27
" But that avenue into economic stability, even for the college educated, was now threatened by two key developments: First, the federal government’s layoffs were concentrated in the social service agencies, where many African Americans worked. Reagan had exempted the Department of Defense, for example, while making it clear that “other divisions of Government would be hit especially hard by the employment reductions.” When one agency was abolished in 1981, jobs for nine hundred workers, 60 percent of them black, were wiped out. Then, the Department of Health and Human Services, a major agency for black employment, absorbed about half of the six thousand layoffs scheduled for 1982. "
― Carol Anderson , White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
39
" In 2004, fifty years after Brown, “not a single African American earned a Ph.D. in astronomy or astrophysics,” according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. In fact, of the 2,100 Ph.Ds. awarded in forty-three different fields in the natural sciences, not one of these doctoral degrees went to an African American.132 The refusal to implement Brown throughout the South even in the face of Sputnik—not only as the law or as simple humanity might have dictated but also as demanded by national interest and patriotism—compromised and undermined American strength. Now, in the twenty-first century, the sector of the U.S. economy that accounts for more than 50 percent of our sustained economic expansion, science and engineering, is relying on an ever-dwindling skilled and educated workforce. "
― Carol Anderson , White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide
