《经济学人》精读笔记 -- 美国种族骚乱（一）
原文：“Every time I think about it I feel like somebody’s poking a red-hot iron down my throat,” says Bigger Thomas, the poor black boy living in a Chicago slum in the novel “Native Son”. “Goddamit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like living in jail.” Richard Wright penned those lines about the debilitating psychological effects of the ghetto in 1940, before the civil-rights era; before the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 and the ensuing widespread racial unrest and riots; and well before the current seething protests against racial injustice in several hundred American cities. How relevant are those sentiments today?
In recent years the most prominent episodes of unrest over the deaths of black men in police custody have erupted in placeswith histories of segregation that persist to this day. They include Chicago, where Laquan McDonald was killed in 2014; Baltimore, where Freddie Gray was killed in 2015; and now Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed on May 25th. Ghettos are no longer legally enforced as of 1948, though the proliferation of restrictive single-family zoning rules in cities does not help. Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton, evaluated the effects of the civil- rights era on black families and found, depressingly, that “the stark racial inequality in America’s neighbourhoods that existed in the 1970s has been passed on, with little change, to the current generation.”
文章的第一部分就为全文定下了基调。六七十年以前的美国，民权运动平权法案什么的都尚在萌芽阶段，那时候觉得自己“不好了”的黑人群体在今天真的已经摆脱了种族之间的歧视了吗？近几年频发的非洲裔美国公民被白人警察暴力执法无端杀害的案例，包括发生在5月25日的这一例，让我们看到压迫从来就没有消失。
* 一个小词：ensue
它本人是个动词，表示“接着/继而发生”，是一个非常实用的小词。Ensuing是它的现在分词变形，可以理解为“继而发生的/后续的”，在经济学人里的出镜率很高了。出现过的原文：
- They will not commit crimes when they realize the problems that ensue.
- That rate dropped slowly but substantially over the ensuing decades to 67% on the eve of covid-19, and then to 63% now.
* 一个句式：“X延续至今”
-原文：…with histories of segregation that persist to this day.-翻译：…种族隔离的历史延续到今天。-原文：The stark racial inequality in America’s neighbourhoods that existed in the 1970s has been passed on, with little change, to the current generation.-翻译：1970年代以来，美国不同族群之间存在着严重的种族不平等，这一变化几乎没有改变，延续至今。 当我们想要描述一个观念、一个现象一直持续，这个段落给我们示范了两个好用的表达方式：X persist to this day/ X have been passed on, with little change, to the current generation. X可以是一个名词/名词性成分/名词性从句，例如：The belief that women should take full responsibility for doing household chores has been passed on, with little change, to the current generation, especially in some Asian cultures
