Equal opportunity is a matter of national pride and civic virtue. Racism, sexism, and all other types of oppression and exclusion from opportunity meaningfully affects us in a very simple way: it reduces the economic capacity of a population by creating conditions that suppress the fostering of talent. Humanity loses every time a person is prevented from accessing great teachers, great mentors, and proper environments to enable their success. Imagine the sheer talent lost if sports was still segregated, imagine all the innovations lost if women were still barred from academia and STEM roles. Imagine Einstein spending time and energy dealing with hunger, homelessness, and poverty; or being denied access to academic institutions and access to like-minded peers.

This document is meant to demonstrate a small sample of the systemic ways US society hampers itself by denying equal opportunity to African-Americans and ethnic minorities. It is meant to be used as a tool to approach conversations with those focused on class equity ("Why race? Why not income?"), oftentimes expressed as a "color-blind" approach to equity, without eliciting a defensive response. The research presented is neither comprehensive nor exhaustive, there is a vast and increasing body of research driven by consulting firms, academic institutions, and well-funded vested interests across the nation that continually add pieces to the puzzle that is understanding systemic inequality in the United States.

EDUCATION

K-12:

• Unequal academic opportunity. Schools where White students are in the majority are more than twice as likely to offer a significant number of advanced placement classes as schools where Black and Latino students are in the majority. In many white majority schools, foreign language education starts in elementary school.
  (Applied Research Center. 2000. “49 Years after Brown v. Board of Ed: Still Separate, Still Unequal.” Oakland, CA: Applied Research Center)
• Unequal academic treatment. Black and Latino students with the same test scores as White and Asian students are less likely to be placed in accelerated courses and more likely to be placed in low-track academic courses.
  (Oakes, Jeannie. 1995. “Two Cities’ Tracking and Within-School Segregation,” Teachers College Record 96, no. 4: 686.)
• Unequal quality of teaching. Teachers who have higher test scores, attended higher quality colleges and universities, and have more experience teach mainly teach upper middle-class students, very few of whom are African American and Latino​.
  (Lankford et. al. 2002. “Teacher Sorting and the Plight of Urban Schools”, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis; 37–62.)
• Unequal quality of teaching (cont.). Analyzing a data set covering 900 Texas school districts, Harvard economist Ronald Ferguson found that the single most important measurable cause of increased student learning was teacher expertise, measured by teacher performance on a state certification exam, along with teacher experience and master's degrees. Together these variables accounted for about 40% of the measured variance in student test scores. Holding socioeconomic status (SES) constant, the wide variation in teachers' qualifications in Texas accounted for almost all of the variation in black and white students' test scores. That is, after controlling for SES, black students' achievement would have nearly equaled that of whites if they had been assigned equally qualified teachers. The experiment was repeated in Alabama and concluded similar findings. Additionally, minority students are about half as likely to be assigned to the most effective teachers and twice as likely to be assigned to the least effective.
  (Ferguson, R.F. 1991. Paying for public education: New evidence on how and why money matters. Harvard Journal on Legislation 28(2), pp.465–498.)
• Unequal discipline. Students of color are more likely to be more harshly disciplined than their White counterparts for a similar or less serious offense. 14.6 percent of White students had been suspended or expelled in grades seven through twelve compared to 38.2 percent Native Americans, 35.1 percent of African Americans and 19.6 percent of Latinos.
  (Building Blocks for Youth, 2004. “Zero Tolerance” Fact Sheet, www.buildingblocksforyouth.org/issues/zerotolerance/facts.html.)
• Unequal punishment. One study found that Black students are sanctioned for more subjectively determined infractions. When offenses are categorized more objectively, such as with weapon or drug possession, racial disparities drop dramatically.
  (Aspen Roundtable on Community Change. 2004. “Structural Racism and Community Building.” Keith Lawrence, Stacey Sutton, Anne Kubisch, Gretchen Susi and Karen Fulbright-Anderson, authors. Washington, D.C.: The Aspen Institute. )
• Unequal curriculum.  Many urban systems have focused their curricula more on rote learning of “basic” skills than on problem solving, thoughtful examination of serious texts and ideas, or assignments requiring frequent and extended writing. 
  (Darling-Hammond, L. 1997. The right to learn: A blueprint for creating schools that work. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.).
• Unequal school resources. Because of race and class segregation and its relationship to local school revenues, students in high-poverty racially segregated schools are not exposed to high-quality curricula, highly qualified teachers, or important social networks as often as students in wealthier, predominantly White schools. The top 10% of US school districts spend nearly 10 times the amount as the poorest 10 percent, with common spending ratios of 3:1 found within most states.
  (Johnson, Tammy (ed.) Race, Education and No Child Left Behind, Applied Research Center, 2003.)
• Unequal integration. Nearly two-thirds of “minority” students attend predominantly minority schools, and one-third of black students attend intensely segregated schools (90% or more minority enrollment).
  (Schofield, J.W. 1991. School desegregation and intergroup relations. In G.Grant, editor. (Ed.), Review of Research in Education, 17, pp.335–409. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association., p. 336)
• Unequal class sizes. A large body of research has shown that smaller classes and students that feel that they are well known contributes significantly to student achievement (300 to 500 student body size is optimal). In predominantly minority schools, which most students of color attend, schools are large (on average, more than twice as large as predominantly white schools and reaching 3,000 students or more in most cities); on average, class sizes are 15 percent larger overall (80 percent larger for non-special education classes).
  (Darling-Hammond, L. 1998. "Unequal Opportunity: Race and Education". https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/)
• Unequal mentoring and advising. Minority students’ relationship with teachers or guidance counselors tends to be defined by disciplinary action rather than college guidance. In some cases, no relationship exists since guidance counselors are simply overworked and unavailable —  average counselor-to-student ratio in minority schools was 1:740. Minority students are left to extract information about college from peers, siblings, or parents who may or may not have gone to college themselves, thereby limiting what these students know and understand about higher education.
  (Teranishi, R. and Briscoe, K. 2006. Social capital and the racial stratification of college opportunity. In J. C. Smart (Ed.), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research, Vol. XXI (591-614). Netherlands: Springer.)

Higher Education:​

• Unequal impact of socioeconomic status. Socioeconomic status and race are associated with an increased level of disadvantage. Improving socioeconomic status is correlated with an increase in test scores, but gaps persist between Black and White students. Black students in families who move from low- to middle-income status continue to be more disadvantaged than White middle-class students.
  (Carnevale, A. P. & Strohl, J. 2010. "How increasing college access is increasing inequality, and what to do about it". In R. D. Kahlenberg (Ed.), Rewarding strivers: Helping low-income students succeed in college (pp. 71-190). New York: The Century Foundation.)
• Unequal socioeconomic representation. Data from the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) shows that for high school graduates in 1992, students from families with less than $20,000 income are 47% Black and Hispanic and 53% White or non-Hispanic. However, despite this control for income, in this same group of students, those that place in the top tenth of their class are 17.3% Black and Hispanic in stark contrast to 82.7% being White or non-Hispanic. Relying solely on socioeconomic status ignores very real disadvantages suffered by racial minorities at all income levels, especially when it comes to college admissions.
  (Kane, T. J. 1998. Racial and ethnic preferences in college admissions. In C. Jencks & M. Philips (Eds.), The Black-White test score gap (pp. 431-456). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.)
• Unequal representation and increasing stratification. Over-representation of White students at competitive institutions has increased from 1994 to 2006 while the under-representation of Black and Hispanic students at those same institutions has increased during the same time period. Figure Below.
  ​(Carnevale, A. P. & Strohl, J. 2010. "How increasing college access is increasing inequality, and what to do about it". In R. D. Kahlenberg (Ed.), Rewarding strivers: Helping low-income students succeed in college (pp. 71-190). New York: The Century Foundation.)

​

• ​Unequal access.  The single largest barrier to college entrance for African Americans and Hispanics is high school completion. The same is likely true for Native Americans. Of all 18 year olds in the US, 16% are Latino but Latinos are only awarded 7% of degrees, African Americans represent 14% but are only awarded 10%.
  (Kelly, Patrick. 2005. “As America Becomes More Diverse: The Impact of State Higher Education Inequality.” National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, Boulder, CO: Lumina Foundation for Education.)
• Unequal graduation rates. College completion data show that African American, Latina/o, and American Indian students are the least likely to attain a bachelor’s degree. On average, African American males who start a four-year degree finish in six years at a rate of 48%. The rate for Latino males is 46% compared to 69% for White male students.
  (Ross, T., Kena, G., Rathbun, A., KewalRamani, A., Zhang, J., Kristapovich, P., and Manning, E. 2012. Higher Education: Gaps in Access and Persistence Study (NCES 2012-046). U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.)
• Unequal time and energy constraints. According to a public agenda report for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the number one reason most students leave college before graduation is due to the fact that they had to work and go to school at the same time and, despite their best efforts, the stress of trying to do both eventually took its toll. Additionally, work is the top reason young adults give for not returning to college once they leave. Far from the myth that college dropouts are lazy, these young adults are assuming responsibilities and financial burdens that traditional full-time students do not have to shoulder.
  (Johnson, J. & Rochkind, J., with Ott, A., & Dupont, S. (2009) “With Their Whole Loves Ahead of Them.” Public Agenda, Prepared with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Retrieved at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED507432.pdf)
• Unequal financial stability. National statistics show that young people who leave college without a degree are more likely than their peers to come from less privileged backgrounds and to live in more precarious economic circumstances.
  (“Employment and Earnings Report,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, August 2009.)
• Unequal financial responsibility. Young people who fail to finish college are often going it alone financially. They’re essentially putting themselves through school and often bear the full responsibility of paying for it. Nearly 6 in 10 students who left higher education without graduating say that they had to pay for college costs themselves, rather than being able to count on help from their families. In contrast, more than 6 in 10 of those who completed their degrees say they had help from parents or other relatives to cover the costs of school.
  (Johnson, J. & Rochkind, J., with Ott, A., & Dupont, S. (2009) “With Their Whole Lives Ahead of Them.” Public Agenda, Prepared with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Retrieved at: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED507432.pdf)​

​ECONOMY & HOUSING

• Unequal employment rates for high school graduates. Among African-American high school graduates not enrolled in college, only 42% were employed in 1993, as compared with 72% of white graduates. Those who do not succeed in school are becoming part of a growing underclass, cut off from productive engagement in society.
  (Darling-Hammond. 2001. "Inequality in Teaching and Schooling: How Opportunity Is Rationed to Students of Color in America".  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK223640/
• Unequal discrimination at point of hire. Across 55,842 applications submitted for 26,326 positions, a study shows that there has been no change in the level of hiring discrimination against African Americans over the past 25 years (as of 2017), although there is modest evidence of a decline in discrimination against Latinos. Accounting for applicant education, applicant gender, study method, occupational groups, and local labor market conditions does little to alter this result. Contrary to claims of declining discrimination in American society, estimates suggest that levels of discrimination remain largely unchanged, at least at the point of hire.
  (Quillian, L., Pager, D., Hexel, O., Midtbøen, A. 2017. "The persistence of racial discrimination in hiring". PNAS October 10, 2017 114 (41) 10870-10875; first published September 12, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1706255114)
• Unequal online market outcomes. A year long Stanford experiment that sold iPods through local online classified advertisements throughout the United States, the only difference being that each ad featured a photograph of the product being held by a dark- or light-skinned hand, clearly demonstrated Blacks performing worse on a variety of market outcome measures.  They receive 13% fewer responses and 17% fewer offers. Conditional on receiving at least one offer, black sellers also receive 2–4% lower offers, despite the self selected—and presumably less biased—pool of buyers. In addition, buyers corresponding with black sellers exhibit lower trust: they are 17% less likely to include their name in e-mails, 44% less likely to accept delivery by mail, and 56% more likely to express concern about making a long-distance payment.
  (Doleac, J. and Stein, L. 2010. "The Visible Hand: Race and Online Market Outcomes. " https://siepr.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/visiblehand_0.pdf)
• Unequal discrimination based on name. When resumes are exactly identical, resumes with names that are very African-American sounding are significantly discriminated against. White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. The amount of discrimination is uniform across occupations and industries. Federal contractors and employers who list “Equal Opportunity Employer” in their ad discriminate as much as other employers.
  (Bertrand, M., and Sendhil M. 2004. “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.” American Economic Review, 94(4): 991–1013.)
• Unequal rates of poverty. In 2017, more than 1 in 5 American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) people—22 percent—lived in poverty, for blacks the number is 20.8%, in contrast to the 8 percent of white Americans.
  (Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, “Poverty Rate by Race/Ethnicity.”)
• Unequal housing value. AI/AN people are also less likely than their white counterparts to own their own home, and when they do the home value is much less. Median home value for AI/AN is $135,000 compared to the white median of 219,600.
  (U.S. Census Bureau, “Selected Population Profile in the United States: 2017 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates,” available at https://factfinder.census.gov)
• Unequal effects of gentrification. Gentrification is happening across the entire nation as displeasure towards congestion on highways into cities and desire for access to diverse food/culture prompts a white relocation into urban environments. This effect is very extreme in places like Washington D.C. Between 1970 and 2015, Black residents declined from 71 percent of the city’s population to just 48 percent. The city’s white population increased by 25 percent during the same period. From 2000 to 2013, the city endured the nation’s highest rate of gentrification, resulting in more than 20,000 African American residents’ displacement. Today, almost 1 in 4 Black Washington residents—23 percent—live in poverty. By contrast, just 3 percent of white Washington residents live in poverty—a lower white poverty rate than in any of the 50 states.
  (Rusk, D., “Goodbye to Chocolate City,” D.C. Policy Center, July 20, 2017, available at https://www.dcpolicycenter.org/publications/goodbye-to-chocolate-city/.)
  (Richardson, Mitchell, and Franco, “Shifting Neighborhoods.”)
• Unequal access to loans. During the Great Depression, the Home Owners’ Loan Act and the National Housing Act designed to prevent foreclosures and make rental housing and home ownership more affordable was written into law. Due to a process known as redlining, where risk was used to deny predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods access to this money, just 2 percent of the $120 billion in FHA loans distributed between 1934 and 1962 were given to nonwhite families. Today, approximately 3 in 4 neighborhoods—74 percent—that was deemed “hazardous” in the 1930s remain low to moderate income, and more than 60 percent are predominantly nonwhite. In short, while federal intervention and investment has helped expand home ownership and affordable housing for countless white families, it has undermined wealth building in black communities.
