America’s Racial Realities

Abstract

Many people believe that America’s racial problems have largely ended. To determine the extent of current problems, we gathered data on racial disparities in six areas: health, family structure, residential segregation, economics, education, and criminal justice. We found that many important and substantial disparities exist today, including:

• Asian women born in the United States have a life expectancy that is 21 years longer than Black men born in counties with a large number of Blacks and high homicide rates

• Black infant mortality is three times the Asian and twice the Hispanic and White rates

• Blacks are 12 % of population but are 47 % of new HIV cases

• Black children are twice as likely as Hispanic, three times as likely as White, and five times as likely as Asian children to live in single-mother families

• Among children born from 1985–2000, 66 % of the Black kids but only 6 % of the White kids grew up in high-poverty neighborhoods

• Black male earnings declined from 52 % of White male earnings in 1980 to 28 % in 2008

• Asians and Whites have much higher income and wealth than Hispanics and Blacks

• Black and Hispanic poverty rates are about twice those of Whites and Asians

• Black and Hispanic children are much less proficient in reading and math than White and Asian children

• Blacks are 3.5 times as likely as Whites to be suspended or expelled from school

• Seventy-eight percent of White, 58 % of Hispanic, and 52 % of Black males graduate from high school 4 years after entering ninth grade

• In large metro areas 99 % of Black, 96 % of Hispanic, 6 % of Asian, and 3 % of White elementary school students attend schools that have 50 % or more low-income students

• The lifetime likelihood of imprisonment is 1 in 3 for Black men, 1 in 6 for Latino men, and 1 in 17 for White men

In addition, we identified five major causes of current Black-White disparities, which are among the largest disparities: (1) past racist practices, such as slavery, Jim Crow, and New Deal policies, provided wealth along with education, employment, and business opportunities for subsequent generations of Whites but not Blacks; (2) past discrimination and violence by Whites and the loss of job opportunities caused many Blacks to live in racially segregated, high-poverty, Northern and Southern urban neighborhoods and the deprivations of these living conditions were passed to future generations; (3) current housing discrimination keeps many Blacks at different income levels from escaping Black ghettos; (4) current employment discrimination affects all skill levels of Black workers; and (5) the continuing mass incarceration of Black males results in poverty, single-mother families, unemployment, HIV infection, and disadvantaged children.