking statistic.

You need, though, to get behind the numbers a bit.

For one thing, blacks are disproportionately victims, as well as perpetrators, of crime.

For another, according to this same study, drug-related crimes account for a huge portion of punishments.

As the Economist magazine pointed out the other day, "although blacks make up 13 percent of America's regular drug users - almost exactly their proportion in the general population - they account for 35 percent of drug arrests and 74 percent of drug-related prison sentences, which are imposed even for possession of tiny amounts of marijuana."

There are lots of reasons for this disparity, including heightened police presence in neighborhoods where crime and drug trafficking are more concentrated, and heavier sentencing for crack than for regular cocaine. In any case, these statistics raise questions about our society and our criminal-justice system, as well as about young black males.

Equally shocking was a Washington Post poll, also released this month, suggesting that a majority of whites believe blacks have achieved equality.

Oh, have they? Does that mean, for example, that in any given hospital a black newborn and a white newborn stand the same chances in our society?

Equality in America means equality of opportunity, not of result. Even so, the proposition that equality has been achieved ought to be considered in light of facts. Such as:

For all the progress, and it is significant, of blacks into the middle class, black incomes in the United States are still only 60 percent of white incomes. Black joblessness is 11 percent, compared with less than 5 percent among whites. And black households' median net worth remains a tenth of white households' net worth.

If you want to talk opportunity, does anyone believe that an impoverished black kid in the inner city of a major metropolitan area enjoys an equal opportunity to an education of the sort a white kid in a suburban school system will get?

Overcoming the racial divide should be neither a black nor a white project, but an American project, and it should address reality as well as wishes.