  (Mitchell, B and Franco J, “HOLC ‘redlining’ maps: The persistent structure of segregation and economic inequality” Washington: National Community Reinvestment Coalition, 2018, available at https://ncrc.org/holc/.)
• Unequal access to Veteran's assistance. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act—commonly referred to as the GI Bill—which provided a range of benefits, such as guaranteed mortgages, to veterans of World War II, deliberately accommodated Jim Crow and allowed banks to discriminate against Black Veterans, preventing access to home loans despite the federal government guaranteed coverage of home mortgages.  In Mississippi, just two of the 3,000 mortgages that the Veteran’s Administration guaranteed in 1947 went to African Americans, despite the fact that African Americans constituted half of the state’s population. Federal programs like this paved the way for millions of predominantly white veterans to enter the middle class and further the economic inequality and racial hierarchy.
  (Turner, S. and Bound, J., “Closing the Gap or Widening the Divide: The Effects of the G.I. Bill and World War II on the Educational Outcomes of Black Americans” Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2002, available at https://www.nber.org/papers/w9044.pdf.)
• Unequal home ownership rates. Even after controlling for protective factors such as education, income, age, geographical region, state, and marital status. Across every degree and combination of controlled demographic factors, Black households are far less likely to own their own homes.
  (Ruggles, S., et. al. “Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, U.S. Census Data for Social, Economic, and Health Research, 2013–2017 American Community Survey: 5-year estimates” Minneapolis: Minnesota Population Center, available at https://usa.ipums.org/usa/)
• Unequal treatment from lenders. At the turn of the century, banks disproportionately issued speculative loans to Black and Latinx homebuyers, even when they qualified for less risky options. These “subprime loans” had higher-than-average interest rates that could cost homeowners up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional interest payments. During the financial crisis, Black and Latinx households lost 48 percent and 44 percent of their wealth, respectively, due in part to these practices.
  (Powell, M. “Bank Accused of Pushing Mortgage Deals on Blacks,” The New York Times, June 6, 2009, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/us/07baltimore.html)
• Unequal treatment when renting or buying housing. People of color continue to endure rampant discrimination in the housing market: 17 percent of Native Americans, 25 percent of Asian Americans, 31 percent of Latinos, and 45 percent of African Americans report experiencing discrimination when trying to rent or buy housing. By contrast, just 5 percent of white Americans report experiencing housing discrimination.
  (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and NPR, “Discrimination in America: Final Summary” 2018, available at https://cdn1.sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/94/2018/01/NPR-RWJF-HSPH-Discrimination-Final-Summary.pdf)
• Unequal market valuation. Racial bias not only undermines access to housing but can also affect property values. One study found that homes in Black neighborhoods were undervalued by an average of $48,000 due to racial bias, resulting in $156 billion in cumulative losses nationwide. 
  (Perry, A. , Rothwell, J., and Harshbarger, D. “The devaluation of assets in black neighborhoods: The case of residential property” (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2018), available at https://www.brookings.edu/research/devaluation-of-assets-in-black-neighborhoods/)
• Unequal access to basic needs. Minority communities have less access to grocery stores, child care facilities, and other important neighborhood resources.
  (Brooks, K. “Research Shows Food Deserts More Abundant in Minority Neighborhoods,” Johns Hopkins Magazine, Spring 2014, available at https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2014/spring/racial-food-deserts/)
  (Malik, R., et. al. “America’s Child Care Deserts in 2018” Washington: Center for American Progress, 2018, available at https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-childhood/reports/2018/12/06/461643/americas-child-care-deserts-2018/)
  (Thompson, D. “Many Black Americans Live in Trauma Care ‘Deserts’,” U.S. News & World Report, March 8, 2019, available at https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2019-03-08/many-black-americans-live-in-trauma-care-deserts)
• Unequal exposure to environmental hazards. Minority communities are more likely to have hazardous waste facilities in close proximity.
  (Fleischman, L., and Franklin, M. “Fumes Across the Fence-Line: The Health Impacts of Air Pollution from Oil & Gas Facilities on African American Communities” Baltimore: NAACP and Boston: Clean Air Task Force, 2017, available at www.naacp.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Fumes-Across-the-Fence-Line_NAACP_CATF.pdf)

​LAW ENFORCEMENT

• Unequal chance of being stopped in traffic. Using a statistical measure involving police search rates and hit rates, a Stanford study shows that police require less suspicion to search Black and Hispanic drivers than white drivers.
  (https://openpolicing.stanford.edu/findings/)
• Unequal use of force in traffic stops. Analyzing traffic and pedestrian stops made in Oakland, California reveals a consistent pattern of racial disparities. 60% of police stops were of Africans Americans, though they make up only 28% of the population of Oakland. Once stopped, African Americans were significantly more likely to be handcuffed, searched, and arrested. These disparities remained statistically significant even after controlled for more than two dozen factors relevant to officer decision making, including crime rates and the underlying racial and socioeconomic demographics where the stop was made.
  (Hetey, R and Eberhardt, J. 2018. "The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves: Racial Disparities and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Justice System". Current Directions in Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721418763931)
• Unequal number of interactions with the police, despite no evidence of crime. In NY, due to the stop-and-frisk policy  implemented (since 2013 ruled unconstitutional), Black and Latinx communities were overwhelmingly targeted in street interrogations. African Americans were more likely to be stopped by the police, were also more likely to be roughed up by the police, frisked, and physically assaulted, but they were significantly less likely to have contraband on their person or actually be committing a crime at that particular time. Functionally, about 9 out of 10 of the Black men that were being stopped were not doing anything wrong.
  ​(https://www.nyclu.org/en/stop-and-Frisk-data)
• Unequal reporting of police killings. An independent study done in the UK in 2015 revealed that between January 1, 2015 and July 9, 2015 there were over 500 people in the United States killed by the police. This is twice the expected estimates based on data from the US Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI).
  (Krieger N, Chen JT, Waterman PD, Kiang MV, Feldman J (2015) Police Killings and Police Deaths Are Public Health Data and Can Be Counted. PLoS Med 12(12): e1001915. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001915)
• Unequal treatment due to size. Using over 3 million cases from the New York Police Department (NYPD) Stop, Question, and Frisk (SQF) Database, 2006 – 2013, studies indicated that tall and heavy black and Hispanic men are at the greatest risk for frisk or search. Tall and heavy suspects are at increased risk for experiencing police force, with black and Hispanic men being more likely to experience force than white men across size categories.
  (Milner AN, George BJ, Allison DB (2016) Black and Hispanic Men Perceived to Be Large Are at Increased Risk for Police Frisk, Search, and Force. PLoS ONE 11(1): e0147158. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0147158​)
• Unequal occurrences of police shootings when controlled for being black and unarmed. A geographically resolved, multi-level Bayesian model analyzing data presented in the U.S. Police Shooting Database (USPSD) identified evidence of significant bias in the killing of unarmed black Americans relative to unarmed white Americans, in that the probability of being {black, unarmed, and shot by police} is about 3.49 times the probability of being {white, unarmed, and shot by police} on average. Furthermore, the results of multi-level modeling show that there exists significant heterogeneity across counties in the extent of racial bias in police shootings, with some counties showing relative risk ratios of 20 to 1 or more.
  (Ross CT (2015) A Multi-Level Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings at the County-Level in the United States, 2011–2014. PLoS ONE 10(11): e0141854. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0141854)
• Unequal exposure to non-lethal use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities.
  (Fryer RG Jr. An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research; July 2016. NBER Working Paper Series, No. 22399. Available at: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22399. Accessed June 2, 2020.)
• Unequal chance of being incarcerated. As the largest racial group, whites commit the majority of crimes in America. In particular, whites are responsible for the vast majority of violent crimes. With respect to aggravated assault, whites led blacks 2-1 in arrests; in forcible-rape cases, whites led all racial and ethnic groups by more than 2-1. And in larceny theft, whites led blacks again, more than 2-1. Whites commit way more crime (7 million incidences vs 2.8 million for blacks) in the United States, yet it is blacks that are arrested and make up our prison population. According to U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2013 black males accounted for 37% of the total male prison population, yet white males only 32%
  (http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/table-43​)